Felt Notes

Abney Park Cemetery
Observation date:
June 20 2025

Trees are particularly pungent to me. Like freshly mowed grass left to putrefy in a puddle of mud, producing bubbles of methane that wrestle their way through layers of rotting once-befores. If I let my nose speak for itself, I’d be wading through peat bogs. My partner says there might be something wrong with me. They say that nature’s fragrance is a scent that people try to capture in bottles, a smell they’d like to douse their skin in. Perhaps nature to me always carries an undercurrent of death. My mother keeps telling me to focus on the positives. Perhaps I need to register the stench with more grace. Despite my unrelenting atheism, the sun still shines on the quietest pocket of Abney Park Cemetery, but it reeks. Of trees, of rain, and of symbiosis. In fact, the sun only shines here. Do I repent for gluttony, or are the resting absorbed and sprouted as tall as they can be? I stood in front of tombs, reading about those laid to rest, picturing them body long gone in a field of homologous bones. Isolated in a box withered down and swallowed by the Earth; without so much as a ray of light to grow a single blade of grass between those supple ribs. But there’s a fresco mural of strangers painted above me in those violent, effulgent leaves. All I needed to do was look up. I may not believe in God but I have a testimony that spirits live on in long, green, greedy apparitions. If I waited decades to decompose just to see the sun again I’d be gluttonous too.

On my way back to Stoke Newington Church Street, I watched the wind blow a pigeon carcass like my mother rocked my cradle. Everything missing except its wings and the delicate frame of what used to be its proud chest. There’s nothing worth flying away for anymore.