Until The End

The law would not bend to her will.  She wished to reverse time, to stop decay in its path, to find the fountain.  Her bones were made of steel. The taste of metal lingered in her mouth; even after brushing her shiny teeth she could sense the elements and polished earth.
The years since her birth had flown like a blue feather on a hurricane gust. Childhood had at first been painfully slow, but the moment her breasts were upright and singing, the years gathered strength and momentum, rolling faster and faster until she came to the edge and her pulse slowed. She grew out her hair in an attempt to capture what had been.

Now, her white mane long and clean, her hair had become a symbol of the past, like some sort of guiding line attached to a place she could not quite remember. The girl that had been, she had never known her.
She had watched herself from a distance, seeing the movements and thoughts of a skinny girl from an outsider’s perspective. Her dancing and singing was put under scrutiny, not by all those teachers and fellow students, but by the loud voice in her own mind that beat its comments into an ever-present rhythm she confused with the body’s pulse.
Her hair was long now, longer than it had even been.  When naked she could feel the soft ends of her white waves rubbing against the back of her thighs. 

Sprouting life seemed to grow unabated just beyond her fingertips.  The tree outside the window, once a sapling she had planted with her own hands, had grown into a massive fruit bearing vine.  It had pushed its way through the cracks in the house foundation, had climbed up the interior wall in her bedroom and spread along the ceiling. 
There were flocks of bright colored birds perched along the ledges of her roof and in the garden. A once carefully tended plot of vegetables had exploded into a new life form.  The tentacles of squash plants covered the land, expanding outwards, resolutely mounting wooden fences in its path, winding its way over forgotten toys and sun-chairs in the neighbor’s yard. 

She wished she could bend that universal law into a pretzel, making time into a new shape so that she could experience it all again in a different way, perhaps with more clarity, perhaps with more wisdom.
She was old and her bones were metallic.  Little walks around the block towards the park sent sparks through her, sometimes igniting the dried up lawns beside the path.
If only the proliferation of vines and thick weeds and the sun could wait for her, could keep her in their company.  She would like to see it all to the end, every moment of existence before it all went up in a colossal puff of smoke. 
She swung her hips as best she could, leaving a trail of embers on the sidewalk.

The Last Tree

The choppers whirled a few feet away, sending still green oak leaves from their branches. It circled, waiting for confrontation.  It circled, adding swift currents of anxious air. 
This was not the sweet sound of evacuation. It was not civilization coming with dry walls in the midst of a flood. It was the brutal force of empire. It was metal and strength looming from above. It was reinforced steel and bullets. It was brute strength.
There was one more tree left, the rest had been cleared away.  Chopped, roots dug, bark mulched.
I had been there when there was still a small grove of oak trees. It had been a sunny Saturday. Blue. A soft wind that carried summer on its wings. The earth had been covered in a blanket of tan leaves that were hard and brittle and sharp along the edges.
The spirit was still young then. There was still a chance, they thought, to save the grove. A small group had gathered around a guitarist.  He leaned against a tree, eyes closed in concentration, lyrics forming on his lips.
My steps echoed with crunching leaves, adding a bit of unnoticed rhythm.  The leaves, one step closer to the earth. Dust. The trees were a canopy. Late afternoon light sprinkled in like glittering jewels. 
A barefoot man in cutoff jeans walked through the grove holding burning sage.  A thin, button-up shirt, unbuttoned now, exposed his smooth hairless chest.  Skunk and earth.  Smoke looked like genie dreams in the rays of sunlight.  
Close to the sidewalk, a few bicycle  activists distributed bruised apples and oranges collected from the nearby farmer’s market. The small space was alive. Young girls in wide skirts.  Old women with long white hair that had seen this all before, and yet still hoped. 
"We will save it," they claimed.  They would.  They wanted to.
Months later, the university was through with games.  The guitarist, apples, the sage.  All forcibly removed.  The squirrels, birds, they were all gone. The police had built a metal chain link fence around the grove, trapping a few lone tree sitters that had climbed into the thick oak branches as a last resort.
I had almost been one of those girls. I had almost taken my sleeping bag and gone into the night. There could have been moon light, a stolen kiss, but that was a different path. I stayed in my blue carnival house.  Warm, cool-hued and imagining, never regretting a night under the stars that would never be.  
There was a different tree to climb and I listened to him sooth me like water.  Cool.  Tranquil.  His words dripped down my ears.
The fence went up, metal and cold, doing what it was designed to do. The crowds watched, pushed to the other side of the street, their hands clutching the barrier, watching as the chainsaws came. They cut every old oak in the grove.  They turned a home to little pieces, they turned it into dust. 
Just one lone tree remained.  The barefoot activists. Just a few thorns left.
Force was nothing new, force stretched out, trickling into every dark hole.  Fifty years. It was not about war or free speech, it was only trees. Nothing had changed, the eyes of the country still blinked in hazy sleep.
Far worse had been done, more violence stood tall on batons, ready for another skull. 
The police came, the fingernails on the octopus, the lowest level that would squeeze into those holes, bashing the centers with their metal-toed boots. Trained men.  Guns, bullets, gas, masks, batons, handcuffs.  Helicopters. Once again.
There were just a few left. The only animals now remained high in their branches, waiting for the inevitable.  Barefoot, eating granola, waving signs, burning sage.  Surrounded by gas and guns, the tree could offer no protection. Its own death was coming. 
The grove was gone.  Steel bars and cement were no longer a bad dream.  The hard hats were ready.  Plans.  Fiberglass.  The obstacles were cleared and soon it would all be over. Most would forget this ever happened.
I listened to it on the radio, driving early. Bright morning light coming through the windshield.  News of the final standoff. The barefoot people came down. They said they had been assured no charges would be pressed.  The university later denied making that promise.  And the final tree came down. 

