from Meg Forajter's _AFTER SUMMER: an apocalypse_

Today I am thinking about ecological terrorism and dying planets and our legacy as human beings. I am thinking about Chicago and leaded soil and tigers and beautiful things we ruin on purpose. 
Today I am thinking about the Chernobyl nuclear accident and its wider cultural impacts and denialism, which is as potent as an intoxicant I can think of. I am thinking of scientists and research and the name Dr. Mousseau, like the French for sparkling wine. One thought bleeds to another. A biologist melts into foam, froth— the mousseux of Bubbly Creek on Chicago’s south side; a branch of the city’s river where the infamous slaughterhouses of the 19th century dumped their horror-waste of blood and bile and sinew— Centuries later, it’s sediment still thick with the fatty sluice of a million slaughtered cattle, rots into soapy foam. 

Yes, I am thinking of this image. Of my home. With this image I am everything and must not speak just from memory or personal trauma, but instead from a localized trauma that places the self within a wider context… and also contextualizes local traumas that may be too wide-ranged for the human soul to truly reckon. 

That being said, taking the macro and making it micro, so that we sing within it. 

X 

The death of Hae Min Lee, a teenager from Baltimore, MD who was brutally killed in the winter of 1999 sings within me in this way. Senselessness in micro. One person. A tragedy we can digest and make part of ourselves. 

Hae Min Lee’s body was discovered in a large wooded nature reserve two months after her initial disappearance. Her body was discovered when a local maintenance worker, dubbed “Mr. S” to protect his privacy, walked into the woods to piss. As Mr. S. recollected, he was suddenly hit with the urge to urinate when driving between home and work. He quickly pulled to the side of the road and entered the woods. While looking for a suitable location, Mr. S spotted human hair lying on the ground. He immediately informed the police… 

What else is there to do? Make a phone call, become one with ooze; to mourn a dying planet. I walk past fields and imagine being of the field, the way dead bodies become part of their environments, the way they melt into the grass or boil on concrete. Is this moving from subject to object? To lay oneself out in a field and feel the grass all around you, feel the earth and the small rocks lodged under your spine 

Accretion, accretion, accretion. 

I think about Hae a lot. I think about the unfairness of her life. About the fact of her death. I think about her grieving family, and the horror that is her sensationalized end. 

She is one person. I think this is how this story must begin. Questions, a reckoning… One death. Yes, the micro to macro. A dying planet. A dead girl in the woods. 

More importantly, I ask myself— what is the necessary point? Who have I killed to write this down? How long do we have left?