Tree of Life
They say if you love something, set it free. Tonight, I want to say, “fuck that.” If you love something, fight for it, fight to keep it alive. I love her far too much to simply set her free, as if somehow I hold her captive. I can’t let her go, not without a fight. That’s how much I love her. That’s how committed she is to leaving. So this is it. This is the end.
It’s not that she doesn’t love me anymore; it’s something deeper than that, something fundamental that was never there to build upon. What that is, I don’t know. Although I’d be lying if I said I didn’t sense it too. The whole relationship has been waiting for that straw to break this thing inward on itself, like a camel collapsing from the unbearable weight of so much lightness. I want to sift through the remains, salvage the pieces, set down a firm, solid, foundation, build this thing up again, stronger and sturdier, into some unshakeable structure which nothing can topple, nothing.
The last time I saw her was nearly three months ago, when I left Orange County, California for Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, so I could work towards my MFA in Creative Writing. She was supposed to join me early the next year until she got a job with Habitat for Humanity. This committed her through August of the following year; I would only see her on breaks. She says this has nothing to do with her decision. I think otherwise. All I want is to see her again, to hold her and feel her one last time. All I want is to never see her again, to never look back from this moment onward. Like Orpheus, I can’t keep my head from turning.
Yes, I have cried. The tears came in bursts of sobs. But mostly I’m numb. I think of Jay Griffiths, her need to escape from all she knew, her desperation for salvation in the jungle, her indulgence in ayahuasca. She went wild as her heart went wild with grief and rage, unleashed like a jaguar upon the page. Only now can I sympathize, though my heart is nothing more than a stone hurtled upon the earth, left to lie there waiting for the wind, the rain to erode it to the size of a pebble, a grain of sand, and then…?
I couldn’t stay inside, not with the ghost of the Last Conversation lingering like a fog inside the apartment. I dressed and, quietly, ventured outside.
A narrative gradually unfurled inside my head, struggling to block out any golden memory of her that insisted upon dancing before my inward gaze, a torture in snapshots. Most of the narrative now makes its way onto these pages, serving the same purpose, a defense mechanism against a yearning to leap from any one of these bridges, hurtle my useless shell of a body into the Allegheny, the Monongahela, let my body drift away into a nothingness that does not exist.
I craned my neck to the sky. The stars were visible; it was well after three in the morning, when city lights are, with any luck, less obtrusive. The air was crisp, cold, though I hardly felt it. Nor could I feel my later shivering, though I watched it, my body shaking from the freezing air or from something else just as frozen, born from within. I followed the yellow line of the street, not a car, not a person in sight. A mammal crossed the street up ahead- a cat, most likely. She’s always been a cat-lover. I turned by instinct, wandered onto the campus of Chatham, the school the sole reason for leaving her behind.
A rabbit watched me as I approached before darting off in the opposite direction. I continued up the hill. The tree loomed grander than I remembered, glowing in the gaslight, its branches barren of all but a few passionately clinging leaves.
It was the first time I’d ever truly seen the tree.
I wasn’t looking for solace, I wasn’t looking for salvation, I wasn’t looking for anything. I was striving not to look, not to look within, not to look without, to distract myself from the world and all that it is. Obviously, an impossible task. I knelt beneath the tree, leaned back against it, my mouth hanging open as if in shock, which I was, though the shock had nothing to do with the tree. I looked up at its branches extending out above me, sheltering me, without love, without hate, without any emotion. That it could serve as a shelter is one of its unintended functions. A fact of the tree. That to me it symbolized a shelter, a being in which I could trust far more than I could trust myself or anyone else at that moment, that too was unintended, a projection of my own state of mind forced upon the tree. Or was it? Perhaps the tree did love me, perhaps it sensed my emotions, emotions buried so deep inside me, so sickening to me to even glance at-like memories of her, glanced at all the same-that only the tree’s fathomless roots could penetrate into their depths. Perhaps it knew what I felt far better than I knew, presented its self to me as I needed to see it. Perhaps the pain of love lost delivered me to the tree, in search of love, a love the tree may or may not have but which I need all the same and write of now.
The moon hung in the air, not quite a half, not quite a crescent. The leaves of the trees rustled in the breeze. A car drove somewhere in the distance. To where? With whom?
I considered picking up a dead leaf, crushing its brown-paper skin in my hand, watching it crumble to dust. The only action I could commit to at the tree was to untie the popped balloon that had been hanging from a branch for weeks. It was the only moment I felt genuinely good about my self the entire night.
