My Twisted Poet Tree

I’m still afraid of so many things. Maybe if I was put into a box and frozen for a few years, my heart would get frostbite, and when it thawed pieces would fall off and with any luck, they would take some things with them. Or a doctor could remove them carefully with sterile clamps and scalpels, all neat and orderly, and sew me back up with nice orderly stitches in a straight orderly line. That would be so much better than what I have to do. So much better to be orderly. So much better to be neat and clean.

But instead I have to reach into myself and rip out the pieces. It hurts it hurts it hurts so much but if I leave them they will rot away there, and take the rest of my heart with them. Maybe it will be less painful if I refuse to write it. If I never again see it before me as ink on paper, in my clumsy script. Maybe I will forget how to write those three letters in that order, and so forget a bit of it.

Every prayer concerning it I’ve put into bottles and hung from my tree. I have lots of things on my tree. Empty bottles of wine, fragile teacups, shiny silver trinkets, sparkling baubles and things that glitter in the sunlight. I have carved things into its wooden skin; words and phrases and pictures and symbols like pale scars in the rough, dark brown hide. A heart is there, with my initials on one side and a plus sign in the middle and a blank space on the other side. I’ll carve my future husband's initials there when I know who he is. Even if I have to come back from miles away.

I’ll go back to where I spent the longest and went through the most and was innocent and romantic and dark and fallen. The place my life changed forever. Many times. Where I longed so much for things out of my reach. I’ll come back and say to my ghosts, “See? It all turned out alright.”

I’ll carve his initials next to mine, and a symbol of closure on the tree. My ghosts will play here, whispering in the branches and swaying the memories of the pretty things that once hung there, catching the light. They will float upon the roof and watch for shooting stars; easy, lucky, free. They will be at peace, because I’ve come back to tell them that I’ve found my place. Life won’t be perfect, but I’m no longer lost. My ghosts will know that and rest. My tree needs a name. Something as sparkling and romantic and magical as it is. In some foreign language; something silver and glass and transparent colors. I love my tree.

And I like boxes. I like to hide things in them—little things—and forget about them so when I find them again and open them it’s like finding old friends. Once a boy brought me two turtle eggs he’d found in the woods. I put them in a tin box with some warm, wet tissues and shoved the tin to the back of my dresser.
I don’t know how long it was until I remembered the eggs. Actually, to be honest, I didn’t even remember them by myself. I was being forced by maternal powers to clean my room, and I happened to find the box. Even then, I couldn’t remember what I’d put in it.

I opened the lid. There was a baby turtle inside, scrambling around on his slippery metal floor, all lost and confused and shocked by the sudden light. The first light he’d ever seen. And I was the first face he saw. Not that it matters much with turtles, I guess. His brother egg was dead, but that didn’t make this one’s survival any less miraculous to me. I’d hatched a healthy baby turtle, almost completely by accident.

There in the damp dark, where I’d left him forgotten, God developed his transparent claws, his quarter-sized shell, his soft, baggy skin, his tiny tail, and his efficient little beak with which he tore through the rubbery eggshell. And so, there in a metal box amid wads of soggy Kleenex and a miscarried sibling, a little life began and lived for days—possibly a week or more. He shouldn’t have been able to breathe; the box lid was sealed and secure. He had no meal to supplement his tiny strength after birth. It was certainly with no help from me, his negligent foster mother, that he survived. His ever-watchful, ever-loving Father cared for him.

I named him Rocky and fed him wet dog food in a ten-gallon terrarium. He liked to sleep under dirt and peat moss, and when he was lethargic I would put him outside in the sunshine for awhile.

Winter passed and Rocky stayed in my warm room, bypassing the normal hibernation practiced by the rest of his species out in the cold.

When summer came again, I took him back out to the woods, to the pile of rocks where his egg was found. I admit I was worried about him; worried that he wouldn’t know how to survive in “the wild”. But as I walked back to my house after setting Rocky free, I remembered how God took care of him in the dark places when no one could see; when no one even remembered or cared. God would take care of him now, out in the sunny woods.
And, because “are you not more valuable than many sparrows?”, God will take care of me too, in the dark places and in the sunshine.