Cow Carcass, Payahuunadü, February 2025

Photo by Tim Giller

It makes a strange cartography, our flesh. Crossing meridians and longitudes, a record of mishaps, misadventures or simply routine wear, the friction of trailing miles. We earn these wrinkles squinting to the horizon. Arhythmic hearts might betray us. Betray us sweetly. Opinions firm as ossified bone wedged next to emotion, a soft pliable gland. How much time does one get to chart a journey, discovering new features. Map revisions periodically updated. There is a story behind each wound and the blessing of living is a terminal condition.

I’ve missed opportunities to document my scars. I could have captured them at prime grotesqueness. A broken collarbone protuberance, a cyclist's injury, also common among anyone prone to go over the bars, off the front, get ahead of themselves. A jagged glass cut, asphalt tattoos lacerated and abraded, grimy metal puncture marks. Instead they have softened, blended, healed and faded, once vivid memories now subtle reference points.

Perhaps a type of love, this generally involuntary offering of one's body. Unavoidable, we can struggle to resist or we can attempt to navigate with grace. The gazelle runs but sometimes they are caught in the jaws of a cheetah. Both are exquisite life, neither will willingly die but their lives require the loss of other life. It may as well come as a dance, a rhapsodic embrace of bloody claws or the gnashing of teeth on pulverized grass, rumination, decomposition. Our ashes to dust are never so dry that they might not foster the queasy composure of mycelial strands or fungal fruit.