They emerged together in a new life as twin saplings in the damp, black mulch. Their seeds had spun down the previous autumn and lodged in the soil. They hadn’t blown away like the others.
She was alone with her consciousness, an innate sense of being; she had been once, twice, a hundred times before; so had he; and they had been—together. Without eyes or mouths, they could no longer see or speak to each other and they were too far apart to touch, but beneath the soil, their roots spread and twined as if they were one.
Send us back, she had asked. Please, let us have longer this time. Let us have a hundred years. (It had not been, could never be long enough. He had been only thirty this time. Who had it been that she’d spoken to, God?)
She had only the faintest sense of being, of awareness. She could not see the sun, but she felt it throughout her new body. She had little memory of what had come before. Who and what she had been. She could not comprehend them in this form. She knew only that she existed and that he existed, that they had been sent back together.
They took in sunlight and water and began to cast shade on the garden. They lifted their branches toward the sky to embrace the sun. Other saplings had grown up in the path of the lawnmower or so close to their parent that it was fruitless, but the two of them had drifted far enough from their mother tree that they were not caught in the sea of her roots or shaded by her canopy, as if set down by great, unseen hands.
The two trees grew along a fence in a yard in front of a little yellow house. The northernmost tree sat closer to the street beneath a hammock of sagging power lines. He would shield the house from the sun when he was grown, but for now they reached no higher than the backs of neighborhood dogs who wandered through the garden unattended.
Their first leaves were small and unblemished. They shed them together in the fall and went to sleep. And in the spring when they woke, they could sense each other’s lives in the movement of water through their roots. They took in air and rain and began to grow anew, until the weather turned cold again and it was time to rest.
The fifth summer, they had spread their branches wide enough that they could properly touch. When the wind blew, their leaves brushed against each other’s gently, and during storms they huddled together as they couldn’t any other time. But when the air was still, or when the ground had frozen over white, they had only their roots, like hands clasped beneath the soil.
As long as the rain continued to fall, they could stay here indefinitely. In spite of her dim awareness, something she perceived was lacking among the rest of the plants, she was content being still. A tree was never rushed. What she recalled from Before had been fast and loud. Here there was no chaos, and every moment of every day they were touching. Did he remember? Could he sense the happiness she felt with every sunrise?
But by the next autumn, she’d outgrown him, stretching so tall that they could no longer touch by the time their leaves burnished and fell.
They had lived lives like this one before; perhaps they’d been humans or dogs like the ones that dug up the garden. But in this form, she had no voice to tell him to catch up, only the rustle of her leaves in the wind.
Listen, she thought. Listen for me.
She knew those words but she could not remember why, nor speak them. He’d had a name once that she no longer knew. If he could hear her, the desperate shake of her leaves, he could not tell her. She could only wait for the sound of his leaves in return.
It was a slow, quiet existence waiting for seasons to change. She became home to a generation of squirrels. They scurried up and down her trunk every morning when the sun came up, their feet so soft she scarcely noticed their presence. Woodpeckers bored holes into her trunk, taptaptaptaptap taptaptaptaptap—those sounds she was aware of. Humans with loud equipment took her tallest branches when they had reached the power lines. She felt no pain like this, only a loss of weight and bulk, but she felt the vibration in every cell when her branches were severed and fell to the earth.
They had carved their names into a tree once. She bore a similar tattoo, with names she couldn’t read or see. It didn’t matter; they were the same.
Twenty years on, a great storm swept up the coast where the little house stood. For three days, the wind and rain pushed them sideways, shredding their leaves and breaking them where their branches were weakest. She felt the wind pull her backwards, felt the moment a part of her was no longer a part of her. Her left side had become lighter; she felt the wind where she’d never felt it before, and all around her was the moaning, the moaning of trees.
She became aware of the brightness, of heat when lightening struck nearby, of something massive falling down near her trunk. Another limb, felled from a larger tree—it had not been hers. But she had no hands, no means to help. She could do nothing but endure the wind, the rain, and think of him.
Three days passed and the storm blew north, exposing the sun, which dried the battered yard, the mulch. The shredded leaves turned to nothing heavier than paper and blew away. Humans came with chainsaws and cut the fallen branches to firewood. Her remaining leaves caught the stench of burning wood as the weather cooled, of their smoke pouring black from chimneys. They had survived. She sent out seeds of her own and prepared for another winter.
That spring, she emerged renewed. New branches began to grow from the place hers had fallen and she waited for the first sensation of movement in his roots. She flowered and rolled out new leaves, and when the heavy rains came, she drank them up. His roots were still; he went on sleeping.
When the wind blew, she listened for his particular rustling, but it was strangely quiet to the north. The great gusts which had always blown him into her arms only whipped around her. Aided by one of them, she bent to where he stood, but there was only air. The roots he’d wound around hers didn’t feel steady. One morning, they felt like nothing at all, and she recalled the long-lost shape of his human hand wrapped in hers and falling away.
She could have followed him then, but she had not. She had no such agency now. Like this, she could not ask about him, or look upon his sleeping face; his roots could have expanded or some of them could have died; he could have lost half of his bulk in the storm. But she would never know with certainty if he lived or had died, not until she was the one to fall and they met again beyond. She could only wait.
Sometimes, she thought she heard him near to the ground, like a child’s voice calling out, but she had no neck to bend downward.
For a century, she stood listening. Listening.
Photo by Daniel Mathew on Unsplash. TBH I’m not sure those are tree saplings, but the color was perfect and I’m quite tired.