In Memoriam

If you follow me on Facebook, you may have read this already, but I wanted to post it here just so it's easier to find next time.

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You are there, but you aren't. "There" is no longer where it used to be.

The woods are quiet, only the sound of birds and the wind accompanying you. The light is grey, dank and cool, leaching the greens out of the foliage around you until the color doesn't seem real. None of this does.

We stood there, in that clearing that wasn't always a clearing, and we were lost. Lost on soil that used to be more familiar than anything else. Lost on our own damn turf.

Nature defies your wishes, scorns your attempts to keep it down and defeat its inexorable will. It had boldly reclaimed the land I once delcared mine, ferns growing where before only dead leaves had lain, saplings standing bravely in what used to be the highway of my forest. The old outlines had blurred until I couldn't place them anymore, and you led me, just as you occasionally had before. But this time, we were both guessing. You were just a better guesser than me.

When you stand in a place like that, where the old is new, the memorized forgotten, and the certainty has crumbled to hesitancy, you are forced to face that time moves on, even if you try not to. The what ifs return with a vengeance. They tease you with ideal scenarios that can never be. You are here, and cannot possibly change the past now. I could not have saved this, no more than I could have predicted the fact I'd be here in the first place. It is a painful release to come to terms with that. A part of you mourns and reminisces.

And in the silence, we locked eyes. "It's sad," I said. A helpless gesture out at the wet green, at the trees that had moved and the soggy earth that hadn't. "All of this." It was a futile attempt to sum up 3 years' worth of change, both physical and otherwise.

A tacit nod, a gentle hug. You knew my pain. This had been ours, of course. We both missed how things used to be. We both missed the lazy summers, the shared snow days, the ease of seeing each other. We both loved that big blue house and these tangled, endless woods.

You leave with a double image imprinted in your mind: the place you knew--lighter, earthier, familiar and friendly--and the place you see: wild, neglected, natural and changed. They seem so different that it's hard to imagine they're even the same place. And it's closure, in a way. A final stamp that says you are not unwelcome, but you no longer truly belong. Life has moved on here without you, churning, relentless. You are wanted elsewhere now. It's an unsettling realization.

The quiet after you are gone is peaceful. Timeless. It, at least, has always sounded the same.

In the darkening evening, another tree gives into old age and rot and rumbles to the ground.