12:42 am:
today is the day that i look back on the vaguest of my memories - spinning in circles under an old old tree and the hottest sun there could have been. vague as it may be, it comes back to me as always and dredges up the feeling that has lingered just beneath my surface for the better part of two decades. it's bittersweet nostalgia that rises up in me, aches in my stomach and fills me with empty in ways that i never would have imagined.
if i thought that years later i would ache for some stupid tree they tore down in the park i grew up in, i would have convinced them to tear me down instead. i would have let them tear me down, if only they let the tree grow [up]. for eighteen years it would grow: its bark would be the darkest brown, ridged and creased and more wrinkled than the oldest hands you ever knew. its roots would peek out from the dirt, twist themselves into poetry and each day kids kicking up dust storms would trip over stanzas.
but.
it's.
no.
matter.
they spin in circles under the tree and incessantly they trip,
but they keep running on like only those that are truly free will ever know how to do. and the tree, who is anything but free, does not show worse for the wear even after all these years. six thousand five hundred and seventy days it grows. it stretches its arms, straight up to the sky and scrapes the clouds, gently still. today is a summer's day. the sun is so whitebright that the leaves shimmer and the clouds forget that these are leaves and they dance together for a while...and a few million feet below are the roots who flex their old fingers who crack their old knuckles who shake off the heaviest dirt in a way that reminds me of myself shaking rain off after a storm - swift shake and a shiver. a thousand feet down are the kids whose tennis shoes scuff and trip them up up up. and who can't help but sneak a glance up at the sky when they fall.
and the sky.today i'm alive and the tree is not. today i pluck fistfuls of dandelions from the spot where i'm certain its trunk once stood. today is one of a hundred days that i sketch a certain tree in my notebook. and here i'll admit that these drawings cannot suffice because the bark isn't quite gnarled enough and the leaves never quite shimmer. but i save these drawings all the same. yes, i hang them inside of my closet on a door that was once a tree. on a door that was once a tree that stretched its hands up to touch the sky. and i'm free.
