I see a tree

“What do you see?” “I see what you see. I see the tree over there and its green leaves and brown bark.” “Then do you see the way it sways itself into years I can barely remember beyond the sensation of a similar breeze, which smells like childhood?”

But she didn’t. She hadn’t thought much about childhood since it passed, aside from sudden jolts of memory that she was always too busy to entertain or too quick to suppress. It was then, for barely a moment, that she silenced the audience, the never ending sounds and all the unnecessary glares into one perfectly focused spotlight. And she saw the swaying leaves. She saw the chipping bark. In that moment she saw only the tree, and the breeze, and the moment passing in unison with her heart beating. Then a little too fast, a little too slow, until it was just right. And at that very moment that all was how it should be, the lights began to glare and the audience resumed their conversations. From a vague exasperation of being thrown back into the cacophony, of which now she was more acutely aware of than before, she felt a densely formed mass suddenly begin to weigh heavy in her chest. The sensation of sinking pervaded her body.

How could he know that she was in the ravages of life itself, in a form as concentrated as could be. Could he guess that she was being questioned just now in a manner very few could appreciate as much as him? That her moment of concentration, of a symphony that from some combination of coincidence and intent, individual manifestations of unwavering purpose that would be essentially bare and worthless if not conjoined to the cohesion and grace of fortune, came together, to offer her the opportunity into a world, though consciously unknown to her at the moment, she had searched for since those days of childhood ended. And that he knew this because, though he was the furthest from perfection’s expression, he kept steady and unwavering to the path that moments as those exposed. Though he could never frame it into a clear shape, he knew what shape it was not. And he did not remain loyal to what it wasn’t.

It was exactly during this moment that she was standing upon the precipice. She was being asked if she wanted to remember the feeling of cresting this highest mountain and, upon looking at the expanse below, if she could relish, savor, the view and the sounds and everything else that belonged as much to that moment as life itself belonged to her, whilst knowing intuitively that there was a desire nestled unconscionably deep that demanded her to descend to the very bottom, deeper down even than before, so that, once more, she would have not merely another height to ascend, but one that had grown even taller from the depth of the base to which she desired descend! To love the fleeting moment, the gentle breeze, the sun that invigorates (now, and burns later). Can she love what is now, she asks herself without knowing it, being intuitively aware that in her heart the seeds of destruction had already begun to germinate.