I turned my head back to the tree as I walked away, forever forgetting that solitary rule. I whispered a thank you and, sniffling from the cold or that deep emotion, trudged back to the place I now call home.
I am tired and restless, my eyes bloodshot, contact lenses fogged from the tears. I can barely see this page as I can barely see the future without her.
Like love I don’t how to define the tree. I can’t define it, nor would I ever attempt to define it, not beyond vicissitudes. Nothing concrete. It is what it is as I am what I am. For all I know, it comes to me, not me to it. I don’t know what it means to me, if I mean anything to it. I don’t know how to define what is wild, what is not. What is wild, what is tame. Where is wild. Where I am. Who. Inside, I am hollow, my heart both raging and inanimate. Even a rock is wild. Even the rubble.
That I shall pick myself up like a crumbled stone, chisel out a new shape for life, is inevitable. I shall look back and see that she was right, that I wouldn’t be wherever I will be if she hadn’t ended it here, tonight. But I am desperate to cling to the naïveté and optimism that Everything Will Be Okay. Maybe it will. Not the way I want it to be right now, but somehow, some way. It will all be okay.
Gretel Ehrlich found solace in open spaces. She was far worse off than myself, leaving behind a dying lover. She found rebirth in those open spaces. I don’t have open spaces. I have a tree. The tree is enough.
It will be light soon. I have not slept; how could I? I am afraid to dream. The sun will rise, the day will begin. Life exists and so do I, apparently. I find it hard to believe that this heartache does not kill me, though it may feel as though my heart’s been ripped from my chest. No, my life is not, surprisingly enough, a Temple of Doom.
As I sat beneath the tree I recalled Pablo Neruda’s “Song of Despair,” followed the trail to another poem, what I’ve often cited as my favorite poem of all-time. If not the whole poem, at least the last two lines. They’ve sustained me through many a night, like Dostoyevsky’s thoughts of suicide. The lines belong to the cult poet, Billy Childish. They are simple lines, lacking the frills of many poets. Like Bukowski but with more heart. I know them by heart and feel the heart that wrote them, feel the pain of that heart that bore them into being, upon a page born from the death of some forgotten tree. That a heart should write upon death…
“Companions in a Death Boat,” the poem is entitled. And those last two lines:
“and sometimes the strangest thing can be
just carrying on.”
The strangest thing in life, this carrying on. So I carry on. Though I do not want to be set free.
It’s not that she doesn’t love me anymore; it’s something deeper than that, something fundamental that was never there to build upon. What that is, I don’t know. Although I’d be lying if I said I didn’t sense it too. The whole relationship has been waiting for that straw to break this thing inward on itself, like a camel collapsing from the unbearable weight of so much lightness. I want to sift through the remains, salvage the pieces, set down a firm, solid, foundation, build this thing up again, stronger and sturdier, into some unshakeable structure which nothing can topple, nothing.
The last time I saw her was nearly three months ago, when I left Orange County, California for Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, so I could work towards my MFA in Creative Writing. She was supposed to join me early the next year until she got a job with Habitat for Humanity. This committed her through August of the following year; I would only see her on breaks. She says this has nothing to do with her decision. I think otherwise. All I want is to see her again, to hold her and feel her one last time. All I want is to never see her again, to never look back from this moment onward. Like Orpheus, I can’t keep my head from turning.
Yes, I have cried. The tears came in bursts of sobs. But mostly I’m numb. I think of Jay Griffiths, her need to escape from all she knew, her desperation for salvation in the jungle, her indulgence in ayahuasca. She went wild as her heart went wild with grief and rage, unleashed like a jaguar upon the page. Only now can I sympathize, though my heart is nothing more than a stone hurtled upon the earth, left to lie there waiting for the wind, the rain to erode it to the size of a pebble, a grain of sand, and then…?
I couldn’t stay inside, not with the ghost of the Last Conversation lingering like a fog inside the apartment. I dressed and, quietly, ventured outside.
A narrative gradually unfurled inside my head, struggling to block out any golden memory of her that insisted upon dancing before my inward gaze, a torture in snapshots. Most of the narrative now makes its way onto these pages, serving the same purpose, a defense mechanism against a yearning to leap from any one of these bridges, hurtle my useless shell of a body into the Allegheny, the Monongahela, let my body drift away into a nothingness that does not exist.
