Honey Roots Read online

  My mother, beaten down from her efforts to bring life back into her only daughter, pushed by the urgings of my good intentioned teachers, had finally reached her breaking point, and in fear of losing me as the family across the creek had lost their only son years before, the image of his limp body hanging from the arms of his father still fresh in her mind, she had decided to send me away.

  A change of scenery, everyone persistently told her, was all I needed to bounce out of my cloud of constant gloom.

  I managed to hide in the woods surrounding the creek for over a week after she had told me, adamantly refusing to leave the only place I could still feel the magic that Silas had shown me deep beneath the tree tops in the spring of our thirteenth year.

  I thought seriously of taking my own life. I wanted to lay beneath the small tree that rooted into the ashes of the boy I had never stopped loving. Desired to cut my flesh open with the small broken blade of his I still carried with me, I would let my blood wash into the soil with his ashes, I would die and become one with the earth as he was. I would become a tree too, our roots would intertwine as we grew, and there we would remain in the middle of our kingdom in the woods for always and forever, as we had whispered about in our short time together. The only thought that prevented me from bleeding out in front of the creek was a small nagging fear that my body would be found and then moved, far away, never to be near Silas again.

  Defeated and starving, I had eventually begrudgingly given in, retreating to my mother, who promptly brought me to the airport, my bags already packed and waiting for my inevitable return in the trunk of her car. She sent me to California, to a small town just below the famous San Francisco Bay, where I would stay with her less eccentric older sister, my Aunt Molly, for the remainder of high school, or until I had a change of heart and perked up. Something I couldn’t even begin to fake in protest, drowned so deeply in the endless well of my own misery.

  At thirty-three thousand feet in the air, I felt the slightest ebbing of hope slip its way into my mind. Maybe, just maybe, I thought to myself as we passed through the clouds, the sunny California coast would cure me, make me feel alive again as I hadn’t since Silas died a little over three years ago.

  My Aunt Molly lived alone in a small white cottage that sat atop a sheer cliff overlooking the sea, her fluffy white cat Moe was her only companion. Unlike my mother, my Aunt Molly was a perfectionist, bordering on obsessive compulsive in most aspects of life, the main of which was her pristine home that I now invaded with my clouds of gloom and despair as I stood in the entryway, afraid to touch the institutional looking sheer white walls, or the light tan spotless carpet that showed lines from being freshly vacuumed. She had pure white milk pitchers overflowing with pure white flowers that matched the walls to the exact stark shade of blankness, so perfect, that when I looked at them I had to stifle a strong desire to pinch their stems, to test and see if they were real. Would nectar leak out as I popped a hole into them with the tips of my nails, or would my fingers only find a hard-plastic decoy? I wondered as she spoke, words that went passed me, bouncing away off the bubble of grief I still held close around me.

  I had fantasized on the plane about seeing the ocean when I would land, thinking that when I took in the vast beauty of the sea I would suddenly be cured of the relentless melancholy I felt having lost out on the magic of the woods. Looking past my Aunt Molly in her plain white dress that matched her plain white house, out the vast floor to ceiling windows that looked out over the sea behind her, I knew that the ocean alone, would never be enough to save me.

  The school that my aunt had found for me was unlike the school I’d left behind, the one I’d never really felt a part of, in every conceivable way possible. The classes all took place outdoors under the unimaginably humongous redwood trees, and consisted of subjects like yoga, abstract pottery, and alternative energy engineering, in place of the standard subjects like physical education, art, and science. The teachers were all called by their first names and didn’t look like teachers at all to me, in their Grateful Dead t-shirts and cargo pants. Being in the forest soothed me, let me break free from my void of dark despair as I stared up to the seemingly never-ending tree tops above, the trees so starkly different than the ones back in my wooden kingdom, they were unclimbable, and young boys cannot fall out of unclimbable trees. There were only thirty-three students beside me in attendance, and not one, to my relief, made any effort to pressure me out of my solitude, or question my depressing poise.

  Sunny California, which had turned out to be more foggy than sunny, did not cure my grief as I had hoped while on the plane ride there, but I did manage to develop an easy routine. I would sleep all night in my light pink blanketed bed, the softness strange after so many nights in the woods, I would wake in the morning and face the stark white that surrounded me, showering and dressing quickly to get out of their confines sooner. I would stand on the small patio, looking over the sea, mostly thinking of Silas but sometimes as time passed letting other thoughts run through as well. Thoughts of school and the art projects I was currently doing there, thoughts of my mother, I wondered if she was lonely, if she ever sought comfort in the woods as I had.

  As much as I tried to hang on to the constant loop of memories that I had played over and over in the years since Silas fell to his death, life had begun to inevitably break its way back in, bursting my protective bubble, elevating me slowly but surely away from the creek where my mind preferred to wander for so long.

  The remainder of high school passed in a haphazard blur that seemed to pass by in weeks rather than years. Though I remained steadily antisocial, unable to even date the few boys who asked because when they had asked all I could think of was how they didn’t compare to Silas Jackson, his love pure and true as the light of the sun at only thirteen.

