No One Should Vanish Unremembered

Let’s go where the light does not reach. There’s a forest in Japan that swallows sound. Aokigahara, the suicide forest. So quiet you can hear the trees creaking. Mourning those who have gone there to disappear. Compasses don’t work. No roots grow deep in this forest at the base of Mt.Fuji; soil is too dense with volcanic rock. What’s darker is that sometimes the trees don’t just mourn—they remember. The trees hold the echoes of voices that cried out—not always in fear, but in strange, fierce relief. They remember the ones who changed their minds but never found their way out of the forest. 

They remember 

the final  look in their eye 

before maggots find their home. 

They remember those who lost something they should never have touched and never did find. What holds the last words of the dead? Because even those seekers in this forest have last words they never spoke to anyone. The weight of those words lingers in the silence that follows. From Flattered footsteps of hesitation to echoes of voices that cry out to carrying secrets. From the sound of heartbreak to the silence that follows. They witness. No one should vanish without someone, or something, remembering. 

That  final scream is like summoning a presence. Like an invocation, like something whispered in the breathless hush between worlds. That clutch at the earth, the bark of a tree, the air— that looks as if one is trying to root themselves one last time in the world only to disappear into the void is ironic. Like becoming a ghost with your hands still grasping for form. In the folding, they confront the first memory and last breath at once.

This forest that swallows sound births freedom. It is a place of death, a sacred space where form changes in its very presence from body to spirit. The trees witness the trap of memory. The mercilessness of it. No one vanishes without them noticing. Their witnessing is not an act of kindness. They remember; cursed to relive the last moments of every soul who mistook silence for sanctuary. They tuck you in to everlasting sleep with the moss that grows over your bones. No one said anything about peace.  If you blink too long, you might wake up as your own ancestor aged not by years but by regrets— No one should vanish without someone, or something, remembering. 

In the roots where nothing grows,

a name is whispered—

not to call them back,

but to let them rest.

Death comes slow and tender like footsteps in wet earth.  In the final moment, the earth, patient and unbothered, does not confuse that clutch for hope. It knows the difference between planting and burying. The trees grow and take the shape of their lover; the stiffen hands, the empty skull, the rigid foot. It remembers the same way a lover remembers; grazing their hand on the skin of the other memorizing touch. Who would want to forget such honest decay? Who would want to forget how one falls flat on the ground as the soul lifts away? These people? They’re not quite gone, but they’re not quite held. They remain a memory caught in the gesture of trying to stay. 

But roots are for living! In dying, they give themselves to the trees and experience the beauty of breath as leaves. The branch, the rough edge of a bark, the flower between two stones, the wet stem; death was planted, and did it not grow? 

Imagine you are sat by a well with no bottom. You dropped your shadow into it because it wouldn’t stop screaming. Imagine writing letters to your future corpse and burying them behind the church that burned but never crumbled. Unsettling beauty this. And the beauty of death as something to kneel before, not just run from? As something less of a pit and more an altar? Death is birth changing form. The moment meaning condenses. Silence swallows screams and turns them to hymns in this dense forest. We don’t always know why. But we know to bow around spaces where the departed once were. We step gently around those charged humming spaces and build rituals. Shrines. Graves. Divine fatality. 

We spend our whole lives finding the truth of the unseen only to become it. Reclaimed. Returned to pure raw material. Like ash finding its way back to star dust.

Death is a holy ground

because it holds the final echo of what it meant to exist—

and what it might mean to continue…