TAKE A WALK WRITTEN AND ILLUSTRATED BY JUDE MERTENS
TAKE A WALK JUDE MERTENS
To all the summer walks we’ve been on.
Why am I here? What is my life amongst trillions of others? What do I contribute? The sun touches the skin of my leg first and upward until it reaches my face. I am more alive than I was a minute ago. There is life everywhere. Visibly soaring through the trees. Non visible digging and squirming in the dirt. Life is rustling in the wind. It is everywhere.
Born.
Reborn.
Old.
Today we are fresh and optimistic. Today we take a walk.
Where are we going? I hope it’s somewhere beautiful.
Buzzing and flapping. Noises indistinguishable from one another.
Bladesblendingtogethertocreateonecohesiveshape coveringexpansesofhillsandditchesinpatches allcutdowntoanappropriatelengthtowalkonfor A person.
I am a person, and often I resent that, but today I’m happy to begin. Maybe today I’ll
Change?
Grow?
Learn something?
Have you noticed that ants are everywhere? You can go almost anywhere and find ants. Under rocks, in your kitchen, sometimes I think I feel one crawling out of my ear. I bet there’s one on you right now. Crawling up your ankle. Don’t mind them, they’re just taking a walk too.
No
one
takes
a
walk
alone.
Whether you mean to or not you are always on a walk with others who are also on walks they didn’t decide to go on with you. We’re on a walk together. Where we’re walking I don’t know but we’ll go as far as we feel like. Walk until we want to go home I suppose. I’ll walk until my legs are too tired or I’m desperately thirsty and feel like a husk. All people are constantly shedding their skin in tiny little flakes and growing new skin in its place. All trees are constantly growing new rings under their rigid bark. All grass grows despite being deliberately cut down. All caterpillars try to live to be a butterfly or moth. We all just want to take a walk and
go home.
I just want to feel alive, surrounded by everything else that is alive, and all exhale at once.
I’ve always felt observed. Since I can remember I’ve felt watched, but perhaps not seen. By who? I’m not sure. By everyone I’ve ever met in my entire life certainly.
I
I am growing in tandem. I fear everything I can’t see and more that is beyond my perspective entirely. Unknown.
I’m not sure they’d care for the likes of us. Why would they? We’re ants crawling out of a hole in the ground to find water. I feel seen by you. You’re seeing me now. I’d prefer it if you weren’t. But I’d hate to be alone.
Summer. Everything happens in early summer. Naive youth translating into opinionated uncertainty.
By god? No.
FUCK OFF.
You don’t want to be here. Seeing me.
You’d rather be anywhere else than you are at any point in time. You’d rather clear the pores on your nose for an hour. You’d rather be asleep. You’d rather do nothing worthwhile and do that the next day too.
You’drathereatandeatanddrinkorsmokeorfuckandfuckoff. Maybe not. Maybe that’s just me.
Maybe I’m just observing myself through so many lenses. I’ve only ever seen the world through glass. Shattering my perspective so easily.
have
no
perspective
that I’m comfortable with. It’s always changing. Sometimes getting worse. Usually getting worse. Always shifting.
Take a look why don’t you. Look at everything you can while you can. You deserve to. After all you didn’t ask to be alive. Enjoy yourself. Take the edge off. Take everything you want. Take everything that belongs to you and save it in a box forever underneath another box of old clothes you’ve been meaning to get rid of.
Give Yourself.
Clouds drift and skid across the sky in herds and clumps and shifting amorphous blobs that are all just scattering where the wind leaves them. I wish that was me. If I could trade my life to be a cloud and then rain and then a lake and a cloud again I might. Wouldn’t you? To be In harmony with yourself totally and move forward as easily as not doing anything at all. To not try but still succeed.
To be beautiful.
Admired.
Needed.
Are you needed? By others surely. Do you need yourself? Do the ants need you? The clouds? Am I needed?
You’ll never see it coming. Everything. It’ll hit you in waves of vicious icy pins poking into your everything.
It’llsqueezeyoucrushmeflattenus skinthemripapartever ything.
If I could go anywhere, where would I go? Across the road. Down the street. Up AND around the bend and then some. But more than anywhere I’d like to go on a walk and then go home.
Take me down to a river and whisper silkily everything. Drown you in burning sticky tar singing piercing notes in ears that cannot contain the everything. Marching across supple fruits with unhonest everything. This is everything. I am on a walk to try and find happiness to some degree. Seeing flowers and trees and life. Life that will go about as if I am not there. Life that exists in spite of us, by the grace of us. Our life by luck or coincidence is here or there. It certainly is everywhere. And I mean.
EVERYWHEREEVERYWHEREEVERYWHEREEVERY WHEREEVERYWHEREEVERYWHEREEVERYWHERE EVERYWHEREEVERYWHEREEVERYWHEREEVERY WHEREEVERYWHEREEVERYWHEREEVERYWHERE EVERYWHEREEVERYWHEREEVERYWHEREEVERY WHEREEVERYWHEREEVERYWHEREEVERYWHERE Of course everything else is everywhere too. You are everywhere you’ve ever been and ever will be and maybe even more than that but not more than ants. Or light. Or anything.
First we need to get over something. This great massive thing in front of us. We’ll never see it coming, but we have to be ready. Get over it. Get over what? All I see is a beautiful sunrise glittering over the land and trees for miles. All I see is everything around me.
