Finally forced out, by a hard knock on the door that wouldn’t retreat no matter how long we tried to block its sound out.
At the door was a police officer, he was young, the beginning of a moustache just starting to litter his clean face. His badge reflected like a mirror, as did his strangely tall boots that he wore up over his pants like a fancy horse riding woman. They squeaked softly with each step he took as he crossed into our home.
“I need to speak to your daughter Mrs. Wilkes, it’s about the boy next door.” I heard him say to her from where I still stood against the safety of her bed, not yet ready to leave its comforting warmth for the harshness of the world again. I could hear her whispering something I couldn’t fully make out, trying to fend him off. She failed, and I could hear them walking down the hallway towards me. I pulled the thick yellow comforters around my body from behind me, a futile attempt to shield myself from the reality I was now being forced to face.
“Hi Silvana, I’m Officer Brant. I’m very sorry about the loss of your friend.”
“Her boyfriend.” My mother corrected him immediately.
I had never called Silas my boyfriend out loud, though I supposed that’s what he was to me as it appeared to my mom. That title had been too simple for my use, had never adequately described the way our hands would magnetically glide into each other’s, could never represent the energy that buzzed between us so loud we could physically hear it when near. He was a part of me, without witch I could only take shallow breaths, could not drink in the beauty of life without. Hearing the word was strange, unreal.
“I need to ask you some questions about him if that’s okay.”
I didn’t answer, just stared at him blankly, focusing on the letters of his badge, counting their sharp corners.
“Did Silas ever seem depressed to you Silvana? Did he ever talk about wanting to end his life?”
I heard his words but couldn’t make since of them, couldn’t form the sentences into a structure that made sense in my mind. I focused harder on the sharp edges of the T on his badge, the bottom was crooked, raised higher up than the rest, a stark imperfection that went entirely unnoticed until you focused directly on it.
“Did he ever show any signs of suicidal tendencies? Do you understand what those are?” He prodded further. I shook my head no, Silas was happy, carefree, a shooting star burning bright and falling fast, uncaring of where he landed.
“We found a rope, near where…” He drifted off for a moment, looking past me out the open window.
“We found a rope near where Silas was found, it had his and your fingerprints on it, we think he may have been attempting to use it to take his own life.” He finished.
The words clicked in my head, one by one like a puzzle being snapped together.
“It was going to be a swing.” I whispered into the blankets, feeling a fresh wave of guilt wash over me, pushing me down into a pile of blankets and tears on the cold wooden floor.
I couldn’t hear the words he spoke next, the sound muffled in my blanket encasement. I only felt my mother’s arms wrap around me a few minutes later, pulling me back up into the bed, where she left me in the darkness alone to grieve, unable to help me in any other way but to provide me with solitude to stir in my sadness.
Chapter Five
“Silas Jackson was the most beautiful person I will ever know. He was my boyfriend, my best friend, the other half of my soul and light that shined bright to reveal the world before it to me…”
I stood in a plain black dress from the back of my mother’s closet, its straps tied up back tightly behind my neck forcing it to fit over my small frame without falling. Under it, hidden by it’s too wide hem, I wore my shorts, the ones Silas had cut that first day we lounged against each other beneath the trees. I leaned back and forth slightly, able to feel the pressure of their short ends against my thighs as I spoke to a large crowd of people I couldn’t recognize, their faces blurred and ghoulish, at the funeral of Silas Jackson. The boy I was supposed to be with in an eternal perfection, snuffed out by the subtly rotting branch of a tree.
My eyes focused on his parents in the front row. Despite them sharing in my grief, I was furious at them. I stared at the dark deep blue vase that contained the body of their son on the pedestal before me. They had burned him, had melted his perfect warm sun kissed skin, had singed away the beautiful caramel brown locks of his hair, before he could be seen or touched or loved, believing his body to now be an empty shell. Their son gone somewhere far away forever now. They were going to keep him locked in that ceramic tomb. They would leave it forgotten on a mantel, as over the years it became caked in dust, and eventually thrown away by the cleaners who would find it after they passed, having no other children to pass the burden of its presence onto. I couldn’t stand the thought, could picture his aggravated response to the idea as if he were still right in front of me. I couldn’t take it anymore.
“He wanted to be a tree.” I said sternly as my eyes darted back and forth between theirs.
“This isn’t right.” My voice rose to a squeak as I gestured to the ceramic vase that held his remains, not breaking eye contact with his parents, urging them to listen to me. I could feel his strength and confidence beginning to course through my veins as I did.
“This isn’t what he wanted, to be locked away. He would never have chosen this. He was going to be a tree, he would never blame them…”
I was pleading, I couldn’t control myself, couldn’t stop my quivering voice from saying what I was sure in the depths of my heart he would have had the courage to scream in their faces had he been here himself. I stared into his mother’s eyes as tears poured down her face, willing her to remember her son, remember the way he had hated confinement, needed to be free to grow and reach to fulfil his happiness. He needed to be a tree, he couldn’t do it from locked inside that horrible blue prison.
