A Fallen Branch

I love my branches. I love them like I love the moon. I’ve shared my sap with them and grown them from nothing. At one time, there was nothing on my trunk. Now branches reach to the moon and lift her my songs.

But sometimes my branches fall. Wind tears them off, men cut them down, or disease infests them.

I awake in the night to the pain. It’s the pain of memory and the pain of emptiness. Where there once was a branch, there is a ragged hole. It reaches almost to my core and I feel the pain through every ring. My bark bleeds, my insides are out and the wind seeps into places it should never enter. Sap runs down my bark. Tomorrow there will be a stain, and the next day. My paper white bark will be stained from the pain and I will always be stained from the memory. My branch is gone.

When it fell, slivers fell with it. The branch took more than itself when it left. It took a part of me. A part of me lies there on the soil, showered around my base. Slivers of what was lie there and slivers of what should be.

I feel it in my sap. I feel it in my roots. My roots grew symmetrical to every branch, and now that one is gone, my roots are unsure. Should they grow as they had before? Or should they give up? Should they bother to support the branch that is no longer? Maybe they keep growing to conserve the memory. Maybe they shrivel up and die, unable to continue without their counterpart. Maybe they linger in the dirt unsure forever.

I imagine my branch. It must be covered in sap somewhere. It too seeped when it fell, but even now I know the branch is unaware. It cut itself off. It fell. It left my side and now is on the ground, but it doesn’t know. My sap sustains it now though it is dead.

If a gardener were here, if the man in the moon or the tree shepherds came down, perhaps they could rejoin my branch to my side. They could bind my branch until the sap flowed freely. My wounds would heal and my bark would grow once more over the seam between my beloved branch and my trunk. I could grow my branch once more.

Every branch is beloved. Every death devastating.

In my own suffering I feel the pain of my fallen friends, of the one they swore to save, yet destroyed anyway. I feel the pain of the hurricane. I feel the pain of the loggers of the night as they strike my friends and family. I feel it in my rings. I feel it in my budding leaves. Every fiber feels the loss of my branch. Every drop of sap feels the pain of the world compounding and doubling. I feel it rising around my roots and devastating my being.

I feel pain, but what of my branch? It lies there cut off. It is good only to be thrown to the fire, but it doesn’t know. It thinks it still has life. It still drinks the sap I gave it. It buds and flowers as if it were connected. It lives as though alive, but is dead.

It goes on, growing as long as my sap runs through it. My life flows through it, but one day my life will leave it. One day, my branch will look up at the moon with death in its eyes and will now it was I, and not another, who gave it life. It will know that I, and not another, sustained it. It will know that I, and not another, had the power to heal it when it first broke. But then it will be too late. By then my side will have closed and new branches formed. By then my branch will be dead though I could have saved it.