bodytext = (verseTag, md`I’m terror-gripped by the atheist’s fear of death, the fear of the void. I remember nothing before birth, so I will return to nothing. I am overwhelmed by love for this world I do not wish to leave. My ancestral roots, my relatives, branch into the past like death-pocked trees documenting a millennium of loss and memory.

I read an article about trees and mycelium memory, thoughts slogging to the surface through decades. There is a beech stump in Europe, long-dead, yet still breathing. Its neighboring trees feed it through the ground and so it is yes-dead, not-dead, yes-alive, still living. Still living by its neighbors’ proffered roots.

This generous cruelty and insipid kindness - these roots scare me. I want to think it evolutionarily selfless: trees feed each other through their branched rootstock, yet when pines feed oaks they spell their own doom. The oak trees grow to cover the light and the pine trees die by their own root; killed by their own love.

I wonder how it would feel to look upon oneself with love instead of hate; I’d rather kill my prior selves, gazing upon past faces with uncanny valley disgust. I treat those selves like competing ancient hominids interbreeding and extinguishing in equal measure. I want to die I want to live forever I want to reverse my birth.

And yet my hypothesis is flawed and my own birth is predicated upon distant hominid interbreeding. An author theorizes that the first tool was not a weapon, but a bag. An anthropologist claims the first sign of civilization is a repaired, once-broken leg. I think of this and my heart threatens to fissure and splinter and crack like burning trees.

How can I hate myself when I can see this kindness of trees? How can I look upon a dead stump kept alive by its neighbors and not weep to the rhythm of a temporary universe? Etched in my bones is the deep ancestral memory of dying in fear and childbirth, a tapeworm’s trickster bargain: my life for yours. We are all of it, stump and sapling, life and death.

Join me at our roots. We will thank our family trees, the millions of births predicating us. I will grow a memory we share, even in death. Ahead of us there is only love. `)