Ryan

18

I saw you first when we were very young and both shared the sacred fruit of innocence growing within our outstretched arms reaching for the summer sun. The sun and rain gave withering life and stole my fruit when it was ripest and taught me how to lose, and taught you how to choose, and the two went hand in hand, but now when I look in the hazy mirror I see bleak and barren branches stripped of bark, myself a blot upon the land. And I awaited the axe. And even if it never came, I hunched and flinched and crept onward toward the sun, a moving bough in timeless trek, always coming back to you, even if I was unwanted. I stood on the porch in the winter rain and shouted your name and when you came to the door you had become what I could never be, and had what I had lost and never thought to see again, and I realized that the thief was not the sun nor the rain but you, the only one who shared that moment and the only one I would ever willingly give it to but it was different when it was stolen and taped and glued to your arms in mocking beauty but you were more horribly beautiful than I had ever remembered and so I reached for the axe I had always carried but never used and never knew was there and used it now to fell your trunk and hew from you what you had stolen from me, but not to take it back merely to plant it in the soil where you fell so you and I could grow a tree.