The joyous jubilee that had exploded from his renewed body wilted at the sight of his mother’s expression. He turned away from her to face me, a look of pure anguish spreading across his now blankly sullen face.
“I died.”
His words were a soft statement, but his eyes held all the questions in the universe. I nodded solemnly, unable to speak the words again as I took in the melancholy that now riddled his every inch.
He screamed into the sky, coughing and sputtering for air through the tears that now flowed down his face as he crumpled to the ground, a ball of unfathomable sadness. His body writhed as if in pain as he tried to understand, forcing roots to sprout from his flesh again, holding him in his infantile fetal position on the crackling yellow leaves. His mother and I stood still in our places on either side of him, our eyes searching each other instead of viewing his distraught state.
“Is it really him?”
She asked me, her voice not high enough to reach my ears but my eyes understanding the words as they formed on her chapped lips.
“Yes.” I told her, choking on the word as it came out. Only once I said it did I finally believe it myself. She searched my expression tirelessly, looking for another answer, a more specific reasoning, but I had nothing more I could give then.
She clumsily made her way over the uneven ground of the woods that separated her from where Silas now lay, crying profusely and bound to the earth once again. She hesitated when she reached his body, looking up at me for an assurance I could not give to her. She reached down and laid her palm lightly against his warm wet cheek, the soft caress only a mother comforting her hysterical child was capable of. I watched as the roots began to loosen and break away from his flesh, disconnecting from the ground as the warmth of her familiar touch sparked a fiery comfort inside him, they turned to ash once again before my eyes, as if they had never been there at all.
Though he was no longer bound to it, Silas remained on the ground with his mother, allowing her to cradle him in the comfort of her embrace in his horrifically confused state. I remained unmoving, embarrassed at viewing such an intimate moment.
As the moment grew unfathomably long, I began to fill with awkward tension, finally bursting after what felt to me like hours had passed. I didn’t approach them, only spoke in a high tone that did not sound anywhere close to my own voice.
“I don’t know how it happened…the tree just disappeared after.”
I started to say, but his mother promptly cut me off, her tone as sharp as the tip of a fresh kitchen knife, puncturing me with her words.
“All that matters is that my son has come back to me. There is nothing else to question. The lord has answered my prayers.”
Her eyes were daggers that stabbed into the depths of my soul, cutting into the shocked happy state that had enveloped me when Silas had said much of the same sentiment. It was different coming from her, it was painful. She spoke to me as if I were an unwelcome burden, stealing away the magic of her reunification with her only child. I slowly retreated towards the fallen tree that I would cross back into my side of the wooded kingdom, defeated by her scornful glare.
“Silvana wait, don’t go.” Silas yelled after me as I caught his glance atop the fallen tree trunk. I waited for his mother to say something in agreement, anything, but she remained silent, happy that I was retreating and leaving her alone to love on her son in privacy. She held her grasp on him firmly, much like the roots that had sprouted from his flesh and held him to the ground below. I tried to look at her knowingly, apologetic in my presence, but she only glared back in a rising anger.
“I’ll be back…” I whispered towards him as hot tears filled my eyes and I silently retreated up the hillside leaving them alone in the glow of the setting sun.
I went through a methodical routine once arriving home, unable to think of anything other than why Silas mother had looked at me with such cruelty. I showered off the dirt from the woods, rinsing their smell out of my hair as the steaming water burned my fingertips even more raw then they had been. I ate a silent dinner with my mother while we stared blankly at reality television reruns on the small tv in the corner of the kitchen, neither of us paying any attention to what was unfolding on the screen. I didn’t tell her about Silas, couldn’t even begin to form the words to explain the events of the day to myself let alone her. I had planned to return to the woods in the dark of night, when the prying blue eyes of my mother had closed in a laborious slumber, when hopefully Silas would be alone again, waiting for me.
I awoke to the light chatter of birds before the sun had risen in the sky, realizing I had fallen asleep at some point while waiting for my mom to retreat to bed, the fluorescent bulb of my bedroom lamp now radiating with heat from having been left on all night, blinding me with its brightness. I clicked it off and dressed quickly in the dark, grabbing things blindly from my dark closet and pulling them on before tip toeing quickly and silently out the door and into the woods again.
Silas was waiting for me just beyond the thick line of tree trunks, causing me to crash into his body as I charged down the hillside lost in the turmoil of my confusion.
“Woah there, running into the woods after a boy, are we?” he asked me through a bright smile, all of the melancholy he had suffered the day before washed away in the night.
“Was your mother angry with me?” I questioned back, unamused, my mind still focused on her icy glare that stood frozen on the forefront of my memory.
He sighed heavily in response, leaning back against the smooth shadow of a maple trunk behind him, tilting his head down to stare at our feet as he spoke.
“Let’s go down to the creek, the suns about to rise.”
He said warmly, grazing my arm with his hand only for a second before making his way down the hillside towards the creek. The warmth of his fervent touch made me realize how cold the icy chill of the morning was on my bare arms and still damp hair, creating goosebumps that I wanted to itch away when I noticed them.
