The Trees.

Yesterday I went to the woods to talk to the trees, that's usually what I do when I need answers, I find their patience and stoicism easier to take than the uncertainty of my friends advice. They've never failed me yet: their message?...patience...take it easy...one day at a time. I appreciate everything they've shown me, the tenacity of the roots in the shallow earth, the constant search for nutrition, how they stretch out their verdant limbs to shade their children, the saplings, below.
But today?
"You wanna know something? We're tired..." they groaned in unison as a gust of wind stirred their branches, "...we get asked too many questions, it's not only you that walks through here you know, everyone wants answers to the big questions...but we don't know anything either, that's why we just stand here, we really don't have anything to share..."
Yes, but...why do I always feel better when I come here? Why does contemplating you make me feel more at one with my own nature?
"It's the placebo effect...it's all in your mind...we're trees, not prophets, sorry if you got the wrong idea."
"Meanwhile, stop by sometime, enjoy the foliage and the fall colors..." one particularly gnarled old tree replied, it's limbs crossed in a gesture of finality, "...but right now...we have nothing for you."
It's true, you know, they looked so unsure, unconcealed, stripped bare of their leaves, naked branches sticking out awkwardly from the trunks, stark treetops against the darkening sky. One fellow lay, uprooted by lightning or toppled by the wind, in the outspread arms of another. Prostrate on the forest floor, my fallen soldiers, once towering and vigilant, now laid out on the pine needles covered with blankets of dry leaves.
No, there would be nothing answered today, so I just watched the setting sun lighten their upturned hands, the fingers closed in silent prayer; no birds to sing to them.
I took a photograph...
...the lengthening shadows and the starkness.
I turned my back on it all, left the woods by the path to the main road, went back to light, to noise, to humanity.

Chapter Five - Somewhere in America

"And I see losing love is like a window in your heart,
Everybody sees you’re blown apart, everybody sees the wind blow"

"Graceland" Paul Simon

He was busy working, in the afternoon on a day like any other, when the office phone rang, He had his feet up on the windowsill and was looking out over Broadway. He had a call on line one the receptionist said, it was his Father, he never called him at work. His blood went cold, He knew it was bad. Son, he said, your Mother died last night, you have to come home. That was it? He couldn't catch it, he asked him to repeat it, then he heard the shaking in his usually stern Father's voice and he knew it was true, he was in New York, and she was in England....but at the same time not in England. He hadn't had the chance to say goodbye.

It was a couple of days after I'd come back to Madrid from visiting him for Christmas, I talked to him the night before, he wasn't feeling good and I told him to go to the doctor's the next day, I will, he said, goodnight son, talk to you tomorrow. The next morning I got a phone call from my brother. Doug, he said, I heard the discomfort in his usually placid voice, Dad's dead, he had a heart attack this morning, around 6, he was going to the kitchen to make tea....he just....collapsed. It was too late to stop it, it was now in the past, I turned around repacked my suitcase and went back to England, it was too late to tell him that I loved him, even after all the years of mutual suffering, I would have to bury that part of myself along with him.

I was at college in Orlando, she came down to visit me, my wife, I was still so much in love with her after 12 years of marriage. We went for a drive, then we went for a walk in a park, we were walking through the rose garden, let's sit down she said, we need to talk. It's...well...it's like, when you come back to New York I don't want us to live together anymore, I want to move on. All I remember now was the park bench, and the heat, and her perfume, I couldn't weigh her words, they weighed more than gravity. Later that year I went back to New York to live alone, and in a way I still do.

It was a Sunday afternoon, and it was raining. He was driving to the market when she messaged him on his BlackBerry, he tried to read but was about to lose control of the car so he pulled off the road into the market's parking lot and without turning off the motor sat motionless there in hell in the rain reading the flow of the severing words, desperately thumbing the keys of the phone in reply, trying to stem the flow, to cauterize the wound, to stop her leaving him for ever. She was walking away from something dangerous, something she didn't even know about, because it was his dream not hers, she was only afraid of causing damage. The messages stopped, he sent her a final "?", there was no reply...there was a vacuum. He threw the phone on the floor, violently as almost to separate his head from his body he wrenched himself forwards in the seat clutching at the steering wheel and felt such a strong desire to drive blindly into the Main Street traffic, to collide with something real and substantial and true, to do something to take away the pain. Rocking backwards and forwards like a child he couldn't stop crying, weeping for himself and his life, and for what he'd done, and feeling so sorry for himself, so sorry for misunderstanding her intentions. After a while he calmed down enough to walk quietly through the parking lot through the pouring rain into the market, carefully comatose, reddened tear stained eyes blind, trying not to look his fellow shoppers in the eyes, because they would be able to sense his extreme vulnerability, feel his guilt. He bought what he needed, milk, cereal, a box of rat poison powder and a gallon of Clorox, and by old habit smiled at the cashier. He walked out into the rain and got back into the car...OK, he thought...time to go home and act like nothing's happened.

