Fragile Things
In late-2016, I was homeless and spent several months living in the woods of western Mass — and left part of my heart there
I am a man of odd habits — I’m sure you remember — and I can’t say what it was that compelled me to come to see you the other day. Some days its hard to remember what we had, others hard to forget. You’re always there, in one way or another: on the horizon, girding the edge of the sky. On lazy weekend afternoons I’ll drive out and try to look without staring, a glance merely to remember your shape, to see if I can glimpse again the things you kept hidden from all others. Men had fled you once, and that is precisely why I had sought you out. I wished to hide, and what better place than where so many had worked so hard never to have to go?
And there, you taught me. I learned what it meant to walk, that it was a skill — how to arrest the crepitations of my footfalls that I might traverse you, unheard. I learned not to hear, but to listen to your world unseen.
I remember those first awkward nights when I did not yet know my place in this new order of things. I remember your cold hands caressing my neck as I slept, waking with your tears still wet on my face — and oh, what we would come to know of tears! In my madness I would scream and cry aloud, I would beg to wake up, as there was no way something that hurt so greatly could ever possibly be real. But you knew, and you swallowed the cries and turned them — always — back into silence. I remember the moistness of your soil, the smell of your earth after rain. I remember the secrets whispered to me by the wind that wound its way through your every bough and bole.
I remember finding the fragile things, the things of iron and of stone that you had taken and made unwhole. I remember the plaque that you had tried to hide, the one that shone a brilliant oxidized green beneath your leaves and announced that you had been proudly planted by the men of the Civilian Conservation Corps not yet 90 years ago. A mere child, you. I remember how your face had blushed a deep red just days after, as if in shame at my knowing.
I remember your skies at sunset, like none I had ever known before — not the rivers of bloodied gold of my home, but purple! A deep, mystical purple, a purple that spoke of magic and majesty, a covenant of ancient promises made in the light of moon and star.
I remember your face all veiled in white the day I left you — the face I saw now, fading to show what I had known of you in that peculiar autumn. I see now your branches, gnarled, twisting, rising, pleading, grasping at the sun as if to hold it close that it might give you color and form once more.
Neither of us are who we were then. I had thought you immutable, unchanging, eternal. I had been too small, too temporary — even then — to see how you did writhe, to feel your rhythm and pulse. A few years worth of frost-thaw cycles and the course of a river is no longer what it was. It’s close — enough, but just different enough to unsettle, to lose that sense of familiarity. Trees fall. Animals nest. You did not stop changing merely because I stopped looking. You are changed by everything that comes in contact with you. Indeed, the very form of you is but the sum of these encounters. You still teach me. To think I had forgotten you — you who sustained me so long when all others had left.
But I am no longer of you. I have returned to my world of fragile things, things of iron and of stone, and there I do not walk as I walked within you. My steps are careless, loud — and yet, still unnoticed. Where before the merest rustling would bring all eyes upon me, here I pass unseen, a ghost in a world of noise.
I miss you, yes, but for all this I feel you have never left me. I feel like I carry something of you along as I go, that the knowing of you has changed me. Everything that touches you changes you, and your form is the sum of these changes. You have touched me, and I am changed. I bring this change forth, into the world of fragile things, and I — we — change them.
With love, forever,