“How are you here now Silvana?” Silas mom asked me.
“The same way Silas is I suppose.”
“That is impossible.” She hissed, clutching him to her as if he were a small child I was trying to kidnap.
“It’s hard for me to believe too.”
“How did Silas come back?”
“You should see the woods.” I told her softly, and walked passed them and down to the creek where I waited for her to follow.
She didn’t come down immediately, and I was thankful for it, suddenly desperate for a moment of solitude. I understood my mother’s reaction, but understanding did nothing to lessen the pain it caused me. I wanted her to understand, as Silas’s mother had, but she had known grief too long and too well to believe in magic any longer. To her, I was dead now, and in a sense, she was right.
“I’ve brought you some things to cover up.” Silas’s mothers voice came from behind me in the darkness. I turned around to face her, and the blue glow that came from within me illuminated her face. Though she had seen it in Silas many times before, the sight still made her gasp aloud.
“Where’s Silas?” I asked as I took the soft grey sweater and tan pajama shorts from her.
“He needed a moment to, well to gain some clarity.”
I nodded in understanding as I pulled the clothes over my dirty skin. They felt immensely strange, as if I had never felt the coverage of clothing before.
“Your mom told me a lot about you.”
I looked at her questioningly, but did not respond.
“Thank you, for staying with him. I wouldn’t have left if I had known.
“Were you with my mother the whole time?”
“Yes. We went to California, to where you grew up.”
“I didn’t grow up there, I was sent there.” I corrected her out of reaction. I didn’t want to have tension between us, but it felt inevitable. She always made me feel as if there was an unspoken battle about which of us loved Silas more.
“Silvana honey, it isn’t safe here anymore, you know that right?”
I did know. I understood perfectly all the challenges that faced us, but we had no other choice. Leaving was not an option, at least not for Silas. We would just have to work harder, to grow everything back quicker, to hide more efficiently. She read my mind as I thought about it.
“You can’t hide here forever. People know you’re here now.”
“We have no other choice.” I replied simply.
“No Silvana, Silas has no other choice, you do. Do you really feel that staying here is the right choice for you?”
I had no intention of answering her, because to me the question itself was utterly ridiculous, I was never going to leave Silas, I was stuck here just as much has he was.
I felt Silas appear beside me, but still I remained silent.
“I’ll leave you two alone to talk.” She said with what I heard as fake sincerity.
“She’s right you know.” Silas whispered towards the creek once her footsteps had retreated up the hillside.
“No.”
“You could have a life, a real life, you could leave and travel all over the world, you could see all the trees in all the woods of everywhere.”
“I’m dead Silas.”
“But you’re not stuck.” He countered.
“Do you want me to leave?”
“I want you to be happy.”
“I’m only happy when I’m here in our kingdom with you.”
He frowned but said nothing. He removed the clothes his mother had brought him and laid on the edge of the creek, staring up at the moon in deep thoughts that he silently refused to share. Eventually I gave in and laid down next to him, drifting into a daydream of colors as I stared into the creek below.
My mother’s voice shook though the darkness like the sound of a rattlesnake when approached too quickly.
“Silvana? Silvana are you here?”
Silas was sleeping a heavy sleep, so I approached the sound of her voice alone in the darkness.
“Mom?”
“You need to come to the house, now right now, please come!” She begged me in a reverent whisper.
I followed her footsteps up the hillside towards our house, unable to see as even the glow from within me was snuffed out by the thick sweater I now donned awkwardly.
The house was dark as the woods, not a single light was on. I could hear her pace quickening as she crunched over the gravel drive, but couldn’t see her or anything else.
“Mom?” I called into the distance.
“Over here! Come paint with me!” Her voice sounded as if her mind had broken open, a lunacy I didn’t recognize.
Still, I walked towards the sound of her voice. She was on the side of the house that faced towards the woods. The soft yellow of the house casting the lightest of glows in the moonlight. The shadows of paint cans were stacked and strewn all over the ground around her. I thought for a moment I could hear her heartbeat, fast as a hummingbird.
“Here, help me, we have to be quick.” She whispered, tossing an already paint covered brush to me in the darkness.
“Mom, what are you doing?”
“I’m painting, are you going to help, or aren’t you?”
I couldn’t make sense of her behavior, was only glad she had accepted that I was not dead and was willing to be my mother again.
“What are we painting?”
“Were painting my daughter.”
“You’re painting me on the side of the house?”
“No. I’m painting my daughter.”