George Up A Tree

A small man sat on a knoll of dried grass. If he looked closely at the ground he could see a few blades of bright green, but it was mostly a bed of pale yellow, and though he didn’t think about it too much, his body remembered the season and the wind and the reasons the ground was dead.
The hill looked down on a small village in the distance, and beyond the village was the sea. In the late afternoon light, the water glimmered like forgotten jewels. The man on the ground was round, nearly the same shape and color as a russet potato, and he knew it, people had made fun of him his whole life for it. Covering the sloping shape of his shoulders was a red and black checkered flannel coat, which was just heavy enough to stop the gentle breeze that blew through bare branches. He looked up into the branches above him and saw the familiar shape of a young man.
“Are you ever going to come down from there?” There was no answer, just the sound of the wind blowing between them.
After a long pause, he said, “did you hear me George?”
Still, there was silence.
The man called everyone George. He had discovered early on that he could never remember a name, and in the village, it was rude not to address people by name, so being a child and resourceful and creative, he had come up with a simple solution, everyone was “George.”
“Hello George!” he would enthusiastically say to the girl delivering milk bottles.
“Thanks George,” he would say to the gas station attendant. His brother was George, his friends were George, the dogs were all named George.
The old man looked into the tree once again, a wide-boughed oak that twisted and turned in sinister wonderment. There was George, sitting in the thin branches closer to the top. He had been there for nearly three months. Some in the village thought he had lost his mind. Some said it was a girl. But the old man did not listen to rumors. He had been an outcast his entire life, and when he heard about the boy who went to the tree, he packed a small sack full of apples and bread and went to the yellow knoll at the end of town.
“Don’t you think you’ve made your point? Don’t you think everyone gets it? Because they do. We all get it. Come down and end this already.” He was startled by the pleading in his voice and looked around, slightly embarrassed. Still, there was silence.
“George, answer me.”
But George wouldn’t answer. His vow many months ago had been real and serious, and though he smiled at the little round man that had faithfully come everyday to the tree, bringing fruits and bread and nuts and concern, he would not break his vow. He could not, and unfortunately, there was just no way to communicate this.
The old man looked into the twisted black branches and spotted the eyes of George. They held contact for a few seconds and then the old man looked away, exasperated.
“It’s over, like I told you. Just get back here on solid ground, will ya? There’s no need for this anymore, it’s over.”
He said it with authority, with absolute assuredness. There was nothing wavering in his mind, no colors between the spectrum. There was dark, there was light, and nothing in between. And once again, he was surprised by the sound of his voice. And once again, he gave a second thought to his desire. Just why did he come to the tree everyday, bringing food and a simple request?
And though he heard otherwise, nothing was over, not for George. There were more sunsets to come, more sunrises, other days. And there were vows. Simple. Nothing was complete and his task would remain, even after the tree burned, even after his body fell, even after the old man left.