  I had gradually and begrudgingly grown to love things that did not have an association with Silas.

  I fell for the ocean slowly, a feather floating down from an impossibly tall building, swaying in the breeze until it finally fell softly and effortlessly to the ground. I would swim out into the freezing cold waves until my arms ached and my head spun. Only then would I look back at the shore, casting it a fleeting glance before plunging into the next wave that built behind me, letting my body be devoured by the salty water, turning and swirling without any control, unable to breath or see or lift myself above the waves as they tumbled me into the sand below. I gained a trust for the ocean, no matter how recklessly I entered it, it always carried me back to shore. It filled my ears and invaded my mind with its green murky color, erasing the thoughts that I couldn’t without it, only for a moment, until I once again had to come up for breath.

  Art is where I learned to make my pain physically seen. I painted the ebbing water of the creek, sketched the arching branches of the trees, formed small stones out of clay, that would have made perfect skipping stones. I created the kingdom forgotten in the woods all around me. I poured my sadness into it, and by the time I began clearing out my room at Aunt Molly’s after graduation, preparing for a summer back home before going off to art school in New York, it showed.

  It showed in the bright yellow paper leaves I’d hung from the ceiling, from the watercolor paintings that dotted the window ceil and showed the water in the creek so clearly, I thought I could feel it on my fingertips as I touched it. It showed in the shorts that Silas had cut for me nearly five years before, which I had remade, adding material so that I could keep them as I grew, only keeping the rough frayed bottoms the same. I turned my pain into art that had earned me a scholarship at one of the most prestigious art schools in the country. It became the backbone that I had lost since leaving the sturdiness of the woods.

  I still thought of Silas often, but the memories were faded now, like old photos that had been left in the sun too long. I could no longer hear his voice or remember the feel of his hand in mine. The only truth left to prove he once existed the small broken blade I still carried with me alw
ays. I wondered how time had changed the woods, if the tree I had planted in the moonlight with his ashes remained. I had boxes of failed portraits, paintings, sketching’s, and scribbles in which I had tried to capture the boy that ran wild and barefoot through the woods in my memory, but I could never manage to match the sun kissed glow of his skin, or the light speckling of freckles that marked his face. I could never contain him onto a sheet of paper, as no one had been able to contain him in his life.

  When my mother had sent me away to the coast of California I had thought of nothing but how I would return home promptly following the three years that remained of high school. Where I would lay beneath the branches of the tree grown from Silas’s remains, and there I would decompose into the earth, becoming a tree of my own. I would wrap my roots around his as I grew, rooting us together for always and forever as I had promised right before he had left me alone in the world. As the time had passed, and my memories of the spring days under the woods grew more distant, I was ashamed to admit this plan had changed.

  Although I still mourned the loss of the future Silas and I would never get the chance to share, I was bashfully excited for the future I would have on my own.

  I refused to admit it aloud, but I was subtly terrified of going back into the woods, afraid to feel the magic again, to see the changes in the grave in the hollow of the oak tree that had taken the life of my first love with a new matured view. A part of me wanted to leave the woods and creek and secret kingdom of my youth in the past. To never again step foot on the soft earth that would lead me down the path my mind still knew so well, so that it would forever remain unchanged, a beautiful snapshot in my memory in which I could recede, as Silas remained, his youthful glow forever eternal.

  I knew as I boarded the plane home that I would not, could not stay away. I could hear him calling to me in the wind that tickled my hair against my face, just as I had the night I set him free from the blue ceramic tomb in the light of the moon and scattered him into the earth he yearned for.

  I could feel a warmness within me return as my feet touched the pavement that would lead to my home and the woods below it, it propelled me forward, back into a place I had thought I may leave forever in the past.

  Chapter Seven

  My mom was waiting outside of the airport for me, virtually unchanged in the years that I had been away from her. I focused on her face, on the clusters of fine lines that had grown deeper on the corners of her eyes, watched as they moved when she smiled. She hugged me in a tight embrace and I could smell the warm sweet smell of the tree sap in her hair, I buried my face into it. I was home.

  As we rounded the second to last bend before our home came into view, she began to slow the car to a dramatic crawl.

  “If you’re going to jump out and take off into the woods, I want to make sure I’m going slow enough so that you don’t break a leg.” She joked with me lightly, but I could feel the desire begin to burn inside me in a way I had long ago forgotten as her car hit the gravel of our driveway and the yellow and orange tops of the woods presented themselves glowing invitingly us as we approached.

  I gripped the edges of the seat below me, clenched my teeth together tight, and tried to push the urge to run out of my body.

  I failed.

  I leapt out in one swift movement before my mom was able to stop the car, I sprinted the short distance from the car to the edge of the woods as if it were about it explode, only stopping once my feet touched the soft familiar ground. I stared down into the trees, everything was exactly the same, but my perspective had changed slightly. I was taller now, my actions less awkward, my eyes had taken in worlds different from this one as they had not before I’d left.

