trees with eyes, and other home-town curiosities

i’m writing this one with a sense of distance, of a place removed from time. these are the roads i walk along in my dreams, but they’ve changed, just like i have. this isn’t the body i left with. it’s not all too hard to reconcile that with this place, where the walls are new and unblemished with words like childhood. there are boxes of children’s things in the basement, of course, but when i touch them they feel resolutely like someone else’s. all of this is what i tell myself when the memories hit me unexpected and sideways, trying desperately to crawl beneath my skin. this place is jagged. something about the silence of it, the way it thwarts all attempts to forget. it’s still as a grave. i push my forehead against the windowpane and my cheeks pink with the cold, the branches outside waving. the leaves blanket the ground here and i’m a little girl again, hop-stepping rock to rock so i don’t roll an ankle way out in the woods.

there are moments of peace between breaths. everything around me is alive, watching. this skin-crawling doesn’t chase me anywhere but here, at least not carrying the same deep animal terror. it’s some flesh-fear, the pressing reminder of life beyond the constraints of body and mind. the trees have always been friends to me, though, as much as the moss and the whisper-soft deer that stand frozen in the field when i push through the tangle of underbrush. this body - this thing - means very little to me, other than as a delicate reminder of mortality. i carry my scars in the same manner as a locked china-cabinet, or the way paintings in museums are hung just so. the trees know all of this, of course, and make a habit of growing perfectly-shaped places for me to sit and catch my breath. i can’t help this sort of nostalgic introspection, at least not here. the water may have claimed me early in this life, but in the end it’s always the trees who preside over death.

there is a small scarred place on my neck still where if you push a finger into it you can feel not just my pulse but the raw hot rush of blood, like dipping a finger into a stream. how do you convince a living body that it’s dead? easy. the rivers froze over in the woods of my childhood, a long sleep from season to season. i used to go skidding across the ice and crashing through it shouting as if to raise the dead woods. it’s so peaceful in that silence, leafless branches dancing in the wind. i’d lay down in the snow sometimes and close my eyes, dreaming as if i were just another thing laid bare in the earth.

i feel here a kindling of body-memory, drawing with each breath the past into the present as real as anything i can touch. the woods know well enough what i mean. when i was young i imagined myself growing rings like trees, ever-toughening to protect the same small, fragile thing at my center. i suppose i wasn’t entirely wrong for thinking so. i am here in a new body, in a new house, in a new stretch of woods, and here i am writing the same old thing. i feel like a body-haunting, i feel like the world is a river closing fast over my head. i’m rotting in the woods and in the cold morning a little girl will decide which of my bones is her favorite and bring it home in her pocket.

published december 23, 2021

« prev | all letters | next »