The Ritual

I looked in my rear view mirror and saw the blue edge of the continent in the reflection. It was a thick line of deep blue. Up the hill I went, further and further from the breaking waves and clans of surfers and screams of the dingy boardwalk. "The city on a hill,” what they called the university of Santa Cruz. I passed the west entrance and kept going. The road began to curve and twist through the incoming forest that seemed to emerge in an instant. Green and black and holding secret promises. In the thicket were animals that refused to show themselves and caves that I had only heard about. I drove on.
I was looking for the right place. I wasn’t sure exactly where it was, but I kept driving, passing plenty of pull-outs on the road. Sometimes, as I approached one of these flat dirt spots, I would press on the break slowly and look to the right, surveying the land and trees, but then I wouldn’t move, I wouldn’t turn the wheel to the right and the car would keep on going.
The sky was a bright blue and through the open driver’s window I felt the crisp air of an approaching fall. The day held the promise of cool wind and yellow leaves, but for a moment, perhaps just for this one day, we could all pretend that summer still lingered and the sun would be ever-present. I saw a black car parked on the long pull-out ahead. The road had straightened momentarily. The “parking lot” was a three hundred foot long space, just wide enough for a single car. The earth was a bright tan dust. On the right was a metal fence that was held between thick dark wooden posts. I saw the aerodynamic car empty and waiting.
Usually the sight of another car or person would have made me keep driving, I wanted privacy. But something about the sight of it pulled me in. I found myself turning the wheel to the right and pressing on the brake pad. The car came to a stop under my command and I pulled the keys from the ignition.
I sat. It was very quiet. The left side of the road was lined by thick pine trees that grew out of an elevated conglomeration of rocks and earth. The right was a narrow field of dried grass and weeds. They were nearly four feet tall. Behind them was a wall of tall pine trees that stretched into the mountains. There were a couple of narrow paths that began at the edge of the road and disappeared into the trees. I picked the one closest to me and headed in carrying a large gray sweatshirt and a woven purse.

I walked, deviating from the trail once I was beneath a ceiling of green pine needles. I let my body lead the way until I saw a thick trunk that called to me. The earth was slightly elevated at its base, but yet flat enough for me to sit upon. I leaned against the bark, on a thick pad of leaves and very thin twigs. There was sap and decomposing yellow needles. It was the smell of earth. The smell of the cycle. I let it fill me. I nearly cried with the warmth of it, with the calmness of the elements. The earth and tree were like the loving arms of a mother I might never have had. Without thought or judgment, I felt them holding me.
“Will you help me?” I asked the tree. “Will you please take all the sadness and fear that I have? Can you take it out of me and transform it into oxygen?”
I leaned into the giant beauty. The old man. The calm wonder. I imaged a backwards flow, a multi-channeled river that escaped through my back and head, taking with it all the sadness and anxiety my muscles had held for a week. The bark was solid and strong, I heard thoughts inside, “how come you don’t do this more often? It feel so nice.” The bark was scratchy and soothing. I let a tear roll down my cheek.
“Please take what I don’t need.”
I imagined the flow of tension move into the tree, up the trunk, into the branches and needles and disperse into clean oxygen. There were birds somewhere in the thick canopy of pine needles above my head, but my eyes were closed and I could not see them. Their sounds were pretty and trebly and short, I imaged little birds with thick breasts.
I leaned against the tree for a while until I felt the moment was right. I opened my eyes. The day was bright, the sky was a bright blue. I could feel the cold wind coming, but we still had a little more time. Rays of light shone though the branches and warmed my thighs.
On my lap was a gray hooded sweatshirt with the word INDEPENDENT across the front in a thick red font. I picked it up and held it to my nose. It smelled of him. The faintness of his Tommy cologne I liked so much, vaguely smelling of grapefruit. I inhaled again, there was sweat and fabric softener. Its softness soothed my face. I imagined his eyes and lips. I let another tear run across my cheek.
I put it back in my lap and cleared the blanket of needles and twigs from a small space in front of my crossed legs. I found the deep brown earth, then I dug my fingers into it, making a small shallow hole. I pulled out the knife from my pocket. I held the silver blade to my finger. I tried a couple of times to force it through my skin, but it only left a faint indent on my flesh without the gash of red that I needed.
I unfastened the safety pin that I always wore on my pant’s pocket. It was small and not created for this purpose, but it did the job. I just needed a little bit of blood. I pushed the tip into the pad of my pink index finger. A small red bead formed. I watched it drop into the small hole within the earth. It disappeared into the soil.
I thought of his face. I tried to feel him in his cage. I remembered his smile. I pulled the sweater over my shoulders and wore it. I imagined his skin. I imagined the shape of his shoulders in the sweatshirt and the way he would wear the hood when he was cold. I took a deep breath again and smelled the remains of him.
My back fell into the tree once more and I asked it again to take what I didn’t need and transform it. I imagined his DNA within my blood. I imagined a small part of him fusing with the earth. I pulled out a small piece of paper and a pen from my purse. I wrote a few lines about him and us and what I wanted and hoped for. I wrote it quickly, letting my hand move nearly as fast as my thoughts. I folded it and held the flame of a lighter to it. The ashes fell into the hole with the fallen drop of blood.
I sat for a while longer, feeling the steadiness of the tree holding me close to the earth. I covered up the hole and placed some stones over it. Then I stood and began to walk back to my car.

