by Juliane Bergmann

Alex Jones, *Untitled,* digital photograph, 2024. Courtesy of Unsplash.

Dead Things

Juliane Bergmann | AUG 2025 | Issue 48

A woman wrote me an email.
She told me to fuck off.
Called me a hypocrite for saying I loved trees, because I had too many books.
Libraries are despicable. And bookstores. Even the indie ones, if you can believe it.
So are people with bookshelves.
Because.
Because these are dead tree carcasses, you dumb cunt.
She called me a cunt for loving trees and books.
I blocked her.

I didn’t have the guts to tell her that what I wanted most from my mother’s house after she died was the rickety wooden table.
I say it was rickety because it was cheap.
But it was the sturdiest thing in that violent house.
I didn’t tell the woman that my Opa helped me refinish the wood floors in my bedroom,
sand them down, then stain them on my hands and knees.
He was only slightly disappointed when I painted myself into the far corner
in the upstairs bedroom of the house he built with his own two hands.

I still think about her. She was crazy. And she was right.

I love the dead things.
The book, the table, the floorboards.
Sometimes a slab or slice of dead wood is all I can handle.
Who could bear to put their hands on a tree, ancient and alive,
Too tall, too wide, too deep in the earth, too close to the sky,
Too alone and too connected.
My fingers don’t touch,
Can’t even see each other, reaching.
Who could be in this presence and not feel the urge to be something else entirely?
Or exactly this.
Not me.

Juliane Bergmann is a book coach, writer, and editor for nonfiction and memoir projects with Simon & Schuster, Penguin Random House, Macmillan, and private clients. She has been published in HuffPost, Wired, Insider, and The Rumpus, and runs the writing community Unmentionables on Substack. She eats Nutella the correct way—straight out of the jar.