All
I
see
is
you.
All I see are the animals we are lucky enough to encounter along the way. All of them truly fantastic. Some charming,
Some odd.
All going for a walk.
Isn’t it kind of funny how people will distinguish themselves from animals? By giving us a species, one name, people, and everything else, one name, animals. Even though we’re animals too, there’s plenty of proof. When I was young I thought people were the smartest of animals and that’s why we separate ourselves.
I’ve realized we separate ourselves because we are smart enough to know we don’t fit in.
I think evolution might have made a few mistakes with people. Made our brains smart in the wrong way. Why do we live like this.
Lying. Lying on the ground. Tossed to the side of the road like trash.
The
garbage
is
everywhere
isn’t
it.
People are also everywhere. Some not picking up our garbage others pretending, pretending we don’t contribute, don’t contribute that much. Everywhere. Ants are everywhere too, one just crawled in your cup and it’s thirsty.
Lying there caught between lines put there by man stupid animal can’t you read. Didn’t you see the everything coming at you all at once barreling down on you.
If only we could make it right somehow. To assuage our guilt from bearing witness. Were you to find the man that did this, what would you say to him? What would he say? I am a wretched awful thing. Predisposed to destroy everything I find to be beautiful. I wallow in every way there is to be human. Kiss every stone and leave it crumbling behind us.
Why didn’t you think faster than the smartest animal on earth? Why didn’t you get to live? Get well soon. A lie. Poor young thing will never be well again. I look upon a frail broken body that once had a bright future. I wonder where their family is.
There is no cure for such a tragedy, just tragedy and the gaping whole of nothing it brings.
May
we
all
find
peace
one
day.
I am weighed down by a heaviness I call myself. Gravity clinging me to the earth, holding you down so you can’t try to escape. Trapping us people with one another until we get desperate enough to figure out a way around god.
I feel so much of that weight leave me and fall steadily down my face dropping to the not so fertile tar beneath our feet.
Bones snapping like pencils when you’re mad and ripping through everything else until it doesn’t function anymore.
And then what?
Nothing?
I could spend my whole life asking the same questions over and over.
To no reply. No answer.
I can’t help but wonder what it felt like. To die.
No reason.
Drift away mylar lie.
I’ve tried to set myself free a number of times but we’ll never really be free. Free from what we really want to be free from. Ants may not be free but are they happy? Do they even have emotions that complex? Sometimes you wish you didn’t
It’s
a
lot
to
carry.
Something weightless but heavier than the densest mineral.
Plastic promise of and for nothing. Relinquish your hold and be free. Free from gravity. Free to drift higher and farther away. Soar until you b u r s t o p e n then fall back to the ground a banished angel on fire bound to rot and choke anything you encounter. And so the garbage returns to the rest of the garbage.
Take a walk. I’m just on a walk. We are on a walk together.
Some bugs only live a couple days or weeks. They generally spend most of that time just trying to stay alive and make more of themselves. People do much of the same. Although we spend a lot of our time trying to figure out how to make our time here more worthwhile, comfortable. I don’t know if bugs spend any time trying to be comfortable.
Where are we going? Forward.
Somewhere where all the trees are taller than all the people and all the buildings. Somewhere the grass tickles the sky and the wind sings along with the bugs. Somewhere light dances between leaves and on spiderwebs. Somewhere all water sparkles in rivers, ponds, puddles.
Somewhere
Everywhere something
we’ve better
things
are
calm
been we than where
and
Try to take your time taking in the surroundings or you’ll always wish you looked longer. If you are lucky enough to see something really truly beautiful try to never forget it. nice.
I am what I can remember.
longed for we were.
Will we even know where we want to be when we get there? Or will we just walk right by it in hopes of something even better? Can we even agree on what is best? I take on my life like a walk, one step at a time. One brief encounter
We
are trying to make ourselves.
Create something better with the clay we were given. But anything you make with it, no matter how skilled and steady the hand. will
still
be
made
right after another. We all came from the earth.
of
the
same
stuff.
And it is the earth we will return to. Wind rushing all around me. Voices screaming clawing through my ears. Everything in me says run! Save yourself! Every nerve on fire screeching to figure out a way to stay alive! Something is coming, something awful, something big something that could kill us. I am afraid.
The sky is no longer beautiful. The environment is a threat.
Grab hold of something. Even the ants are afraid, scurrying back into the tunnels they call home. I cry out in my mind to move but I find myself standing still. Staring forward. Watching everything get closer. Counting down what might be the rest of my life. Everything is completely still and silent for a moment. I know I’m still here because adrenaline is making my heart a creature all its own. What is there left to do, left to say? I
am
not
held
down
a
Nothing can be n
y
m
o
r
e.
What is left when there isn’t anything left? A soft crackling noise. A warm breeze. A knowledge that nothing can get better if it wasn’t once worse.
How will people remember me? How will animals? Am I a name on a rock in the ground? No surely I am something more beyond your comprehension.
Perhaps
even
beyond
my
own.
Beyond the earth I knew, falling apart at the seams stitched carelessly. Beyond being human and held down. Beyond real death. ‘
I am known by those who knew me and known by the dirt I tread on.
I am known by everything I ever touched.
I am known by the grass I cut and the air I breathed.
I am known by what I left behind.
I am known by what I take with me.
What is left?
Everything Everything you can’t see