I craned my neck to the sky. The stars were visible; it was well after three in the morning, when city lights are, with any luck, less obtrusive. The air was crisp, cold, though I hardly felt it. Nor could I feel my later shivering, though I watched it, my body shaking from the freezing air or from something else just as frozen, born from within. I followed the yellow line of the street, not a car, not a person in sight. A mammal crossed the street up ahead- a cat, most likely. She’s always been a cat-lover. I turned by instinct, wandered onto the campus of Chatham, the school the sole reason for leaving her behind.
A rabbit watched me as I approached before darting off in the opposite direction. I continued up the hill. The tree loomed grander than I remembered, glowing in the gaslight, its branches barren of all but a few passionately clinging leaves.
It was the first time I’d ever truly seen the tree.
I wasn’t looking for solace, I wasn’t looking for salvation, I wasn’t looking for anything. I was striving not to look, not to look within, not to look without, to distract myself from the world and all that it is. Obviously, an impossible task. I knelt beneath the tree, leaned back against it, my mouth hanging open as if in shock, which I was, though the shock had nothing to do with the tree. I looked up at its branches extending out above me, sheltering me, without love, without hate, without any emotion. That it could serve as a shelter is one of its unintended functions. A fact of the tree. That to me it symbolized a shelter, a being in which I could trust far more than I could trust myself or anyone else at that moment, that too was unintended, a projection of my own state of mind forced upon the tree. Or was it? Perhaps the tree did love me, perhaps it sensed my emotions, emotions buried so deep inside me, so sickening to me to even glance at-like memories of her, glanced at all the same-that only the tree’s fathomless roots could penetrate into their depths. Perhaps it knew what I felt far better than I knew, presented its self to me as I needed to see it. Perhaps the pain of love lost delivered me to the tree, in search of love, a love the tree may or may not have but which I need all the same and write of now.
The moon hung in the air, not quite a half, not quite a crescent. The leaves of the trees rustled in the breeze. A car drove somewhere in the distance. To where? With whom?
I considered picking up a dead leaf, crushing its brown-paper skin in my hand, watching it crumble to dust. The only action I could commit to at the tree was to untie the popped balloon that had been hanging from a branch for weeks. It was the only moment I felt genuinely good about my self the entire night.
I turned my head back to the tree as I walked away, forever forgetting that solitary rule. I whispered a thank you and, sniffling from the cold or that deep emotion, trudged back to the place I now call home.
I am tired and restless, my eyes bloodshot, contact lenses fogged from the tears. I can barely see this page as I can barely see the future without her.
Like love I don’t how to define the tree. I can’t define it, nor would I ever attempt to define it, not beyond vicissitudes. Nothing concrete. It is what it is as I am what I am. For all I know, it comes to me, not me to it. I don’t know what it means to me, if I mean anything to it. I don’t know how to define what is wild, what is not. What is wild, what is tame. Where is wild. Where I am. Who. Inside, I am hollow, my heart both raging and inanimate. Even a rock is wild. Even the rubble.
That I shall pick myself up like a crumbled stone, chisel out a new shape for life, is inevitable. I shall look back and see that she was right, that I wouldn’t be wherever I will be if she hadn’t ended it here, tonight. But I am desperate to cling to the naïveté and optimism that Everything Will Be Okay. Maybe it will. Not the way I want it to be right now, but somehow, some way. It will all be okay.
Gretel Ehrlich found solace in open spaces. She was far worse off than myself, leaving behind a dying lover. She found rebirth in those open spaces. I don’t have open spaces. I have a tree. The tree is enough.
It will be light soon. I have not slept; how could I? I am afraid to dream. The sun will rise, the day will begin. Life exists and so do I, apparently. I find it hard to believe that this heartache does not kill me, though it may feel as though my heart’s been ripped from my chest. No, my life is not, surprisingly enough, a Temple of Doom.
As I sat beneath the tree I recalled Pablo Neruda’s “Song of Despair,” followed the trail to another poem, what I’ve often cited as my favorite poem of all-time. If not the whole poem, at least the last two lines. They’ve sustained me through many a night, like Dostoyevsky’s thoughts of suicide. The lines belong to the cult poet, Billy Childish. They are simple lines, lacking the frills of many poets. Like Bukowski but with more heart. I know them by heart and feel the heart that wrote them, feel the pain of that heart that bore them into being, upon a page born from the death of some forgotten tree. That a heart should write upon death…
“Companions in a Death Boat,” the poem is entitled. And those last two lines:
“and sometimes the strangest thing can be
just carrying on.”
The strangest thing in life, this carrying on. So I carry on. Though I do not want to be set free.