My mom had escorted me away from the podium and out the door where she held me in the street while I sobbed hysterically, pleading with her to change their minds. Silas’s mom had followed us out into the street following our exit, away from her own sons funeral. She held the heavy blue vase to her chest, looking at me through waterfalls.
“You’re right. I know you’re right. He loved those trees, and he loved you Silvana.” She spoke softly, a hint of question in her voice. I thought for a moment she would give me the vase that contained him then, but her clutch on it remained unwavering.
“I just can’t let go.” She said down to the vase as she grazed its cold blue lid with her lips. She gave me one last fleeting glance, before turning away, back to grieve with everyone else who hadn’t known Silas in the way that I had.
I could feel his aggravation at being locked away coming out from within me in the days that passed. I did not return to school after Silas fell from the tree, there was only a week left before summer vacation began anyway. I slept through the day, shielding myself from the warmth of the sun, forcing out anything that made me feel alive. In the dead of night, using only the small light the moon casted through the tree tops, I would make my way down to the creek in secrecy. I would let the icy cold water run over my body in the darkness, as I stared above at the now clear space in the sky where the branch that Silas had been on had snapped.
From the light of the clearing I could see that the tractor remained, broken and abandoned near the waters edge. Silas’s father had retuned the next day and removed what was left of the stump, setting fire to its roots, so that only a deep black hole remained in the earth where the tree had been now. As the early summer rains began to fall, the black soot that lined the hole faded, dismissed its corners, retuned it to the earth anew. Only if you had seen it in its glory, had laid against its warm trunk as Silas and I had so many times, would you know that there was once a towering oak tree in the spot next to the water’s edge, an oak tree that had given out, plunging to the ground below, taking a boy of thirteen who clung to its dry hollow branch with it as it plunge
d down to its destruction. The part of the trunk that had fallen from the splintering blow of the tractor still lay across the creek, the water lapping its truck as it passed through more violently than it had before. A permanent bridge between our kingdoms in the woods.
I filled the endless hours that passed as slow as time possibly can, with anything that would make me feel closer to Silas, desperate to feel the magical spark that had died along with him. I climbed the trees to their tenuously swaying tops, imagining how he had fallen, wondering what had gone through his head before he had hit the ground and never opened his eyes again. I ate only the few foods I knew he enjoyed, mainly apples, sour and too small to be plucked from the nearby forgotten trees, I had multiple scars on my hands from attempting to cut thin slices with the broken blade of his knife as I had watched him do on so many occasions. Mainly I would simply lounge in the sun, letting the cold water of the creek gently graze my feet, enjoying the silence of the woods as he had taught me to.
Silas’s mother would not answer the phone when it rang, nor the door when it was pounded on. She refused to let the light of the sun kiss her cold skin as I did. She kept herself locked away, as lonely and desolate as her son, his crumbed remains in the blue vase that now sat above the fireplace, a stark contrast to the otherwise dull, tan and white room that she kept the sun from touching. The curtains stayed tightly drawn, thumb tacks now stuck in where the light had escaped after she drew them shut upon returning home from the funeral.
She had heard my sorrowful sobbing rising up through the woods from the creek below in the dead of night in the first days of the long hot summer nights that had begun promptly after Silas fell, a wicked joke whispered by mother nature in sinister tones only those who had loved him could hear.
She had made her way down towards the creek, following the sounds of my cries, inching her way down the path that still lay heavily trodden from Silas having walked it so often in the days leading up to this death. From the darkness of the trees she had watched me, illuminated in the clear space beside the creek. She watched as I caressed the spot where Silas had laid next to me on the long sunny days in the spring that had died along with him, she could hear me faintly whispering to him in the warm breeze, my voice carried to her in the trees like the soft lullaby of a new mother. She remained hidden in the trees, a secret witness of my unfathomable grief. She could see him in my tears, could feel his presence all around us as I wept, realizing as she watched me rock in agony on the soft piles of leaves that layered the ground, now rough and crackling, that he had become a part of me, a part of the woods in which I melted into before her.
She never told anyone about how she watched me moaning into the glow of the moonlight, deep in the woods were neither of us would ever admit to entering, though she would watch me again on several nights after that first sighting, always remaining silently hidden in the background of the trees. She would find herself lying on the hard earth as she often watched me doing, staring up at the speckles of moonlight that broke through the tops of the trees, breathing in the sweet smell of their sap that melted slowly in the heat of the night, and she had begun to understand, to taste, if only faintly, the love that her son had felt in this same spot, the energy and blissful gait it had evoked inside of him. She could breathe there, out in the darkness among the trees, finally free of the claws of grief that held her captive when inside her now excruciatingly quiet home.
