The Longest Goodbye
By Majekodunmi Ebhohon
WHILE we are busy
up here,
obsessing over high-speed internet
and the expiration dates on yogurt,
there is a slower, more stubborn drama
unfolding beneath our sensible hiking boots.
It’s a bit of a scandal, really.
A hemlock falls,
loses its head,
its branches,
and its entire social calendar
to a winter storm,
leaving behind nothing
but a flat, mossy circular stage—
the kind of stump you’d sit on
to check your pulse
or wonder where you left the car keys.
But the neighbouring trees,
in a display of what scientists call
“communal life support”
and what I call
“an inability to take a hint,”
begin to pump sugar and minerals
through the plumbing
of a vast, underground socialist network.
The stump has no leaves.
It has no photosynthesizing
ambitions whatsoever.
It just sits there
like a retired relative
who has moved into the guest room
and expects his meals delivered on a tray.
The roots know
what the eyes must never see:
that life grows downward,
toward the shadowed earth,
and staying alive
is sometimes just a matter
of having friends
in low, damp places.
They bury themselves
where no light touches,
refusing the easy exit of rot,
remembering everything
the world tried to prune away.
The secret of life, it turns out,
is not in the glorious reaching up—
the vanity of the canopy—
but in the sinking down,
the refusal to let go
even when you’ve lost your
crowning achievement.
It’s a communal stubbornness,
a quiet conspiracy
the daylight must never overhear.
I walk past a cedar stump
that has been technically “dead”
since the Awo administration,
yet it looks remarkably well-fed.
It’s a comfort, I suppose,
to know that even when
you’ve lost your head
and your purpose
and your upward mobility,
some relatives downstairs
are still keeping the lights on.
Majekodunmi O. Ebhohon is a Nigerian poet and playwright. He is the author of ‘The Great Delusion’, winner of the ANA Prize for Drama, 2025. He writes from Benin City, Edo State, Nigeria.🇳🇬
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