Moving through the forest I realize how dead it really is.
Skipping from root to root I only hear my own footsteps in the otherwise deafening silence.
The roots seemed to hold together the ground as they twist outward, searching for each other to hold on to. Turning the ground into a mosaic of twisting wood frozen over shallow crystal waters.
The trees have long been dead, but they nevertheless keep up the illusion of life. Every cell intact, only sleeping, frozen in time. Destined to never fade away.
Standing as proud as they are empty. Without leaves, straight without bending. Nothing would decompose them. Destined to stand there until wind and rain eventually turn them to dust, just to drift into the clear water below to make it even a little more deadly.
The trees are a disease among themselves. Producing poison so perfect nothing else may survive, nothing except the trees themselves. No animal could eat the plentiful bark. No termite could enjoy the sweet wood. It is all a silent wasteland. Slowly growing at the edges. Like a tumor, it spreads through the land.
What a cruel joke to talk of the fruit of life. For I know now, life must forever be entangled with death. To separate them would mean murdering the individual. I mourn all the lost people I could have been. Looking back the path is littered with corpses. The future frightens us for what we might lose. Potential is indeed the promise of death.
If we had instead forsaken knowledge and eaten the fruit of life, we may have been forever spared death, but in our ignorance we would have been oblivious to the fact that we were never really alive.