Instead, I silently followed him down to the creek, eager for answers.
The familiar comfort that washed over me as we took our usual places on the water’s edge was now obstructed by my incessant curiosity. I felt a sense of jealousy, feeling that he now knew more than me, but was holding out in a futile attempt to maintain normalcy, but what was normal anymore anyway?
“I died. I became a tree, and now I am somehow alive again, I can feel the truth in all of it, but lack a memory of anything of importance besides you.” His voice was soft as he spoke in a hasty whisper, the words flowing out with more speed than I’d ever heard him speak before.
“My mother told me of how she found my body, limp and broken beneath the trees. She told me of how she had ordered for me to be cremated, and had my ashes placed in a small blue urn. She told me of how she would watch you from behind the trees in secret late into the dark of the night in the months following my death. She told me about how you fought her and my father tooth and nail, even on the day on my funeral, to set me free from the urn and place me into the woods where you knew I wished to be. She told me of how she had placed my ashes, along with a small oak tree and a discounted bag of potting soil above the hole where the tree that I had fallen from had been ripped from the ground. She told me how she watched you as you mixed my remains into the dirt, committing me to these woods forever, as we had spoken of doing in my life. She told me of how you would lay beneath the tender growing branches of the tree, watering my ashes in the dirt with your hot tears. She told me of how your mother sent you away, hoping to drown the memory of me out of your mind.”
His words flowed one after another in quick succession, as he spoke up to the sun, not revealing the feelings he now carried of these realities he was suddenly faced with. He never paused for me to respond, continuing in a rampant haste.
“She also told me that I should stay hidden in the woods…that people…well that they wouldn’t respond well to seeing me, wouldn’t understand as y
ou do.”
I couldn’t argue with the last statement, he was slightly incorrect in saying that I understood, because I most definitely did not understand a spec of what had happened since I had arrived home two days before. His mother had been right to tell him to stay hidden away though, people would not respond well to a boy rising from the grave, no matter what the circumstances may be.
Maybe I should have been, but I was not surprised in the least to hear that his mother had been watching me all those nights, that she had been the one to leave the ashes and little potted oak for me to find, knowing what I would do with it. Though Silas was now in front of me, alive and well as he ever was. The new knowledge that it had been his mother’s eyes I had felt all those nights in the woods watching me, and not his own, left me with a slightly morose feeling. I had been so sure it had been him, his spirit protecting me from far beyond the reaches of reality all those dark cold nights alone beneath the trees.
“Wow.” I said simply, unable to form any other response after the heavy intake of information. He grabbed me roughly by my shoulders, holding my face in front of his own close enough to feel his breath on my skin but just far enough away to not be touching noses.
“There are a lot of things I don’t know, things I will never understand, I’m not sure why I died or am now able to live again or why I have no memory of any of it. The only thing I know to be absolutely true in this entire screwed up universe is that I love you with every factor of my existence, here or far.”
His words were stern and drenched in a manly confidence I had never seen in him before, he stared into my eyes with a severe intensity as he spoke, practically shaking me as he attempted to convey the total force of his statement.
“You wanted to be a tree.” I told him softly, his grasp on me still firm, his gaze still intensely bearing into my own.
“And so you grew a tree from my remains.” He said back, loosening his grip now.
He kissed me, harder than he had the first and second time, he kissed me with purpose, the kiss of a vast future we would now be able to share in together, just as we had wished for all those years ago.
“I never trusted that stupid old oak.” I told him as I leaned heavily into his body, dizzy from the intimate attention I had longed for from him for so long.
“Shh. You should always trust the trees, I was the one who should have not been trusted.” He laughed as he spoke, able joke humorously about his own death already despite the confusion and fear he faced.”
Chapter Eleven
All at once, just as everything had changed, all had gone back to normal. I spent the long sunny days beside the creek with Silas, enjoying the simplicity of his presence after having felt the sorrow of his absence for five tediously long years.
I quickly forgot about the pressures of the world that lay just outside of our wooded kingdom, adjusting easily back into a routine that purely revolved around seeing Silas, just as I had at thirteen. I would wake early and race down to the creeks edge before the sun rose. I would lay against the warmth that radiated from Silas, as we lounged sleepily against the soft forested floor. We played as children do, chasing each other through the woods, splashing the cold water of the creek into each other’s eyes, the only activity we did not resume, was climbing the trees, we never even spoke of it.
It was as if time had stood still all those years the woods had remained void of our joyous laughter, and for Silas, it had.
We picked up right where we had left off, as if not a day had passed. His happiness was pure as a child’s, as he has skipped all the years of growing up that I had been left to endure alone. The only time he showed any hint or seriousness was when we would speak about the way he had left and retuned.
“Describe the tree to me.” He would ask as we lounged in front of where it had once loomed above.
