why you'll stay there with her

You wrote a poem about a tree.
You wrote a poem and wrapped yourself in a shelter of leaves,
crafted sunbeams from nothing but syllables arranged 
in patterns like the mosaic of faces you can’t place into proper pictures.

You’ve always found such comfort in colorful lies
that lie like art across your lonely eyes, aching,
imagining ivy
and stories stretching to the edges of your hands,
of your lungs, drowning in the silver
and words you think you can breathe, 
because stories cannot leave you.

But there never was a tree.

Instead you stand
in the silhouette of a ghost, 
at most, a cut corpse,
a place in the snow where no one needs your answers.

You can see the footprints,
(her footprints),
footprints of years.
They are silhouettes, too.

She came here at twelve,
her body too small 
for the sadness that clawed at her chest,
and crawled across her skin, leaving lines only she saw,
came here
when all she wanted to do was break,
but instead she ran,
because running was breaking without the blood.

She came at fourteen,
to breathe more than monotony,
to fall into the trees
and the earth
and the sky
and this place that will stay as she fades away into wind.

At sixteen,
she stumbled into these woods
while green shoots pushed through the earth
for the first time,
watered them
with memories that slipped from the cracks as she peeled back her scars,
exposing the truths she so carefully buried,
digging nails into dirt (instead of her skin).

She came here in cold soaked sneakers.
She came here singing
and screaming,
traded salt for the stars
in her eyes.

She came here empty.

She left behind the expectations,
(hers, theirs, and was there a difference?),
filled herself 
with a world too vast 
for these lies and truths and aches to matter.

She came here,
again,
again.

Again.

She came here
because trees ask nothing of you
but peace.

And now.
Five years like a photo reel tumbling through your mind,
feet walking a path they have memorized
one more time.

The thorns (and you) have grown up,
but the cold hasn’t changed.
The stump 
of a tree that was dead when you got here,
a place to rest.

You can feel the footsteps of that girl,
quiet, questioning.
You want to wrap her twelve year old body up in your arms,
tell her the stories she needs to hear,
promise that tomorrow was better,
tomorrow wasn’t lonely,
tomorrow she won’t want to break.

You want to comfort your twelve year old ghost.

But she’s gone, 
gone,
and now you can only hold yourself
and repeat the stories 
that fall like silver and sunbeams on your face.

There is only you.

There was only ever you.