Red Cedar

she strikes the match against the rasp on the cardboard cover, bringing the flame up towards the cigarette, united in a plume of smoke before she shakes her hand to drop the cardboard stick onto the sidewalk. feet moving, away from the scene, away from the sounds of sirens directed towards this block. she tries to scrub her mind of what she has just seen, bloated with blood and tires slick against rainy pavement – two moments of reaction, to realize the man isn’t getting up again, and to get as far the hell away before the police show up and she is forced to relive it a hundred times in statements and courtrooms and anecdotes.

traffic has slowed to a crawl in both directions on the humming street, either those impeded because of the body sprawling limbs on the ground, or those slowing to get a glimpse before the clean-up crew comes. she turns away from them, left into the alleyway two blocks south, takes a few steps into the concrete corridor, and leans her back against the mossy brick of a supportive building. knees soft, cheeks flushed, she takes a drag off the cigarette, shielding it from the wet to make it last until the filter. here is safe for a moment, smoking and looking up at grey sky overhead moving the shapes of rain, the lip of the roof across from hers, the siren-song dulled in the distance, perhaps now arrived at the intersection. but safe will soon give way to a throng of suits and reality on the sidewalk six feet away. once the cigarette is finished, she knows this moment will have to be reconciled with all the others, and so she dawdles with it as long as possible.

she wishes she could plug her mind or shut it, so what has just happened in front of her will not seep back in. a flame shook and put out, extinguished in the damp streets of november. a cigarette she did not need.

the last statement i made to gerald (an ex from long ago), in ocean falls this summer was, “i don’t believe in hope,” and then the ferry horn sounded and i had to run down the hill to get on before it sailed away. i felt uneasy for days, leaving a conversation at that supposedly bleak place seemed a bad omen of something – particularly because i delivered my parting line in a town of 35 residents, its structures crumbling back into the earth amidst a patchwork of lush rainforest and clearcuts. the boarded up hotel, the eyeless hospital windows, the junk museum set up in the old co-op grocery store – a scene both hopeful and hopeless, which is often how i see the world, one sentiment negating the other. perhaps this is what i meant to say, or maybe it was just that “hope” seems like a difficult (if not untenable) place to situate our energy.

we were talking about peak oil, unfettered development and the collapse of land and ocean resources at the time. i’m not sure who initiated the conversation – likely me because i had just read derrick jensen’s yet-to-be-released book, Endgame and was thinking through the implications of environmental degradation and civilization’s reliance on shrinking resources. it was here that gerald said “you can always hope that people start making the right choices and consume less” to which i made my reply. and of course – he is right – i can make a million wishes, which is all that hopes are, and pin my energies there. or (and this is what i was getting at in my sharp response) – i can take action on those leverage points of change where i find them. my reaction to him, was really a reaction to the society that throws its hands up and “hopes for the best” rather than taking steps to make real changes.

but of course it is not true that i don’t have hopes or wishes or dreams; it is false to say “i don’t believe in hope” except as a retort in a conversation with an ex who has always been a riddle to me. there are things i want, that i can’t manifest by my physical actions in the immediate – which require some wishing and positive thinking just to keep them alive as dreams and desires. this is a type of hope, albeit one without expectation of fulfillment, which really just goes back to one state cancelling out the other (a hopeless hope).

i suppose i bristle at the word “hope” because it feels too much like saying – “there is nothing i can do about this anyway except pray” – and giving up so much agency, while our life-support systems of air and water and plants are slowly poisoned around us and by our actions as a collective body seems a bit disingenous to me. it’s the avoidance factor that makes me recoil and then react – and i suppose that is what i did mean in my parting statement to an ex last july in a tiny central coast village. looking back at it, i am pretty sure it was not a bad omen of anything.