“It was massive, at least twice as high as the one you fell from. It had a long branch that arched out over the water, enormously thicker than the one that snapped under your weight.”
He would hang on every word with an intense morbid fascination in his own death.
“Where did the blue lava stuff flow from again? Tell me how the colors whirled and sparkled about as it singed the earth.”
We would stare into the flesh of his now hardened and tanned stomach, watching the blue swirls that could still be faintly be seen flowing beneath. He would hold my hand beneath his, grazing my scarred fingertips against his velvety lips, as I described every detail of the sparkling substance that he was now made of.
I had managed to avoid seeing his mother again since the first day she had found us hidden beneath the yellow canopy of leaves, when she came in search of the tree that could no longer be seen from her bitterly silent home. Despite all that Silas had told me, I still did not understand the fury in her eyes as she gazed at me from her place on the soft earth where she comforted Silas as he came to terms with his resurrection. I had done everything it seemed she had wanted of me. Silas had returned to us, and yet she still held a silent resentment that I couldn’t begin to wrap my head around, even more than the oddness of everything else.
My mother, on the other hand, was an unavoidable forcefield whom adamantly refused to allow me to drift away into the magic of the woods again.
I avoided telling Silas as the days loomed closer, that I was supposed to be leaving again, back to a life that I had planned what felt like an eternity ago. One I now loathed in place of the budding excitement I had once felt for it. As my mom nagged me about shopping for dorm room supplies and meal cards, I was growing steadily more anxious, trying tirelessly to devise a plan in which I could remain in the woods hidden away by Silas’s side. Choosing art was the only thing that symbolized to my mother we shared a similarity other than the wide almond shape of our eyes, and she rallied for the decision, despite her opinion that no one needed to be taught to be an artist, they were simply born that way. I had tried to use this against her, ineffectively, to not be separated from Silas again. So far nothing had worked, and as much as I tried to deny that the day of my departure was fast approaching, the days had quickly flown by, giving me only a few more precious nights to convince her not to make me go.
When I finally dragged myself down into the woods to tell Silas, he had responded with a sadness that I had not anticipated.
“I’ve stolen your future.” He had said solemnly in response to the feverish rant I had spewed out, the basis of which was that I may be forced to leave him once again.
“You are my future.” I argued.
“You were going to have so much more, you’re destined to see the world Silvana, not be hidden away here in these woods with me.”
“There is nowhere else I would rather be than here next to you, forever.”
“What a dull existence.” He concluded.
“I think it’s beautiful.”
“You should go.”
“I’m never going to be separated from you again.” I argued on, and he stopped responding, lost in a stew of his own thoughts.
Out of options, and feeling as if I were on my own, Silas still arguing the loss of my potential future far away from our kingdom in the woods, I had decided it was time to resort to drastic measures.
Instead of racing into the woods as was my usual morning routine, I walked down the road, around the gravel bend that led to Silas parents’ home. I made my way around the back of the house to where I hoped I would find his mother, staring down into the woods as Silas had told me she like to do in the early hours of the morning. Luckily for me, she was right where he said she would be.
“I need your help.” I said to her back.
She took a long while to respond, her shoulders stiffening at the sound of my voice.
“What could you possibly need from me?” she asked without turning to face me, annoyance broadly present in her tone.
“I’m supposed to leave for school in a matter of days, I need help convincing my mom to not make me go, so that I
can stay here, with Silas.” I pleaded from my place behind her in the damp lawn.
“Funny. You didn’t care about being here with him when you decided to bail out for five years to go party at the beach.”
I was stunned at her statement. I stood in shock behind her, my mouth hanging wide open in surprise, unable to form words immediately. She turned around to face me then, unleashing the full power of her icy glare onto me.
“I had no choice.” I whispered into the dense chilly air between us.
“You didn’t seem to be making any effort to run back, you left my baby in the woods alone to rot.”
“I had to get away, to heal from the loss.”
“You know nothing about loss.
“I LOVE HIM TOO!” I finally erupted, screaming the words at her, the sound echoing back at us in the silence of the morning.
Her unfriendly demeanor began to crack away at my words. Tears rose to her eyes and she contorted her face as if she were in physical pain.
“Why didn’t you bring him back sooner?” she questioned me softly.
“I didn’t know…” I whispered back, picturing the tree breaking apart in my mind.
“Okay.” She concluded warmly, pulling me into a gentle embrace.
“What do you want me to do?” She asked with finality.
The plan was simple enough, Silas mother would go and speak to mine, forging a worrying urgency in her voice as she spoke to my mother about how she had seen me in the woods, talking to the trees, and thought that maybe I still needed time to heal, that she believed my emotional wounds had been ripped open from returning to the woods where we had lost Silas, and that I was in no shape to do anything but heal myself at this moment in time.
I wasn’t sure if she would believe the woman who lived right around the corner but whom she had not seen step foot outside the house since the brutal loss of her only child, but it was my final fleeting chance at remaining with Silas. So, I took it, begging the universe for it to work.
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