The Little Man And The Map

It was a crisp day, a morning bright with blue light that showered on her from a cloudless sky. The leaves of the dense woods were tinged in varying shades of yellow and orange and the cold air bit at the tip of her nose and left stinging kisses along the edges of her ears. The young girl walked alone along a thin trail that wound itself through the woods in lazy, meandering curves. Fallen leaves crunched beneath her feet and under the weight of her shoe, she left them as small as confetti pieces. The scent of the leaves mingled with the aroma of earthy soil and she inhaled it all deeply, letting the cold scented air fill her lungs with its raw life. She felt more than alive, she felt electric beneath the changing canopy of trees, amid a world were words were useless simulated communication. With each step, she saw more and more, as through each move forward took her deeper into a world of mystery that usually lay beyond her grasp. Now she was here, walking, alive. She saw tiny brown capped mushroom heads sprouting from the ground. A bright green caterpillar inched its way across a fallen twig. An owl interrupted from his nap by the sound of crunching leaves flew overhead, looking for a meal.
In a curve of the path, the little girl saw a large tree, thirty steps away. It looked like all the other trees that surrounded her, only it wasn’t, there was something different about it. Filled with curiosity, she stepped off the path. She approached the tree slowly and saw there was a small opening at the bottom, a little door just big enough to poke her head in. She got down on her belly and pushed gently on the wooden door. When her eyes adjusted to the dim light within the thick trunk, she saw a small Native American man sitting on a tiny stool made of bark.
He looked to her and their eyes held steady and she knew he had been expecting her. Had he waited a thousand years for her to walk the path, to see the owl, to find the tree? She smiled and said hello. He did not move his mouth, his expression did not change, he sat still on his little stool, but the little girl heard him,
"Hello!" he said back enthusiastically.
The tree was silent, he was silent, and yet, he spoke to her and she could feel the warmth of his voice, the tenderness of his heart. The little girl smiled again.
The little girl broke their contact naturally and turned her head to look around the small room. There was a small fire in the far corner which gave off just a bit of warm light. The little man pointed to the back wall. She turned her gaze and saw a map carved into the tree. "Where will this map lead?" she asked her question silently, thinking her thought and then sending it to him like an open letter.
"It is a map to your heart."
The little girl was taken aback
"To my heart?!?!" she squealed.
The small man with tan skin nodded. She turned her head again to the map. A faint blue light came from it.
"To my heart." she repeated.
She stared at the map, letting time fall around her, letting her limbs grow numb, letting the forest continue on its charge towards death and rebirth. She stared at the map, her eyes fixed on the charted path to her own heart, the internal voyage that seemed a world away, an odyssey of a task. The image burned, though her eyes, past the various masks already imprinted on her young body. She let the map burn, moving through her bones, past her personality and past her learned habits and she let it burn itself into her soul. Each line of the map went in, becoming a new vein, a new course, a new path to follow.
The little man handed her a small rock. It was a small cracked geode. She held it tightly and tilted it back and forth, the sparkling center twinkled in the light of the fire and sent sparks of light across her face. She peered through the crack, looking deep, as deep as she had when she saw the details of the forest. She looked and looked and looked some more, and then, she saw it, inside the illuminated center of the geode was a smaller version of the map on the tree wall.
"Take this with you wherever you go,” the man explained. "It will be your Guide.”
The little girl put it in her pocket.
“How can I ever thank you enough?” she asked.
"Use the map. Follow your heart. That is how you can thank me."
The little girl smiled, wider than she ever had before. The sun opened in her face, the world came through her eyes and she held out a finger and touched the tiny man's heart. It glowed blue and she felt the ground let out a slight tremor and then he disappeared. She ran back to her house, clutching the geode in her hand the whole way. In her room, she placed the rock under her pillow, the soft place she kept all her treasured possessions. She was anxious to start the search for her Heart… but first, it was time for a nap.

