The Gold that Stays

When I was eight years old, my dad shot a deer. I lay on its body when we reached it, sucking on the black licorice stick that had incentivized me to go hunting as tears streamed down my face. My dad taught me to touch the deer’s eye to make sure it doesn’t blink, to make sure it is dead. I touched the deer’s eye and it did not blink. Nature’s first green is gold, / her hardest hue to hold. When we got home, I ate raw meat from the deer’s body, so fresh it was still warm. It was strange consuming an animal I was still mourning, but there was a sense of purity in the direct connection between our lives that allowed me to do it. It seemed like a natural cycle of life to me then, and the meat made sense in my mouth. I widened my eyes at my dad and bounced up and down next to the kitchen table to express how good the deer tasted. But the image of the animal’s unblinking eye as it lay on the ground stuck with me. I saw the deer running; I saw the deer dead. The two irreconcilable thoughts stuck together in my mind like magnets. As my dad gathered the rest of the meat from the deer’s body in the garage, I somehow got hold of one of its hooves and for several weeks after that night I carried it with me. My mom quickly banned me from bringing it inside, so I wrapped it in a paper towel and brought it into the backyard. As soon as I got home from school each day I went to check on it. I sat there with it, stroking the black hoof and the bit of hair above because it was the only part of the deer I could still care for. I don’t remember how it happened, but slowly the hoof disintegrated. Maybe I lost interest in it and it turned to dirt in the backyard, or more likely another animal took it in the night. Either way, one day the hoof was gone. Nothing gold can stay. ⚘⚘⚘ I had a lot of worries when I was young. At night they swarmed around me and I couldn’t sleep. “One more question,” I called down to my parents night after night after they had tucked me into bed. “Why do bees like pollen?” I would ask anything to keep them near me, to keep them talking. I wasn’t so worried when I wasn’t alone. In middle school I got a small patchwork bag filled with worry dolls on a camping trip in Joshua Tree. I’d already tried a hundred ways to soften my fears at night–therapy, an energy healer, crystals, visualisations, meditations. They all helped, but I didn’t latch on to any of them the way I did to my worry dolls. They were small, about half the size of my pinkie, maybe eight in total. Each of their wire bodies were covered in small pieces of bright fabric that looked like skirts and shawls, and tiny eyes and mouths were drawn onto their paper faces. At night I took them all out of the bag and whispered a worry to each one before putting them back inside. “I’m worried I will never find my favorite necklace that I lost.” “I’m worried that I’ll throw up.” “I’m worried that Mama will die in a car crash.” “I’m worried we shouldn't have killed the deer.” Once they were all back in the bag I pulled the string tight and tucked it under my pillow. I felt so much lighter. Night after night of whispering my worries to the dolls, I came to know each of them well. I felt safe knowing they would hold my fears at night so I could sleep. One day, the patchwork bag ended up in the washing machine with my pillowcases, and all the little worry dolls fell apart. Her early leaf’s a flower; / But only so an hour. I felt torn apart with them, cleaved in two. I held the broken figures in my hand and pressed myself under the drying rack in the laundry room, trying to cry hard enough that I would escape the pain. But no matter how hard I cried or how small I curled up I could not escape. Nothing gold can stay. ⚘⚘⚘ In high school I sat on a bench in the park on New Year's Eve. The line between us where my body pressed against his, the side of my thigh, my arm from the elbow up, my shoulder, was electric, even under my down coat. There were so many stars above, shatteringly clear in the crystal cold night. He saw a meteor and looked at me with wide eyes, but I had been looking at him and missed it. We stared at the sky again. I saw a meteor and nudged him, but he had been looking at me. This time we swore to stare at the sky until we saw a meteor together. We watched for a while, inching closer and closer because it was cold, and also because we had never been so near to someone like that. I could smell his shampoo: apple scented. Suddenly, from the crest of the sky, a meteor broke loose from between the stars. This one was bigger than any I had seen before. It had a thick, fat tail