Alone in the apartment, sitting by the window, she was fixedly staring at the computer screen and she couldn't believe what she was reading, the force of the blow had knocked the breath from her lungs, she gulped and gasped for air and kept reading, she couldn't pull her eyes away...transfixed,nailed to the chair by the betrayal in the words scrolling before her eyes. The pages went on and on, some so old they were mildewed and yellowed by time. Every hurt she'd ever endured from every man was there, brazen and unapologetic, stacked up like the dirty dishes, ugly and twisted. Here she was in the realness of the comfort of her own home, by her window, looking at her trees, and yet this was also really happening. She pulled her knees up to her chest to protect her heart from the arrows, yet also left herself wide open, so open and vulnerable like Saint Sebastian pierced through and through by the awful knowledge that this was probably going to kill her, and if not the whole of her, then it would raze that private garden that she had loved and watered with her resilience and tears. Then mercifully she slowly ceased shaking and groaning and a cold fear entered her veins, what does this mean?, she asked, what's the point if this is what you always get in the end, I shall be strong enough to get over this, I've done it before, and I'll do it again. She unfolded herself, and stood up, looked out of the window at the fall leaves on the covered pool, yes, she thought, everything has it's season.

The Dispensary

I've been thinking that there should be a special place where you go to receive bad news, like a special Department or Office, or even Clinic or Dispensary. There should be an official looking summoning, exquisitely printed, embossed even, or perhaps a personalized phone call from a calm, softly spoken representative, requesting  that at such and such an hour at such and such a place you should present yourself, with a form of picture ID, because unfortunately the universe has gone a bit crazy, some stuff's happened, and well, sorry to say but we have some bad news for you. So you go, feeling nervous and anxious, because, although this might have happened before it's still not a very pleasant experience, rather like going to the dentist's. Even people who have received bad news in the past, and have learned to accept it, still feel a shiver of apprehension down the spine when they grip the envelope or pick up the phone and here the soothing muzak and the calm voice asking you to please hold for a moment. Once you arrive you check in, they're very busy and there are always people waiting, but the staff are courteous and professional in a doctor's waiting room way. They sit you down and tell you the bad news, they give it to you straight, no messing around. Then it's up to you, cry, scream, pass-out, go into denial, throw things (they have a wide selection of things to throw), curse God...whatever you want, go ahead, nobody will judge you based on your reactions, you don't have to worry that someone might misunderstand, the attendants are highly trained and have seen it all before, they are unshakable. After a short while you will be offered tissues to dry the tears and shoulders to cry on, genuine understanding and empathy is available 24/7. Surrogate mothers, fathers, husbands and wives are at you disposal, as are many variations of pharmaceutical palliatives, your choice, it's on the house. But, no sharp objects, razor blades or knives, no means of permanently ending the pain are available, you're just going to have to go home and figure that problem out for yourself.

Bridge building by night

"—As if too brittle or too clear to touch! The cables of our sleep so swiftly filed, Already hang, shred ends from remembered stars." "Voyages" by Hart Crane

Every night, as they slept miles apart in their separate worlds, he in his bed, and she in hers, they unknowingly shared the Bridge Building Dream. In it they dream that they are building a bridge towards each other, they are not acting together, hand in hand, in concert, but they are building to the same plan, following the same inordinately complex design that is required for the dream to function, and using the same ethereal materials that could dematerialize at any moment should their attention wander. They were building two spans of the bridge, that would meet at a predetermined spot in space and time, to unite themselves into one gigantic structure that would close forever the gap between them.
Night after night the pavement was slowly raised foot by foot, and the curvatures grew broader and stronger, the cables intertwining to create the cat's cradle wherein the builders sleep when they dream about sleep. Far below the raw masonry edges the oceans churned, occasionally a tongue of wave would leap up hungrily and carry away a loose chunk of material, that would later have to be replaced.
Why they or anyone else has this dream is unknown, each builder raises their edifice to join with another, sometimes the joining and completion is in alignment, sometimes it misses by a fraction, the fusing impossible.
She had in her mind the idea of a bridge arcing away to a metropolis, whose lights glimmered on the calmer water off in the distance. His bridge arches off way into the sky to touch the moon that shines on the snow of the Himalayas. One with her feet on the land and one with his feet in the skies, looking Brahma-like, towards and away from each other at the same time, face to face, spine to spine, spinning their impossible structures in mid-air.
Purposefully the sun begins to flood the room where he is sleeping and touches his eyelids, as he wakes the dream begins to fade and all his night's work sinks back down into the waters from where it was constructed, he must dredge up the materials from the depths every night to continue again. Still deeply asleep on the other side of the ocean she is distracted for a moment from her work by the slow, deep rumbling coming to her from miles away. A distant storm? She thinks. The sound of steel and concrete collapsing into the waves, coming from somewhere indistinct. Way over the dream's horizon a light that had brightly pierced the sky shudders for a second then winks out, darkness rises for a second then falls back, leaving silence.
She shudders fitfully in her sleep, her eyes blink open in the pitch darkness of her room, confused about where she is, she stretches momentarily, then without a second's thought turns back to continue with her work, there's always so much that needs to be done before waking.