The Axe Forgets, but the Tree Remembers

The axe forgets, but the tree remembers. It comes back to me, all of it. Memory as water. A deluge that floods my lungs, rushes through the map of my body that only knows one place by heart: the childhood years. The absence of it. The darkness of it. Years of innocence stripped away. Imagine the body of a little girl, sliced up like wood. Thrown into the fire. Years of black, curling smoke. Years of papery ashes floating in the wind like a wish. How do we go from there? What do we stitch together—a body or the ghost of one?

The axe forgets, but the tree remembers. The tongue as a knife. Pink and fiery and charged with ruthlessness. The sharpness of words that slash through the air before they land. How they settle on a dress, break through the stiffness of a body, and plunge into every soft and raw thing within. Nothing is spared—the flesh, the heart, all the binding tissues of being. Harshness that poisons a stream, red vicious language that twists the mind and renders a vessel weak, defeated, useless. How do you take it back? Do you stretch your hand deep into the chest and pluck it out like a seed from the ground? Do you dig and sift the soil in your hands, feeling for an unmarked place to salvage? But you forget, don’t you, how quickly pain spreads and takes over a body. Life itself sits at the roof of our mouths. Open it wide and look at all the deaths that fall out.

The tree remembers the striking and splitting. The blood that never gushes out. The mourning of a witnessing forest that won’t speak. The dark shape of wounds. The phantom songs of the night. The cracked body slanting towards the earth like a streak of light. The loneliness of a final breath.