Everything Bright Is Something Burned: Living at the end of the world

109 have come to suspect that I experience only two kinds of sadness: the kind where I have lost something, and the kind where I have done something wrong. The first would be the loss of the wobbly gold earrings my mother bought me one sunny afternoon years ago or my favorite winter coat, left on a train. Lost sleep. The sorrow of losing a best friend when I broke up with him, or the respect of another friend because I said too little after her mother’s death. This kind of sadness arrives in a flood. When it has passed, it leaves a void. essay Everything Bright Is Something Burned Living at the end of the world Erica Berry I 110 | Erica Berry If the first sadness is a kind of grief, the second is a kind of shame. This is the sadness of sharing a rumor only to hear that someone was hurt by it, a hurt that hits me the way a bird hits a window and then falls twitching to the lawn. The sadness of kissing someone when one of you already has someone else, making a secret as naturally as some people make babies or zucchini bread. It can be triggered by something as minor as telling a joke that is met with flat stares. If the first sadness makes me want to rewind time, the second can make me want to escape it entirely. The world would be better if I were not here, I think. Maybe I should leave this place. Is it useful to parse these sadnesses? I’m not sure. Each kind can be petty at times. Still, I am trying to separate them because lately they have become intertwined, tangled in both an emotional sense and an environmental one. It has become increasingly difficult to ignore the way the components of my life, its continuing creation—the meals I cook and eat, the lights and heat that sustain me through winter, the T-­ shirts I sometimes buy on the trips I often take—represent both a wrongdoing and a loss. A depletion of resources that are not mine to take. I consume; I mourn the effects of my consumption. I am ashamed of my grief because I know that I myself am causing it. This sadness, like the capitalism that breeds it, feels inescapable. As if, by being a twenty-­ first-­ century American, I have been cursed to enact one selfish choice after another until the sum of my actions constitutes the loss I bear. On the worst days I wonder how much of my sadness for the natural world is actually sadness for myself, nostalgia for a time when I knew less. I fantasize about seeing our world through the gloss of the passive voice: The coral reefs are dying. The honey bees are disappearing . How easy it would be to mourn those losses. To feel insulated by the distance between me and them. I could grieve for those catastrophes the way I grieve for my neighbor’s cat, an animal who one night just did not come home. Instead, I gas up my old car. It’s me, I think, turning the key. I am killing the coral. The sadness of my wrongdoings has become the sadness of my loss. Everything Bright Is Something Burned | 111 One day I confess this shame-­ sorrow to the woman who created me. I try to sound casual, as if it has just occurred to me, the ongoing apology of my days. I look at the roll of toilet paper and hear displaced birds; I reach for my iPhone, aware of child laborers in the supply chain. I keep on going, hauling compost to the co-­ op and jars to the bulk aisle, not because I think this will change the world but because it makes it slightly easier to live beside the engine of my body. Oh sweetpea, my mother said. Beneath her words I sense what she has often told my sister and me: we are not defined by our sadness or guilt, but these are feelings we can welcome like guests at a party, knowing we can say good...