Soiled Earthworms

I once met a man looking up. It was a cosmic night. Rainy clouds in the distance. Stars more bright. Others less so. Too far away. Quaint. Some serious. A man darkened by a forested path without light, without anything to remember what appeared all around us. Sight demolished. Sight suppressed. Other senses awakened. Other senses on full throttle.

My mood changes when I see the man looking not up, but instead towards me. Darkened eyes now fixate on me. They urge me forward. They ask me, “Do you look up?”. What a weird question. I reply, “Sometimes, when the night calls for it.”

He moves towards me. I meet him halfway. “Hello”, I say. “Hello”, he replies.

Together we enter a mission. A star mission. For a moment I am not from this place I call home. For a moment I am the man. And he is me. And we travel together. To the stars we see above us. We understand each other. We fall in love. Not the kind you’re thinking of. We float. And we have conversation.

Our dialogue consists of understanding home. Where it is. Who it is. How it comes to be. He tells me a story about home I will never forget.

It begins with him looking down at the ground, at an earthworm slithering through wet soil. It begins with him picking the worm up. He smells it. It is earthy, wet, humid. He steps through more soil, finds more worms, collects them, puts them in a jar, fills it with sand. The worms begin to dry up. He delights in their slow deaths. As they dissipate into a sandy abyss, he retreats back into his rain-jacket and sobs. Not because they are now dead, but because he can’t find anymore to play with. To poke. To remove. To make death with. Because it is a process. It is repetitious. It is purposeful. And he enjoys the predictability of it, of the worms escaping their homes when it rains. Of emancipating them from their simple existence. It’s his way of saving them from themselves. Or so he thinks.

He tells me of his childhood. Unconventional at best. Fleeting. But isn’t it for each of us? Only forgotten memories etched onto our consciousness, marked down onto our bodies, invisible bruises without treatment, without support. I know those bruises. We are sometimes friends. We are sometimes enemies. We are sometimes intense lovers, though, too.

He tells me of where he lived. A cabin lodge at the north east corner of Woodglen forest. Somewhere in Europe, but he isn’t specific. On the brink of broken suburbia, but not quite. He says he’s lucky. He says he’d rather live alone amidst the trees and vines and bush and weed then be bored by the voices of those stuck in concrete mud, of those talking petty white noise. It’s about balance, he says. If he wants to hear the sound of those across the pond, whose lawnmowers scrape up green puss every other day, he can. If he wants to kill game, climb trees, throw rocks, he can, too, without judgement. There’s no one stopping him. Because the folks across the way know him as elusive; they know him as arcane; they know him as slightly sane, mostly neurotic, sometimes intense about things. But there’s no shame. Just acceptance. He doesn’t bother them, and they don’t bother him. He just looks up. He sees what they’ll never be able to see. Only the young ones know.  

And he tells me it isn’t about the stars. The light freeing its way through vacuous space. It’s about everything else. The blurry spots. The clouds that dissipate so quickly you can’t blink or else you’ll miss them. You’ll forget they were there in the first place. A cloud scented so slight, yet so pungent, you couldn’t dare to resist a sniff. But a scent, too, that you won’t remember. That floats by without detection by those distracted in corridors and car doors and social mores. He tells me it’s about the sky too, without the stars, without the cloud. The sky in and of itself, for itself. The blurry spots now blurrier. But they aren’t indistinguishable. They are filled with dust. The sky turned to dust. Dust that shot across sky. Dust that told him what he’s actually made of. That tells him what home was. What home is. What home does.

The man appears to get tired. We sit down on the grass. We find an earthworm squirming its way back to water’s edge from the path we just trudged. We continue.

He tells me he doesn’t really know what home is supposed to be. Or at least in the literal sense. He boasts how he built structure to his liking, teetering on societal edge, playing with personal sanity. He then says how people assume he has a home. But even that doesn’t make much sense to him. And I agree. But I ask why. He doesn’t want to own anything; he just wants to own himself. He desires individual control. He dislikes frailty. Yet he is disinterested in simplicity. So I inquire again, as if it weren’t obvious already, what does home mean when you look up, when you see the blurry spots, when you see the dust?  

He replies: “It’s not really a matter of knowing what home means, as if it was something you had to acquire, as if it was something immutable. Rather, it’s about knowing how home changes, how it functions, where it functions…deep inside you. Burrowed under mounds of filth and noise and distractions and dust you shove under the bed. To rot and to build up for another day’s work.  

He realizes he isn’t the most orthodox of peoples roaming this planet, amidst a system of work and play and laugh he is displeased with. But he knows who he is. And he knows who he is not.

So he looks up. Because that’s all he knows. Because that’s all he is. So we look up, together. And for a moment life wasn’t so simple. For a moment, we see stardust. We see home.