The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On

by Franny Choi

when invited, I added my small voice to the reciting of the Kaddish, and the perfect thunder of it lifted one part of me higher than air, while rooting another deep into the fragrant earth, a bit of which I later scooped, as gently as I could bear, onto the casket, the shovel heavier than any word I knew, and more full of light than even the birds overhead, who, as we wept, kept, of course, right on saying exactly whatever they needed to say.

Try not to time travel, says the voice in my meditation app, as I fast-forward to everything I haven’t yet remembered to be afraid of—

If the land in me could speak to the land I live on, what would it say? Maybe I’m sorry. Or, where does it hurt? My cheeks are stuffed with sweetgrass and ssuk. Maybe I’m only ever singing that awful song: O beautiful. O beautiful. And it is, some days, driving through the “untouched” hills to the place where I’m paid.

We can still hear the planes’ deathknell hum— circling our heads like we were carrion, despite the pictures, which know only how to tell one truth at a time. Our names were napalm, ravaged paddies, lung cancer. Names, like ghosts, reverberate. The bad memories in the body? They climb to the surface, from war’s muck. War: the only surname on our unmarked graves. Our sustenance amidst your savage freeze. So we married fear, salvaged these small lives. We’re free, at least, to dream of the fires that made us by splitting the us we almost, some days, remember.

Every day of my life has been something other than my last. Every day, an extinction misfires, and I put it to work.

Sometimes I wonder how long I’d have to run to reach the last generation where one of us felt loved,

I listened to those firefighters while, in Hamtramck, I waged a much tinier war against the dust on my blinds. I wiped and wiped to rid my windows of it. In the forest, rot feeds. The earth drinks soot and makes it into new leaves. In other words it’s the plastic, here, that makes dirt a problem.

When disaster comes, some of us will stand on the rooftop to address the ghosts. Some of us will hold the line. Some will look for the shards, run our tongues along the floor.

I say when like disaster hasn’t come, isn’t already growing in the yard. Do I have to run through the list? The firefighter prisoners—my friends’ islands slowly swallowed—war in my faucet, remember? Syrian Civil War is the name of a drought. The name of this hurricane is Exxon, Exxon, I shout. I can pull as many weeds as I want. I stalk the garden pulling them, thirsty for the sound of their true names wrenching out of the soil. (Do I have to say it? They fly out of my arms.)

Things That Already Go Past Borders trade deals; pathogens; specific passports; particular skill sets; vegetables; car parts; streaming rights; seasonal workers; some insects; certain birds; religion; dialect; music at the right volume; headlights; human remains; wireless signals; all manner of money; of memory; people in trucks; on trains; on foot; in line, in lines; charging checkpoints; wading waist deep through rivers; clinging to rafts; or yawning their way through customs; sisters separated for decades, whose faces are as foreign to each other as the faces of the dead; seeds; drones; prisoners on planes; dictators in motorcades; orders to kill; and longing; yes, this most of all; the longing of families; and the long -ing of storms

What I want you to know is that we’re okay. Hurting but okay. We’re surviving, though it’s true, we don’t know what that means, exactly.

Look My mother, very Catholic, loves that song: Imagine there’s no heaven. Can you picture it?—my mother joining the chorus of her three churchless children to croon, no heaven, no hell, nothing before or after? Above us, only the universe and its borderless yawn. Only the trees who died for my handwriting, history’s pollen, fields and field hands I can’t stop robbing with money. Today, I woke up on still-stolen land, then scrolled through the latest debris of people attempting godliness in a hundred wrong ways. The room was filled today with light; filled, you could say, with nothing. No hope, no glory. No such peach as an ethical peach. The minute I started wanting paradise, it leapt from my belief. I’m not good enough to survive not being good. I’m like you—still drooling after a perfect world, even as the stars warble off-key and the oceans rattle with plastics. Imagine, I can’t stop saying. Imagine, I beg, when I should have said, Look: paradise is both a particle and a wave. You don’t have to believe in something for it to startle you awake.