that glowed brilliantly orange. It dove down in a long, smooth arc until it vanished near the horizon, like a stone dropping into dark water. Neither of us moved; we had both seen it. After a while, he put his arm around me. I had never felt that way before-burning, falling. My heart dove toward him, dropping inside his darkness like a meteor into sky or a stone into water. That night I came back with frostbite, dark purple kneecaps and blotches on my hips. I rubbed at them in the shower, holding my breath, holding my breath, until the purple faded to red. I took deep breaths. I knew the meteor was a sign of something magical, something no one would believe if I tried to tell them about it. Orange like a fiery tail burned behind my eyelids as I fell asleep, my smile lingering on the scent of his apple shampoo and the weight of his arm around my shoulder. There were more nights cold enough to break if you breathed in too fast, too cold to hold hands so we took turns sharing our pockets. For months we met only after dark, only outside, in a starry world that never quite felt real. By the time the stars started blinking out I was so used to the dark that I didn’t notice. Then leaf subsides to leaf. / So Eden sank to grief. I hadn’t yearned for my worry dolls in years, sometimes I even wondered if my swarm of fears had found a different queen, but by summer I spent most nights falling asleep shaking with the effort of keeping my pillow dry and no one to tell. It took me until fall to admit to myself I was wrong. The meteor wasn’t a sign, the frostbite was, teasing me like sparks but blooming into bruises that I couldn’t see. Nothing gold can stay. ⚘⚘⚘ I only have one poem memorized, a short eight lines by Robert Frost called “Nothing Gold Can Stay” that my dad recited to me over and over when I was young. The lines occur to me randomly sometimes, when I finish a book or walk home at dusk, or when I think about how much my dad loves Robert Frost. Nature’s first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf’s a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day, Nothing gold can stay “Stay gold, Ponyboy,” Johnny Cade says in the The Outsiders as the fire that burned him, extinguished now but still roiling across his skin, steals his final heartbeats. Stay gold, I say, stay gold. But nothing gold can stay. ⚘⚘⚘ When I learned about fireweed this semester it fit like a puzzle piece between the contradictions of those lines. Like its name suggests, fireweed is one of the first plants to grow after a wildfire. It takes to the blackened ground like a phantom, sucking life out of the ashes. It blooms across meadows and mountainsides almost as fast as fire itself, leaping in arcing colors across scorched land, touching all the places that died and igniting them in a magenta-tinged remembrance. As it spreads, though, it slows down, then stops. Instead of taking over mountainsides and charred forests and holding them forever captive with its blossoms, fireweed, in the end, chokes itself out. The purple miracle flower falls back to the earth, not sentenced there by fire like the trees and shrubs on the land before it, but sentenced there by its own overpopulation, its own drowning. So dawn goes down to day. But then, from the fertile remains, new sprouts emerge. Not only short-term flowers and brush, but the trees that will make forests that could stand for centuries. ⚘⚘⚘ Maybe that is the answer. We do things that die. Sometimes we have to do them so that they will die, like killing a deer, telling worry dolls your darkest fears, loving someone who will stop loving you. Burn the forest, flower the ashes, grow the trees. The finality of the deer’s unblinking eye was splintering, and I’ve recognized that same splintering ever since-the washed bodies of my worry dolls, the slow curve of the meteor in the sky as it broke apart. But even when the deer’s heart stopped beating, she kept existing outside of that moment, as a figurative presence in my heart when I touched her eye and she did not blink and as a literal presence in my body after I ate her meat. What’s dead is gone, but it depends on where you look. The worry dolls taught me to make sense of my fears, to put them into words so that when it mattered, when I was losing him, when I was suffering anything, I knew how to face it. Maybe those two weren’t related, but even if they weren’t consequential ripples they collided, like the deer’s heart and mine, like flowers and ash building a forest. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief. So dawn goes down to day. Somehow, there is a gold that stays.