The Woman And Her Man

The woman leaned back on the green bench, stretching her thick muscular body as far as possible, her legs parallel to the ground. She pressed her cheek on her hand and she looked out towards the lake and the tall dark trees and the gray and white pigeons that flew in dark masses of feathery movement above the calm surface of the water. The man sat in his silvery wheelchair right in front of her. His foot was stretched out tightly, perpendicular to his body and enmeshed in metal bars and thick cloth bandages. He wore a thick blue jacket and dark green pants, a blue cap with an eagle on its front and dark glasses which now rested on the edge of his nose. The woman also wore dark glasses, along with light brown pants and a black T-shirt. She had a beige sweater wrapped around her waist. Both the woman and the man had very dark skin and they were both in their thirties but the man was a bit older. His scraggly beard already showed signs of white and his hand and head movements were somewhat erratic. In contrast, the woman hardly moved at all. Her breath was slow and gentle, and when she did move, it was with a deliberate slowness that seemed as steady as the passage of time. Her eyes moved ever so slowly from the lake, to the man, back to the lake, then to the man, to the road, to the people that walked on the path beside them, to the man and then to the lake once again.
"That’s what they said, anyway… but you never know… you never really know…", the man spoke in a harsh dry voice and his hands flew up and apart to emphasize his words. The wheelchair moved slightly forward, towards the concrete path that separated him from the woman, the path that made its way all around the lake. Two older women walked by, wearing light colored pants and large straw hats. As they passed by, the man had moved so close to the path that their knees were just inches from his frozen leg. He looked up at them with eyes full of questions but they just looked straight ahead, purposefully trying to ignore his silent call. "You never really can know…"
"It’s always worth trying… you can never give up… you have to try everything…", the woman stretched out on the bench spoke with a soft voice that seemed out of place in her strong muscular body. Over her dark glasses, her eyebrows came together in a silent expression of tenderness. She saw the two women pass by but her eyes came back to rest on the man, intent on letting him know that she would always look right at him, that she would never look away.
"I’m just tired of hoping… it’s been years now… I can’t hope too much more…", the man reached to scratch his knee, the knee that braced up and forward like a dead piece of wood.
The woman turned around slightly and leaned forward. A man ran by listening to music on tiny earphones, his naked legs red and moist with fresh shiny sweat. "We are in this together… we will always be in it together… I have hope so you have hope… and because we’re together… we won’t ever run out of hope… you understand?"
The man on the wheelchair nodded and his hands flew up once again, one towards his chin, one towards his head, his whole upper body rocked back and forth and the wheelchair inched slightly back, away from the path and closer to the strip of grass that touched the lake with a kiss of mud. A flock of pigeons passed behind him, crying to the heavens in a mass of impulsive flight, and a red car drove by, the sound of loud music slipping out of the open windows. "I will try it… I’m not saying I won’t… It’s just that…"
"I know…" she said and looked up at the sky, so blue, so all embracing. Her large breasts rose up towards her shoulders as she sighed heavily and her mouth opened wide to let the surge of sadness escape, like a torrent of unspoken stories finding freedom among the pigeons on a sunny afternoon. "I know… it hurts me too… each and every single time… but we have to keep on trying."
