My emotions are much louder than hers. Sometimes I wonder if I come off as inauthentic, but as I age, so ages my conviction, and I know that I’m not.
Next to her, I’m a weeping willow: emotive, romantic, maybe a bit dramatic. But she’s a windswept cypress tree. Uncommon and haunting. They’re not showy and have this still, composed presence. It suits her—she is someone who feels things deeply but doesn’t always show it outwardly.
I thought about an oak tree for her, too. Maybe she’s all the damn trees. But an oak in that she is grounding, and oaks hold a lot of history, memory, and presence.
One vivid memory I have of us as kids is something I come back to a lot when I need to remember what magic feels like. We were in my grandparents’ front yard in the summertime, so you know it was the greenest grass. In my imaginative mind, we weren’t in a front yard, but seated on a hill that looked like where Julie Andrews spins in the opening of The Sound of Music. I remember we had just gotten ice cream from the ice cream truck, and we had separated ourselves from everyone—as was our constant goal as children. I think we saw each other deeply back then. We maybe were subtly aware of our differences in spirit, but our similarities kept us magnetized.
As we ate our ice cream next to one another, I remember this feeling. It was ethereal and odd and beautiful and strange, and I don’t know if we spoke it aloud to each other because we were just kids, but part of me feels like we did. Like we knew the love between us was sacred and it would be etched in our roots forever.
Even when time took us in different places and personalities shifted into pride and pretend indifference, we always found each other again. She’s still the person that holds me up, and she is able to distill my complexities with humor, reduce my chaos to punchlines. You get the idea.
I think I’m still the person who allows her to be her most windswept cypress self. When she confides in me and tells me what’s plaguing her, I know I’m being shown something she doesn’t easily show.
Last year, we sat in the greenest grass with a blanket covering it, snacks she prepared herself: the most delicious and fresh white peaches, hummus and pita bread, and I think there might’ve been dark chocolate-covered something, but those damn peaches stole the show for me. Now, instead of the two of us as kids, we are grown women, and there’s a third person: her four-year-old son. When I’m with him and we’re in a moment of connection, that ethereal feeling comes up, and I can tell she’s literally pouring all of her magic into his wild form.
He is wild, in the best way. I’m not sure what tree he is growing into yet. But like her, he’s so deep-feeling and beautiful. On that grassy section of the garden we visited, we raced in our bare feet and we laughed so hard, and I remembered joy and love and let the sun heal whatever parts of me forgot it for a second. And I got to be next to the person who showed it to me at such a young age.
How lucky am I that right after I post this, I can pick up my phone and send her something, and she will send me something back. And it might never be something as insane as these blocks of words. It might be the most amazing and insightful Tarot reading, or a thoughtful (Virgo-coded) analysis of whatever I’m saying. It also might be a joke that I decide to take the wrong way, but we quickly work it out.
If we are those trees I mentioned, we are similar in that we were both shaped by emotion and environment. The willow seems shaped by sorrow or sensitivity, its branches hanging like tears. The windswept cypress is shaped by external forces: wind, weather, isolation. Neither tree grows perfectly straight. Each tree has their own kind of drama: the willow’s drama is emotional and expressive, the cypress’s drama is existential. Even the social energy of the willow is inviting and enveloping, whereas the cypress is distant, singular, and sometimes harder to reach. How lucky am I, to have reached her?
I think I’ve succeeded with this metaphor. And why do I think that? Because I suspect she would love it. Maybe ask me to make it less public. We’ll see…
(Daily Writing 021)
Thoughts?