It's a little piece I call "Assurance"
My New York City
apartment sits like an overgrown man on the fastfood-yellow subway benches, sloppily
planted, going nowhere. The green awning with the neatly printed white bold
“203” reaches out pitifully toward the small tree on the sidewalk’s crusty path.
I feel oddly poetic today. The soft sprinkle of rain has slowly
tapped its way into my soul, puddling it. It’s as though I should float over to
the Park. Float until the trees force me back to the ground with their
sprawling limbs, shouting softly at my urges. It is then that I raise my lips
to the wetness of the rain and whisper with it thoughts no one has heard
before, ideas yet to emerge, songs yet to be writ. Watching through slit brown
ovals heavy with dewed lashes as those whispered words weep with the rain,
slowly rising like forgotten smoke, swirling up through the branches and out of
sight for no one to catch.
I once felt this way as a child—strangely alone in my
deepened connection to the unknown. I had a tree of my own. She waited for me to
return from school every day and called out to me to sit atop her branches. I
did not know double digits in age; yet, I only knew the waxy Crayola scent of
the classroom, the raised curb in the school’s lot that I balanced on as the
other girls played in closed circles, the poems I hid in my Social Studies
notebook and the stickers I knew the others swapped and shared. I climbed atop
my tree with these truths sitting heavy on my heart.
But she held me as I cried. Held me as I stared out at the
weed-ridden corn field, the back woods guarding the stalks in walled defense.
As I questioned, as I thought, as I let the worry of nine years slowly release
its death grip on me. The leaves softly spoke, hushed assurances and lullabies.
When I was 16, my father cut that tree down. He didn’t know
better. I couldn’t be angry. The tree was leaning then. Leaning in toward the
barn, intruding on a project I didn’t understand. I laid my hand over the deadened heart beat
of her stump. I looked out at the weed-ridden cornfield and the back woods and
tried to hear it all once again. But it was gone.
But, she came back today. As soon as I stepped out onto 8th Avenue
and the first droplets of rain kissed my forehead hello. Followed me through
the subway, making her way around strangers with kindness. Held my hand as I
re-emerged onto the street in my unfamiliar neighborhood, gliding from one
concreted sapling to the next.
I walked past the Church, the same Church that has sat with
sterile grace alongside my lazily slumped apartment. I felt her tug my sleeve
toward the stoned steps, pointing through the open hand carved door, heavy with
age, at the carpeted aisle leading toward the candle-lit alter. I stopped for a
moment, looking in. I saw the weed-ridden corn field; the oak and elm guards. I
closed my eyes and heard the feathered assurances, the rushing rustling of wind
and leaf and limb.
The worry of 23 years slowly released its death grip on me.
I raised my lips to the wet rain and allowed them to turn up in an easy smile.