"And if not this time…?" the man let the wheelchair slide back just another inch, his static foot rising up like a hopeful banner, then he slid down back into place, and his eyes came to rest firmly on the woman on the bench. He could then see her as a little girl running down the street behind him, calling for him to stop and come back, for him to take her where he was going and he could see himself just running faster and faster, unwilling to give her even a second to catch up. He could then see her as an older woman with her hand around his wrist, leading him across a busy street, talking to him in a stern voice. He could see her with him, walking together to the grocery store by the beach, both of them hoping for a taste of adventure among the many colored aisles. He could see her as a beautiful young girl in black shorts and a white shirt, pressing her breasts against him as she kissed him on the lips. He could see her as a young teenager, leaving with her friends, wearing skirts and dresses that he didn’t approve of, grooving down the sidewalk as they all laughed together like a pack of wild hyenas. He could see her crying and waving goodbye as he marched off to boot camp, his hands trembling, his smile fixed as tiny tears rolled down his cheeks. He could see her as a frozen face inside a coffin, looking up at the roof of the mortuary and at nothing in particular, while crying women surrounded him and pressed their hands against his heaving shoulders, trying to offer support but only pulling him further down. And he could see her in front of him now, this afternoon of gentle breeze and clear skies, here with him like every afternoon as far back as he could remember, always ready, always alert, always kind, always loving, always her, truly her, whoever she truly was.
"Then next time, and if not then, then the next… we won’t give up…", her voice then was tougher, rough around the edges, with a hint of loving threat around her lips, and the wind made her curly long hair fly up behind her head, and her forehead wrinkled slightly in a sign of clear decision. She could see him too, as proud as he ever was, even now when his eyes opened wide and the pupils ran in all directions and he sometimes called her mother, and he sometimes called her lover, and he sometimes caller her daughter, and he sometimes called her friend. Even now, when he sometimes called her sister and the word was as false or as true as anything else. Inside the sunken eyes and the pale face, was the boy that she loved above all things, the boy that would someday replace her father but instead came to replace her son. Somewhere inside those eyes that shifted back and forth inside their open sockets, was the boy that truly was her man, the one that needed her, the one that saw her, the one that would always be there, sitting on the wheelchair with pigeons and trees and water at his back.
"But what if…?
"We know what if…but there are always what ifs… there are what ifs in all directions…"
He nodded and leaned his head backwards and he let the breeze dissolve all the questions that still remained at the tip of his tongue. She looked at him, open mouthed, wide eyed, the picture of a madman. Then she looked at the lake once again, at the shiny green surface where couples passed by on rowboats and pedal boats and ducks swam next to a flamingo that dipped its head into the water every once in a while. And she looked at the path and at the two tourists that were standing there a few feet away, looking at a map carefully and discussing their destination in a foreign tongue. And she looked at the man again, trapped in his metal chair, and his eyes met hers.
"This time they say they’ll fix me…"
"I know… maybe this time they will…"
A plane passed by above them and the sound of loud laughter bounced towards them from far across the lake.

