When I was a boy, I spent the afternoons in the woods behind our local school. I'll assume that, amidst the petabytes of information you've intercepted from our airwaves, you know what boys and woods and schools are.
I'd grab an orange from the crisper, run across North Mill Street and — at the spot the culvert crossed the road — dip beneath the canopy, choose a tree, and climb it as high as I could. Then I'd peel the fruit with my pocketknife and carve poems into dislodged bark until my friend Juan found me.
When he did, we'd choose walking sticks and search for chanterelles and traces of beavers, and wade into the creek that they dammed, eager to feel the immensity of being alive, to be rooted in something older and wiser than the clamor of people.
The appearance of other humans was rare, and that was one of the appeals. But one day we found a group of boys at the base of our favorite oak. They'd trapped a robin and were laughing as they tortured her. I'd like to say we chased them off but they were a few grades above us and as apt to torment us as the bird. They weren't physical thugs, not to people, but they'd hurl epithets and racial slurs like they were stones, and both of us had our fair share of welts from the mouths of bullies.
By the time they'd had their fill, she was barely breathing. Her wings were tattered, and while we cradled her in our arms and carried her to my house, we begged her tiny red breast to keep rising. I remember the look of contrition on my mother's face when we arrived. She knew a lost cause. But I had to know.
You'll know by now that we humans fear the unknown, and that we fill that chasm with stories, imagining endings we have some agency over. What makes us tick is the pursuit of knowing, of being masters of destiny — at least our own. In its absence, we act rashly.
We are a race of conquerors and schemers. You'll know this well. Perhaps you even discovered us through the detritus of nuclear war, small novae speckled with deuterium and flecks of death, hurtling toward you alongside solar flares and radiowaves. You'll know that genocides and other armed malevolence mark our pasts, present, and likely our future.
But even our worst outcomes are not born of malintent. We are driven by qualia, you see — that uncanny pith at the heart of our consciousness: the redness of red, the affect of art, the suchness. We wrench it from the earth and from each other, and mangle it across the full spectrum of life and death, trying and trying to explain why we're here, or at least prove that we were. Even at our most tragic, you've probably sensed hope in our concessions, and strength in our will.
When my mother saw that look in our eyes, she acquiesced. Bring her in, she said. My friend gave me his sweatshirt to keep the robin warm. I remember it was a Cleveland Browns hoodie that smelled like casserole and cigarettes. I told him I could use one of mine — it was a chilly fall day and he had to walk home. But he insisted. There was a hole in the sleeve that was perfect for her head, he said. Just return it tomorrow at school.
But the next day, he wasn't there. I searched for him everywhere — he was the only other I knew would mourn her as I did. The teachers said they'd sent his family out of the country. “Illegal aliens” was the term they used, and I tried to square my sweet friend with the green Roswellian creatures I imagined aliens to be — how we're still led to imagine you to be: things to be feared, coming for reasons unknown but surely for nothing good.
In this quantum state of possible truths, we have imagined you as every other: the bully, the tender steward — even the wounded bird in need of a new home. But know that as long as it serves us, we shall call you aliens. It's how we feel safe in our smallness when the ending eludes us.
We're so obsessed with our own mythos that we don't even wonder if what brings you here is not us at all, but the unsung bird in the verdant woods. Or whale song. Fresh snow. The wiles of foxes, tussling in the interstices of night and day.
Maybe in your story, we're just the profligate fools who plundered our planet for shiny toys — we're certainly easy to root against. Maybe Gaia herself has lit the distress beacon and you are here to save her from us, and I would not blame you. Perhaps you are even the kind of hero that leaves sweatshirts for dying birds.
I won't insult you by presuming you don't know that there are those of us who see an injured robin and give her sanctuary, or that there are many who see beyond the false veil of species and into the eye of life, that fathomless pool, holding sentience and its infinite whims and permutations.
But we, too, want to know the shape of yours. So even if it is to be the last we ever hear, tell us your story. We shall listen, attentively, through the twists and turns, your fancies and foibles, until we can see you through the guise of plot and recognize ourselves.
— From one who was here, and for the time being, still is.