by Andrea Roylance
A cold lake filled with wilted leaves, ash, and broken branches from a toxic tree sits at the edge of my consciousness. The lake’s waters are as still as death. Although the surface mirrors a pretty scene, the depths are murky with ghosts of the past, and holding a wealth of closet-worthy skeletons that will never see the light of day.
On days where I can walk the path forward, leaving my lake miles behind me, I’m centered by clear blue sky and mountainous Red Rocks. It’s a place that smells of dry desert foliage in spring, and the area echoes with familiar voices and laughter calling me home. I know this place well. I visit it more often than my lake, lured by the comfort of warm embraces, delicious food, and meaningful conversations.
I know it’s where I should spend my day. But not yet, or maybe not today. I don’t feel like laughing or carrying on. Not when another stone has been thrown into the waters of my lake, disturbing its peaceful stillness and drawing my notice yet again to the broken branches and refuse littering its shallows.
Instead, I find myself kneeling in the dirt at the lake’s edge, attempting to soothe the ripples. The action steals the warmth from my skin. An icy chill spreads throughout my body and into my bones the longer I stay. I know it’s masochism, but it doesn’t stop me.
Turbulent grey clouds roll in, their reflection a dreary scene mirrored below. Hauntingly beautiful, their presence also darkens my lake a shade more. The rain comes next, starting as a trickle. I’m barely aware of it. I pluck old leaves and debris out, not to rid the lake of each one, but to inspect them for a hundredth time like old friends, old memories.
Some tattered.
Some aged.
Some wilted.
Some frayed.
Some are gathered together in a way that makes them look like art in a certain light. Some lay so deep they’re out of my reach, and I expect they may always stay this way. What I sift through on the surface of the lake already feels like a lot. God only knows what I’d find down there if I dared to dive. No, not yet, and definitely not today. I’m not sure at the moment, but maybe not even someday.
It wasn’t like this a year ago, when every single member of my family walked on earth. There was no lake here, only trees. Not all were healthy, but they still stood tall with age. But then September came, and October vanished. Before I could wrap my head around the news, the actions I didn’t understand, the words that didn’t make sense, and the emotions I couldn’t handle—or wasn’t given time to handle—it was over.
The force behind it was so much stronger than me. It came like a flood, hitting me so hard and so fast that the water overwhelmed me, overflowing in all directions and drowning me for a time. It was like a hurricane that caused a flood, which turned into a mudslide—or so it seemed. All of it targeted my tree, my dying tree, and before I knew it, a lake stood where my tree had once been. The remaining skeleton of it was burned to ash before I could say my last goodbyes. I have an urn, but it holds no ash. The ash of my tree is one with the water flowing between my fingers.
He’s not here though, in these waters, for he is not the ash. He is standing next to me as the storm rages above me, his invisible form saddened by the salty tears that drop from my chin to add to the liquid rippling below. No doubt he fears for me too—my safety, my sanity—as the clouds darken and lightning builds. I can easily imagine his voice on the wind, telling me to go back to the spring desert, back to the sun and familiar laughs, back to the people who are awaiting my return.
I know I should. But not yet, and maybe not for a few more moments. There is something I can’t let go of that keeps calling me back here. Not just the messiness of this lake, although most days examining the wreckage of it all holds me hostage here. More than I’ll admit to anyone who asks.
The truth is, I can’t stand the look of the other tree still standing. It’s heartbreaking to see its broken branches lying in the water. I hate them. I want them gone. And I want to stay here and protect the water from any more stones falling from the base of that tree, so nothing ever touches my lake again but me. Wishing the other tree’s seeds had never been blown this way is a fruitless endeavor, though I do daydream about it from time to time. Had it not taken root here next to mine, what would my tree have grown into? Had the other tree been cut down, or better yet, torn up by a tornado and tossed thousands of miles away, what could mine have become if their branches hadn’t intertwined? I’ll never know, but that doesn’t stop me from imagining it. If only we’d known that it carried a deadly disease, that ugliness lived in its core, and could turn into poison with time. Maybe we could have stopped it from infecting the tree we loved so much.
Now my tree is gone, and I miss it. I miss the way it flourished under the bright sun, its leaves flushed with color and life, reflecting in the sunlight. I miss the sound it made as it embraced the breeze, as if it loved the gusting wails riding through its limbs. It reveled in summer and stood strong and proud as a guardian over the lake in winter.
It was a good tree. Not the best. Surely not the tallest or made from the sturdiest seed. Not always the prettiest either, especially after the poison took hold. But God, we loved that tree. For what it was to us, for the memories we had when under its care, for the years and years of sharing its space and watching all the ways it changed and grew, and for the quiet way it departed in the end.
And my heart is weighty again. So damn heavy as I wade my fingers through still waters, wishing upon a storm reflected in the ripples that I could change the past and clean up the devastation riddling my murky lake, the lake the holds what’s left of my beloved tree.