I Live Around You

I live around you. I extend myself and cut myself and double myself and triple myself in all directions, and I do it all around you. I breathe around you. I hunger around you. I feed myself from you and from all that lives around you. I dream around you. Someday, I will die, clinging desperately to one last flash of gentle brilliance, and even then, my last gasp of life will be around you.
I branch out like a spider web and I come back to myself, like a word that sums up a long and carefully planned sentence, after taking many detours and sliding off on many tangents. I am very thin, thinner than a pencil at my finest points, so thin that I may break and I might not even know when it is that I broke. But I don’t worry about such things. There is so much of me and I have multiplied in so many ways that a thousand breaks won’t hurt me, they will only make me more than I already am. I cling forcefully but tenderly to you. I reach down to your roots and touch the edges of the dark kingdom that stretches far and wide beneath us both. There I find great fountains of cool sustenance, gushing graciousness that springs eternal from sources I may never understand. This mystery of overwhelming pleasure flows up through me, along the ridges of your body, up through the slivers of mine, it talks to me of places far beyond this lake, far beyond the thick sprout of life that is you, far beyond the complex web of life that is me, far beyond the tenuous surface of the water that I feel shifting just beyond my reach.
In days of great heat, my body grows as brittle as the dead bodies of insects that have come to me to find their final resting place. In those days, life is pain and the dark kingdom gives me little hope. I suck as hard as I can on its remains but it can not give me what it doesn’t have. I cling harder to you and many of my branches fall away. I can feel them floating and dancing as they slowly fly away from me, me who was their home, me who was their body, me who was the only place where they could live. In their death they are no longer me and so they become they, and they are gone and I can feel them falling on the dry grass, being pulled away by dogs, played with by dressed up monkeys, dissolving into the mud like memories of things that never happened. I know I keep on being, I know I keep on sucking on the dark source that is beneath us and clinging deeply to you and so I am still me and you are still there and I am still around you, but I must tell you, with the clearest sincerity that I can muster: there is a kind of sadness that washes over me as I see these little branches fly away and dissolve into nothingness, a selfish sadness for that within me which has fallen to the ultimate fate that awaits us both.
In days of cold, my whole body freezes and I cling harder than I should. I know I hurt you without meaning to. I know my thin branches press against your flesh in a way that is harmful and, as they press against you, they leave great wounds behind. I know I hurt you because your blood slowly drips through me and over me and I can feel your pain in subtle songs that pass through your strong body into mine. In those days of cold, I suck hard on the source beneath us both and the sustenance does come, but it is slower, less full of music and more full of dread, like the thunder of a storm that hasn’t quite begun. In those days of cold, we are all alone and not even the birds, that on warm days rest their tiny claws on your branches, are there to sing for us, and not even the monkey children laugh as they run under your shadow. In those days of cold, it’s only the two of us and nothing else, and I can almost see a dream when we stand as we do here, but there is only a great valley all around us, as far as my branches can feel, a valley that is all white and cold and dead, and in that valley we are alone forever, you and me, and nothing can ever save us from that final desolation. I don’t know where this dream comes from, but I’ve had it more than once. I wish you could sometimes tell me your dreams. Maybe I could taste them in your blood as I crush my branches around you, maybe the dreams would flow through your white pain in teardrops of sadness and windy gusts of laughter. Maybe that is where I got my own dreams. Maybe I have no true dreams of my own.
In an afternoon like this one, I can simply let my presence wander. From the top of your thick body that allows me to reach heights beyond my power, where the wind blows a little stronger and the birds are a little louder and the lake shines like a silver mirror that extends in all directions and lets me know how large the world truly is, how complex and how terrifying; to the deep darkness of your roots, where the soil and the bugs and the worms and the grass can cover me and I can become as if one of them, where I can be as dark as to forget myself in the utter oblivion of warmth and silence, and down here know that the world is simple and small and caresses me with gentle fingers of dirt.
In an afternoon like this one, I have no limits and, as much as I cling to you, as much as I live for you, from you and in you, I am alive and complete. In an afternoon like this one, I can almost believe that I love you and that you love me, and, furthermore, that there may be no distinction between you and me, and that you are like one of those branches, the ones that were me once but are no longer me as they have fallen away and are now in the process of vanishing. In an afternoon like this one, I know that the branches that were once me can never really stop being me, and that I myself may be such a branch fallen from a larger web-like being that is also me and is so large as to betray the limits of my comprehension. When I see that, I can only cling to you harder, hurting you in the process, leaking at your blood, pressing at your wounds, now without guilt, now without remorse, for I am only hurting myself and I have a right to do so.
When the afternoon passes and the night falls, I will be me once again and you will be you. And the wounds that I made on your strong body will be healing and my body will be at peace in the darkness. And then, when you are you and I am me once again, I will only tell you that I don’t know you, I never will. I don’t understand what you are or who you are. But I do live all around you. And without you, I am nothing.