Exactly a month after Silas Jackson had been unfairly stolen from this world, I had gone down to the creek in the late hours of the night, when I believed I was the only one not stirring in a heavy slumber, as I had been doing most nights since that horrible day. I navigated my way through the darkness under the canopy of heavy woods easily, floating down to the clearing of moonlight that illuminated the creek in a trancelike state, my feet now disturbingly familiar with the pitch-black path. I walked directly to our spot in front of the rotten old stump as I always did. The dark shallow hole that the tree Silas’s father had removed had caused coming into view as I crossed over the water, using the trunk of the tree that now connected our two kingdoms into a singular gloomily vast one. Though I endlessly tried to avoid the sight of the hole, that would have now been easily overlooked by anyone else who happened to pass by its desolation, my glance shifted to it in the moonlight as I stooped down to lay in the earth that had once felt the touch of Silas atop its dusty surface.
I froze, a chill running so deep into my very core I thought I may never thaw out and be able to move again.
Just out of reach of my grasp, sitting in the solemn hole whose sight I had tried to avoid, was the blue vase, the urn in which held Silas Jackson’s remains, glimmering in the soft light of the moon. Stranger than the sight of the abandon urn, was what accompanied it directly behind the hole it sat in the shallow depths of. An immature tree, an infantile oak, a plastic price tag still hanging from its few tender branches, sat in a black plastic pot, and next it, propped up against the receding hillside, was a large white bag of potting soil.
I squinted into the darkness beyond it, unable to see Silas’s mother in her hiding spot behind the trees on the gentle slope upward away from me. She could see me though, staring at what she had left waiting in the moonlight, knowing I would come. I could feel her presence as I stared at the dull plastic that held the small tree, an intruder in this dead and secret kingdom in which I hid from the world.
The earth propelled me forward, until I too was encased in the shallow hole, my body folded around the cold ceramic blue tomb that held the boy I would never be able to let go of, who had died in this very spot where we had so innocently fallen in love beneath the yellow glow of the sun through the leaves above us. I carefully un-capped the top, reaching my fingers gently in to touch the too smooth ashes that were once his buoyant energized smile and warm tan flesh. The woods breathed a breath of fresh air as I pulled him from his blue prison and back into its view, blowing the fine ashes through my thin fingers and carrying a small piece of him away with its heavy gust, desperate to feel him against its heavy trunks and soft ground as I was. Needing to devour the little hint of him that had still remained.
His mother, from her place behind the thick line of maple trunks, had felt the woods finally let out the breath it had been holding since Silas had been silenced forever within its golden encasement, alongside me silently, as she watch me open the glowing blue urn that contained her son. In its passing through the leaves she could hear his voice as if he was simply on the branches that hung just above her reach, speaking the words he had told me and I had repeated to her and his father mercilessly following his death, begging them to release him from the blue ceramic tomb.
“When I die, I am going to come back as a tree.”
I heard it too, a soft whisper, I felt his lips graze my ear as I heard the noise, sweet and familiar, pointing me towards what I knew needed to be done next.
I did not think about how the urn had gotten there, nor the potting soil or the small tree. I only thought of his face, the way his hair would catch on his eyelashes as he looked up, directly at the sun. An endless searching on his face, as if he were harvesting the light from the sun itself, and propelling it all around him through his blissful demeanor, though his lazy happy smile as he laid in the earth below.
I picked myself up out of the shallow hole clutching what remained of Silas tightly to my chest. With my bare hands in the glow of the moonlight, while his mother secretly watched in silence from the barrier of trees, I removed the small oak from the bucket and placed it in the hole, I covered it with the soil from the bag and the earth around it, sprinkling the last of the remains of the boy I loved in with it. I sat there till the sun rose, my hands caressing his soul into the earth, while I watered his final resting place with the last of the tears I would cry for his young life, gone too soon from the grasp of my love and the realness of the world that still contained all he left behind.
Chapter Six
I never forgot the fat
eful spring days in which I fell deeply and eternally in love with Silas Jackson, I would always feel the earth and his ashes, mixed beneath my nails. Could never cease to see the glimmer of the caramel tips of his hair as he ran through the sunlight in the shallow creek when he passed through my mind.
Every night following the one in which I had mixed his remains into the earth, granting him his dying wish, to return as a tree, I had made my way down to the water’s edge, where I would sleep, pressed against the small oaks thin trunk, my bed quickly becoming a foreign entity to me.
I returned to school in the fall, and life seemed to erupt around me in quick succession, moving quickly, as if making up for the time it had slowed when Silas had breathed his final breath. I passed through it all in a zombie like state, feeling as if I no longer belonged to this world, too large of a part of me gone and mixed into the warm earth with him to remain animated and lifelike. I would sleep walk through the days as they passed by. Thinking only of returning to the water, where no one called me depressed or threw sympathetic glances my way, or worse, suggested it was time to move on.
It went on that way all through junior high and into the beginnings of high school. While other girls would boast of their nights spent in the arms of senior boys, their pickup trucks streaming down the highway at excitingly dangerous speeds, I would remain silent, thinking of my body curled alone in the dark woods, grasping a tree hoping it to speak to me Silas’s warm forgotten tone. I receded from the world around me, pushing away anyone who dared try and enter the bubble of solitude that surrounded me whenever I was forced away from my kingdom of sorrow in the woods.
Honey Roots Page 3
