Radicchio

There was a tree, a tree we named Radicchio because the leaves turned purple in the sun. With thick leaves, fat ones, ones we thought we could bite into like watermelon. There⁣ was a tree that made the wind stop and threw it back. Whose branches made tiny tunnels in our aortas. A tree that grew with us.⁣

When we were seven I could climb to the top. I could make a castle of it and call you my queen. When we were seven there were no dark colors to our imagination. Only curiosity and exploration and naked bodies not knowing they were naked. There were leaves made of apple candy and bark made of whispers and tiny granules of ourselves in her outsides. ⁣

There were bees nests and honey and warnings and witches and ogres and big oceans inside you. There were mothers’ voices, grandmothers, ancient ancestors in her rings. ⁣

When we were seven our ABCs were new worlds of possibility. We made pies of sand and sang to sing and told birds they were beautiful and soothed sleeping dogs knowing altogether that we had the power to connect with everything that shared a pulse. With things that didn’t, because of magic and the belief that no one thing was exempt from the pain and splendor of existence. ⁣

When we were nine we scraped tree bark from her, fought her with her own sticks, broke rocks against her and told her more secrets, new secrets. The secret of our bodies and our parents’ silent rebellion against us. We told her of our dreams, held her in the cool⁣

autumn and in the bitter chill of winter we shook snow from her branches to make forts. A tree that grew with us. ⁣

When we were 15 she saw us get our license, drive off with lovers to cliff sides to discover other bodies. Not doctor. When we were 15, I drove you to the edge of yourself. I put you in with her branches. My blood pumped next to her and you and we lost ourselves in the speed of astonishment in love. ⁣

When I was 15 we made tangles of ourselves. We put each other together in a way that neither one of us thought we⁣ could— We could fathom what it was to make a child and we didn’t know about any kind of sadness other than the death of our grandparents. We didn’t know about disease or hunger or lust aside from the one kind that came from love. That attached itself to feeling. That manifested.⁣

When we were 15 I drove to your house at midnight and breathed summer air, car smoke, and your breath back to you.

Your heart looked into the home of mine. My heart and its new carpet and not fully formed brick walls and you railed it. Spit in it and tree branches began to splinter, sent shards of my old self all through my body scraping my liver and lungs. She handed me alcohol and told me to clean myself up. Raddichio handed me a joint and said, “no more,” pacified me and at 18 I knew what sin was.

At 18 we drank whiskey under her. You lit a fire and I told you her leaves would catch but you didn’t believe me. She heated up, screamed but you couldn’t hear. Mother couldn’t hear her and the wind won for the first time since she was a sapling. She gave up. She was dying, and I was beginning to “grow.”

She told me that mother would go and that she would go and that none of it would mean anything to anyone but the two of us. I held her all night and told her that nothing could come again like her and she said nothing ever would.

She said that it was over. That my tiny fingers would never half wrap a branch again. That my hands were fixed. My teeth. My toes. My chest and the hair on it. That I would think not with my heart and that I would touch with only fingers. That I would kick when threatened and that I could do nothing to stop from getting burned.

In the winter of my twenty third year they chopped her down. You were somewhere in Texas and a family I didn’t know outside a house that had not been my own for over 3 years watched her fall. She didn’t scream when it happened. The heat from the fire you made spread from her leaves to her veins, to her rings and killed her. I spilled whiskey hoping it would allay her pain. I spilled whiskey into my own veins trying to feel her. Trying to feel the dreams her roots held and the mist her cracked saplings would make. ;0 When I was twenty four I made forts for myself. Forts of dead trees branches. Mine and others and I was burned just like she said. Time after time after time I was burned and blisters turned to impenetrable skin and lessons turned to morals which in turn turned to empathy and I began to understand what it was to care for another. I had scars. More scars than I could count in places that I didn’t even know could burn. I kept my head down and wished more than anything for my past. For my first sip of beer and my first puff of marijuana and the feeling of escaping to another part of myself and to not be myself altogether. I missed the embrace of a teacher and what it meant to feel things new. What it meant to be missed and to miss back and to not understand that all I’d ever want was her back. You back. It all back.

She whispered with the voice of my mother and of all that had ever played on branches to try and breathe. She said when I was afraid she said that there would be nothing to do but to continue to grow. Grow when I didn’t want to. Learn things and believe that one day those things would be things I actually wanted to know. Things I could use to help another. She whispered with you sleeping whiskey and her leaves screaming that I would one day be able to understand why the body gives out. That knees I used to hoist myself onto her would give. That my fingers would blister and vulnerable skin would become callused and would never be soft again. She told me that scar tissue was thicker than anything and that burning happened in the same place more than once so it was best to let it roughen. She told me that someone would again get through. Make a tiny incision in the upper crust of one of my old wounds and would be so gentle and so kind that they would gain entry and she said that not everyone will be gentle. But one would be.