In The News Today

"Can you believe it?"
The newspaper crackled as the man stretched it out between his hands and the light breeze made it swing lightly back and forth. The man was seated on one of the many green wooden benches that stood on the edge of the lake, right by the concrete path that went all around its perimeter. His skin was reddish white and his hair was black with wide patches of white. The man was wearing long light brown shorts and a white shirt. He was also wearing large reading glasses and his blue and gray backpack was resting on the concrete floor, a few inches away from the bench. His legs were bent back so that his feet were pulled back under him. His arms extended outwards and the thin wiry muscles in his forearms were tight and tense.
"I can’t believe they think they can get away with this!"
The breeze blew softly over the calm lake which surrounded a small man-made mountain, a large island in the midst of gentle placid water. The mountain itself was crisscrossed by dirt paths and covered in trees, plants and thick bushes. There were tall water plants growing right by the bench, obscuring half the view of the water. The same tall bright green water plants grew here and there all around the lake. There was a large dead tree trunk that acted as a clear barrier between the bench and the water.
Next to the sitting man, there was a small, slightly thick woman. She was sitting on the bench as well and her body was just a few inches away from his. Where the man’s eyes were pointed down to the thin newspaper, the woman’s eyes were looking out towards the mountain in the middle of the lake. Her eyes were soft and round and they spoke of a hope that still clings to life against recurrent obstacles. Her small hands were pressed together on top of her lap. She was wearing long beige pants, a flowery shirt and a small jacket. Her skin was white, like the man’s, but her hair was blonde and it fell down to the edge of her shoulders. Her forehead was pressed tight, in an attempt to protect her eyes from the sun.
"It’s terrible… after all that has happened… that they would be saying this…"
The man shook his head in disgust and shifted the paper up to continue reading below. The woman nodded and simply said: "Yes, it’s terrible."
"It’s not just that… you know… it goes way beyond… after all…" The man was shaking his head more intensely now, his face becoming a bit more red, tiny droplets of sweat sliding over his temples and under his chin.
"Yes, I know what you mean."
A pink flamingo rested its longs legs on a dead trunk that extended into the water. Every once in a while it would dip its head into the water itself, catching some small insect in its beak. There were a few boats roaming back and forth on the lake surface, wooden row boats and hard plastic pedal boats for couples, slowly making their way around the mountain. Echoing whispers traveled from the boats to the edge of the lake, snatches of conversation, a word here and there, a sudden loud laugh.
"It’s just unbelievable… the things these people would do… you know, it’s just like I’ve always said…"
"Yes, I know."
The woman’s eyes turned up higher towards the edge of the mountain, where there was a colorful pagoda that poked out into the water. The pagoda was round and open, its pillars were deep red and the round stylish fence that surrounded it was white. The round roof was a deep green and it pointed up towards the sky like an old lost antenna. At the very peak of the roof, there was a small green sphere, the green paint only a little faded. Long tree branches extended over the pagoda, half covering it in dark green and brown. A single thin dead trunk was standing up straight out of the water, just a few feet away from the fence. The pagoda was empty now and as her eyes wandered over it, some kids walked by it, on the dirt path that surrounded the mountain. Their thin voices were so loud that their words almost made it all the way across the surface of the lake, only to become isolated syllables and broken bits of song.
"Nothing really changes… it’s just that… you know?… I can see that… but after all this? C’mon! Right? How can they do this? They just have no shame!"
"Yes, I know. It’s very true."
The woman turned to the path momentarily. A woman in a white shirt and long blue shorts was jogging in their direction. She had earplugs on and a hint of music was seeping out from around her ears. Her face was covered in subtle wrinkles and the tanned white skin of her shoulders and neck was covered in shiny sweat. Her eyes were focused on the path and on the effort of running. She passed behind the bench and the sitting woman followed her with her eyes. Then she looked at the lake once again.
"After all, what if it was the other way around? Huh? Would they say that? Would they even dare?"
"No, they wouldn’t," she said, with a slight hesitation.
"You don’t think so? I bet they would! They have no shame!"
"Yes, I think you are right."
A flock of pigeons rose up from behind the tall water plants, spreading outwards to the sky like living pockets of gray and black life released from the breath of a sleeping underwater god. The woman looked up at the birds as they disbanded and she saw how they almost darkened the clear sky for a moment and how the sky reappeared from behind them, outlining their flapping wings, their upturned little heads, their soft feathered bodies. A boy called out to the fleeing pigeons and a man laughed, his voice deep and hoarse. Then the boy laughed too, in light explosions of air and tiny squeaks.
"What can we do? These people can get away with anything!"
"Yes, they can."
The man nodded and turned the page. The man with the deep hoarse voice laughed once again and there was the sound of light feet running on concrete. A man on a bicycle rolled down the concrete path, accompanied by the sound of a little bell. Then there was only the sound of gentle waves caressing the muddy edge of the lake. The woman looked down at the moist leaves of grass that stuck out from the mud, bending back away from the sun.
"See what I mean… now they… can you believe it?"