dear life

Art is not about art. Art is about life… a way of recognizing oneself, which is why it will always be modern.
(Statements from an Interview with Louise Bourgeois)

This is the land where bees come to die. A hundred thousand of them falling to the earth, catching on the branches of the great trees and saturating the ground like a summer monsoon. We came here to eat crackers and sip tropical Capri Suns and study our books in the crisp coolness of shaded grass, but the stillness of death and of dying filled the air with a thick sadness we couldn’t ignore.
I am holding hands with the world, and suddenly it releases me, nonchalantly unlatches its grasp, or perhaps I’m the one that’s turned away, too weak to hold on, or too unfaithful. Maybe the distinction isn’t important. My fingers reach out like hopeful vines, only to grasp at emptiness, at the stale air that whispers the dusty perfume of decaying honey, like a secret.
The air is still here. Still, slow, and silent.
I wrap myself into a synthetic womb of blankets and heaviness and material things to mimic my birth, to anchor myself with skin flesh against earth flesh, to bury my feet like roots into dirt and declare that I am yet alive. I fill my belly with heaviness, wrap myself into the warmth and out of the land of the dying, and wait.
We gathered the bees in our palms and sanctified their passing with streams of moistness from our closed eyes before we packed away our things and walked, slowly, into the sun.