  The trees, which had once looked so vast and towering to me, felt small now, having spent so much time among the gigantic redwoods on the coast. The leaves were less colorful than they had remained in my memory. Reminding me more of the fake decorative leaves people in California put out before Halloween, where no trees of this color actually grew, more than the trees that I retreated into in the picture book of spring days I kept on a rotating roll in my mind. I reached out and touched the rough bark of the spindling maple nearest to me on the edge of the short strip of grass, that had now gone faded and brown in the years of heavy sun and neglect. I stopped just before I reached its surface, my hand hovering just above its cookie scented trunk. I turned back then, looking at my mother, who watched me as if I were still a small child, toddling dangerously near the treacherous wooded hillside.

  I turned away from the woods and followed her towards the house, as we passed the banister of the thin porch whose purple paint had faded to a dirty lavender color in my absence, I saw the remains of the crowns and necklaces Silas had once braided together for me with the small blades of grass he would pluck from around us as we lay in the sun, infatuated in the delicacy of our budding young romance. The grass had dried and been swept away long ago, but the stains where I had laid his gifts as he made them for me in the hot afternoons of those late spring days remained, a stark contrast to the faded lavender banister that once held them. I ran my fingers across each shape, tracing them with care, the crown he had made me our first afternoon in the grass, the bracelets he had made to match it, the long braided necklace that had taken him a full day to create. The faded marks they had left ran all the way down the side of our little yellow house, bringing tears back into my bottoms of my eyes that I had not felt the burn of since I had last been in the woods that stood to the side of us now.

  My mom leaned in the doorway of my room as I began to unpack. My old room felt foreign and cluttered to me now, unlike the familiarity of the woods. She had left it untouched, my bed was still clumsily made, a book I had been reading before I was sent away laid open and face down on my otherwise bare green dresser. It was as if I never left, and yet I felt like an unwelcome intruder standing within its pink walls. I wondered, if I were to turn the shower on full blast, and leave the door connecting my bedroom to the small blue glittery bathroom opened wide as I used to do at thirteen, if Silas’s name would still appear on the glass as the steam filled my small window. I faced away from my mother, concentrating on unpacking my, already cleaned and flatly ironed by Aunt Molly before I’d left, clothes. Placing the old jaggedly cut jean shorts to the side on the edge of my bed.

  “You can go if you want, I won’t stop you.” My mother said softly from behind me. It felt like a hard blow to the face.

  “Go where?” I asked, without turning to look at her, feigning indifference.

  “The trails have all overgrown now, no one has been down to the water since you went away. Be careful please.” She said softly, sad notes of sympathy dubiously obvious in her voice.

  When I turned around to face her, I found she had already retreated, waiting for me to tear into the woods as I always had, knowing it was inevitable, hoping to get it over with. I slipped out of my soft white capris and into the shorts that had formed to the shape of my body like a glove and become a faded grey over the years of constant wear.

  I ran, barefoot and bare legged as I hadn’t done in so many long years, through the house, past the gravel drive and into the woods that knew all of my darkest secrets and wishes.

  To our kingdom, I had finally returned.

  The over grown weeds that had taken over the paths were tall enough to tickle my chin as I passed through them. Under my feet, the earth felt the same, as I carefully glided down the path that had carried me down to the water in the dark of the night. The dry weeds sprang back to life behind me as I trodden over them down the hill, leaving no evidence that I had ever passed through their brittle barriers.

  I could hear the creek before I could see it, could smell the warm sweet familiar smell of the sap heating in the sun as the bushes that lined the water came into view. I thought they had been tall the day I had first spied on Silas, from my hiding place behind their cover, and had forgotten them ever being there by the time I had been forced away fr
om this magical place, Silas and me having crumpled them into the ground as we played and reclined on the edges of the water so often in the early days of the spring that they had vanished into the ground below well before he had fallen across from them. They had all grown back now in full force, creating a thick thorny wall between me and the water behind them. I edge along their unpassable barrier until my body lightly thudded against what I had hoped would still be there, the large truck of the tree whose branches had given out under the small weight of Silas’s young body. It was hidden by the tall weeds, but its presence was indefinite, I climbed onto its top, where I could see the creek still gently flowing beneath it. I stood in its very center for a moment, taking in the bittersweet nostalgia, the bridge between our two kingdoms.

  The weeds on the other side of our kingdom where even taller, as were the trees, as if someone had been spraying a magical growth serum over only this side of the water’s edge. I stumbled through, unable to see, the weeds now taller than I was, on the familiar path to the rotten stump. I felt its soft mossy edges right where I had remembered it would be, I touched my hand to the ground, wanting to feel the warmth of the spot where we had grown in love, the sun baking our skin and the creek cooling our toes. I felt the exact spot I knew from the memory of my touch would be the place our hips had met on those lazy spring afternoons, but instead of the soft earth I expected, my hands landed on the hard, thick roots of a tree, protruding out of the earth as they grew, directly in the space Silas had always happily lounged. I wrapped my fingers around them gently in frustration, gliding along the soft bark as I made my way up towards the space where I had mixed Silas in with the earth.