“Oh, okay.” I wanted to grab her by the shoulders and shake her until she snapped out of whatever this was, but I couldn’t. I simply started painting with her as she had asked me to do.
We painted in silence all though the night. She declared we had finished just before the sun rose, even though we still could not see our canvas on the side of the house.
She held me to her chest like she had done when I was a child as the light began to reveal our picture. Just as we were nearly able to see the outline of our work forming, she squeezed me in a tight embrace and whispered into my paint speckled hair.
“Goodbye Silvana. I love you.”
She let go of me and walked briskly inside, shutting the door behind her before I had a chance to respond. I wanted to go after her, but something held me in place, there was a finality in the thud of the door closing.
When I looked away from the door that had shut behind her to the wall in front of me, I fell backwards at the sight.
I understood as I took in the image that my acceptance of all the things that could never really be understood had been derived directly from knowing my mother. It seemed entirely impossible and made perfect sense that somehow, in the dark of night, my mother had painted a beautiful mural of me. It was the best work she had ever done, it made the eight-foot-tall sunflowers and life-size rainbow lion seem miniscule in comparison. She had painted all my features to perfection, yet had given me bark in place of skin, moss in place of hair, and roots instead of legs. The colors of my heaven floated all around me, spilled watercolors in the sky. It was my death, it was my resurrection, it was all that I was and all that I would be. It was my soul, eternally looking out into the woods below. It was my mother’s final goodbye to me.
When I reached the edge of the creek Silas was still deep in a comfortable slumber, and I simply watched him as he slept, thinking of our story as it had played out so far.
I had felt a magnetic pull from the woods for as long as I could remember, and I felt the same way towards Silas from the very moment I heard his laughter though the trees the first time. I did not belong to the woods as he did, but they were a part of me, one I could never fully get away from no matter how many miles I put between them and myself.
Remaining in these woods forever would close a lot of doors, I would never have a typical and normal life, I would never know my mother as she once was, I would never see the world or feel
the ocean devour me. I would have no future that did not include dirt and sweat.
It would also mean that I would never have to leave Silas. I would never have to feel the pain of loss again. I would never feel as if a part of me was eternally missing. I would never grow old, and would probably never die.
I had lived a life with Silas, and without him, and then did it all over again. I knew what each version offered. I knew the possibility of us being found here, of being turned into some sort of experiment or burned to nothing but ash again. I knew that if I left, over time it would get easier, I would find a routine and survive and live an average life as I had before.
When I thought of my life without Silas, I wanted to die. When I thought of my life with Silas, I didn’t care if I lived or died, so long as he was there with me.
My decision to stay forever beside him, despite whatever the consequences may be, was made before the sun fully had the chance to fully rise in the sky.
Chapter Twenty
We spent the foggy morning hours bundled together beneath the sweater I had worn the night before, with our heads tilted to the sun and our feet dangling over the water. Though the woods around us were still black and empty, the visons from our memories filled them in around us. We laid in a timeless and peaceful moment, both of us silently wondering if it would be our last.
“Do you remember when you told me you wanted to be a tree?” I asked him as the birds began to sing their songs of good mornings around us.
“Yes, and you said that if I were to become a tree, you would lay beneath my roots, until you too became a tree, and then you would root into the earth next to me.”
“And we would watch the earth end around us, eternally intertwined.” I finished for him.
“It didn’t quite work out that way, did it?” He laughed, the warm sound seeming the push the morning fog away from us, causing our bodies to be suddenly illuminated in sunlight.
“Maybe we still can.” I told him as I borrowed my face into his hair one last time, breathing in the sweet smell of the trees that somehow remained in him.
“What? Become trees? Haven’t we done that already?”
“No, root into the earth next to each other, remain eternally intertwined as we watch the world end around us.”
I laced my fingers into his and pulled him up from the ground, directly to the rigid edge of the creek. We stood hand in hand at the edge, looking into the yellow depths that glowed just below the spilled watercolor surface.
“Till the world ends?” He asked squeezing my hand, the same boyish smile he always had light up his face.
“Till the world ends.” I agreed.
Hand in burning hand, Silas Jackson and Silvana Wilkes jumped into the creek below. With one colorful splash, they were eternally encased in the honey colored earth they loved. The water flowed over their feet, and their faces tilted towards the sun. Spectacularly green moss covered their flesh, and flowers grew from every inch of them, as roots grew from the bottoms of their feet deep into the earth below. Life reentered the woods.
Deep in a forgotten wood, you can find the perfect statue of young love and life, a couple forever entwined in a wooded kingdom by their honey roots.
Honey Roots Page 13