The Mycelium found this light in all of them. She found it buried in their chests and in this planet. In Flagstaff—and in other lands and beings. In graves too, in a pile of dog bones buried beneath sweet peas or with a cat skeleton high on the observatory hillside, easy to spot from campus.
Kalantos Beach on the south shore of Crete. The sun setting to my right. The timid surf. Gold cliffs that Theseus first saw.
The ten of us in a row, Andy, Xan, Dido, Manny, Brit, Juno, Cly, Gallia, Camilla, and me, Atalanta, our feet bare and sunk into sand, our knees bare, our arms crossed around them.
We are saying goodbye to Earth: to land, sea, and sky.
The sea of aquamarine and navy is rolling the gold sands licked from the cliffs.
The sky is clear. We consider our setting sun as seen from Earth.
These are our last days.
Most of us are fairly young. But 59 years has grooved a deep habit. So, to this we have come, to this evening ritual after a days work, after swimming, walking, quiet, conversations, after a drive on the thrilling roads.
“I’m not going to be able to leave.” Camilla.
“Ha! Right?!” Gallia next to her, leaning with her desperate laugh against Camilla. Our friend. Her constant companion.
“Look. When we were in Italy, I found this place. You know, if you have money to fix it up, you can get one for $20?”
Camilla passed her phone around. Each of us looked at the picture of her ruined villa, its arches, and graceful spaces. The wild vineyards. A courtyard with its greened and calcified fountain stopped.
I for one looked blankly.
Everything was something not to want. There was freedom in this. But it was also disconcerting.
“Oh! This place was so cool.” Gallia.
“Only $20,” Camilla repeated.
Then we were quiet.
The waves rushed up at us, towards our toes, at the edge of the surf where we had sat in a row.
The Mycelium had learned to connect across. Through the cooling sand—up its heavy layers, into the loose warm, into their feet, across the white strands of nerves, down the branches of them.
In Camilla, the sense of Home was brighter than the rest. Red and rooted, she was determined.
For Camilla, the Volcian girl, the pull was innate, Indigenous. As the historian Virgil wrote, she had given her life to it once, long, long ago, resisting the conquest by one-day Romans.
The Mycelium felt how this also connected, unsevered, through sands, across the Aegean Sea to that wild vineyard. A light in Camilla was mirrored and rooted there. The Mycelium found this light in all of them. She found it buried in their chests and in this planet. In Flagstaff—and in other lands and beings. In graves too, in a pile of dog bones buried beneath sweet peas or with a cat skeleton high on the observatory hillside, easy to spot from campus.
Here a bright orange poppy would bloom from silver stems.
But the beacon shone the brightest in Camilla and in ancient Latvium, amongst the Volci, in the golden days before Romulus and Remus would arrive, where the Mycelium knew humans located “the past.”
The Mycelium focused there, growing nerves, tightening connections, brightening them. She found another light, one matched in Gallia’s chest and in all our bodies. She tightened and brightened and fiercened the white nerve networks that linked us.
She did not mean to be cruel but experimented like this as a matter of adaptation. The humans had given her permission, entrusting her to the unfathomable complexity of time, space, history, destiny, knowledge.
There were places, lights like theirs, in her too, nodes in her, where we all met, where she could never let go, where she hurt and yearned valiantly.
The disconcerting numbness eased, replaced with a tugging. Quiet like the surf, but insistent, always pulling.
It pulled us home.
It pulled us to the stars.
We would be born over and over, born again and again.
The faint sense of familiarity in a strange place has been written about a million ways, ruined, made trite. It was this the Mycelium tweaked in us.
