The Red Tree
There was a red tree in front of me once. I want to say I saw it, but that would be a lie of the kind I told myself often in those days. I saw leaves. Thousands of them, each one crimson red and perfect, and I catalogued them the way I do with everything: in pieces, never the whole.
It was exactly noon. The sun stood directly overhead, pressing down so hard that the world gave up on shadows. Nothing dared to cast one. Nothing except me, though mine did not fall on the grass. It fell inward, where it always had.
A stranger stopped beside me. Mesmerized, yet he said nothing. He simply stood there with his head tilted back, taking in the entire tree at once — trunk, branches, canopy, the way it held the light like a held breath. I envied him before I understood why. His eyes were full because his heart was full. Mine was split into rooms that did not speak to each other, and a fragmented heart sees a fragmented world.
That was when I noticed her.
She stood behind the tree, half-hidden, a girl in a red dress — as if the tree was related to her. Her hair caught the noon sun and turned to gold. She was humming something low, but her voice felt as if the shell of my armour wanted to turn into wax.
For a long time I could not move. Then, from somewhere beneath the fear, I fathomed courage and walked toward the hypnosis, fully aware that was what it was, and not caring.
I called to her.
She turned, and here is the strange part: she turned toward a shadow. Toward the only shadow in that whole sunlit field. Toward me.
When her eyes found mine, they did not stop at the surface the way eyes do. They went through. It was as if she stepped inside my chest with all her light gathered around her, took my heart from the dark room where I had been keeping it, and carried it upward, set it gently behind my eyes.
And when I looked around again, the forest had changed. Or I had.
Every tree was the red tree. The same impossible crimson, the same wholeness, repeated in every direction, as far as sight could go.
I had not been standing before the one beautiful thing in the world.
I had been the one fragment in a world that was already whole.