Author: Sophia Collender
If you rest your hand on a mossy rock and down beside it, you have the option to stay there forever. The moss will accept the invitation to crawl into the new space. It will grow to encompass your fingers and your arms. It will seize whatever space it can find under your fingernails. You’ll become wrapped up in a plushy green epi-epidermis. Your skin can take a break. You’ll turn green yourself.
The boundary between you and the world will cease to matter.
Of course, this will all have occurred long after a painfully boring (and, more than that, painful) few sacrificial days during which you’ll be conscious.
Dying will be awkward. Getting through that unfortunate (albeit comparatively brief) phase where you must let yourself starve and dehydrate in total stillness is sure to be the most tedious part.
But once it’s over it’s over, and from then on it’s smooth sailing.
The moss will make its way over your body.
It will curl around your lips, and eventually reach inside of you. It might like the dark and whatever remains of the damp. It’s around this point – though it may possibly have occurred before – that the inaction of your limbs will leave them suited to a new form of labor.
Stillness doesn’t mean an end to work – anything that exists must pull its fair share.
You’ll find renewed occupation as a structure, as the contours of your form are discovered to make an excellent home. The familiar bugs that have crawled on you from the start (or by now, more likely their descendants) will make their nests there. Larger things, like rodents and reptiles – might dig into you and near you. You will find new purpose as a shelter. You will make for a useful thing. The sockets of your still eyes might make nice nests. Your teeth will have turned into pebbles – perfect for construction – if they haven’t yet decayed into demineralized mush.
You will have felt the turn of the seasons many times over in this spot. The alternating dryness of summers with the rehydration of winters and springs will have worn away at your flesh many times now. Mushrooms and molds will have populated the corpse-turned-continent many times over. The annual apocalypses and rebirths will wear away at your structural integrity. How many endings can a body withstand?
In your immobility you will find yourself rediscovered as a vessel for movement. Everything that is not life becomes the substance that life moves through; the riverbeds that it flows across and shapes. Nature’s unrelenting labor will not cease – and it will not cease to make use of you. Its fingers will tear away at you as you’re required for new purposes. Less and less of you will remain. Your role may change but you will always have one – even long after it is you.
Your will is only so strong.
If you hold still long enough, nature will move you.