978 words

A tree is not a home. But you, twelve years old and bony, dragging a suitcase behind a gray mother into the gray building where you were now going to live, looked back at me as though it was all wrong. As though the building should have been me.

You came out soon afterwards, walked across the parking lot and over the low wire fence into my patch of land. (I saw you, in a manner of speaking, like an arrow rushing at me in the dark.)

I could tell that you had never seen a birch before. You pressed your cheek to me and asked if my white bark meant that I was old. Maybe you thought I was like your grandfather, whose white hair had grown long in hospital and spilled over gray pillows. Maybe you thought I was like you. You were so young; the whole wide world, to you, was nothing but a mirror.

On sunny afternoons after school you stopped by and leaned close to my hollow, where damp moss grew and squirrels sheltered. You told me about your second-hand uniform and about the school lunch of sweet bread and milk that you ate every day because there was nothing else. (I heard you, in a manner of speaking, your words tumbling down like bitter sap.)

Even when you grew up and let go of all the things grown people do, you still held on to me.

After your mother died, you climbed up and nestled into my hollow, folded yourself until you fit. You told me about her: how the disease had eaten into her until there was nothing left; how the funeral had eaten into the rent money. How you were left with no place to go. “Lucky I have you,” you said, “my friend, my home.” I could not say anything.

In the daytime you went to find work, food. You moved from job to job, came back at night smelling of cigarettes and sometimes drunk. (I smelled you, in a manner of speaking, like beetles under my bark.)

You carved into the hollow, enlarged it so you could curl up comfortably at night on a bed of dry leaves. “Thank you,” you said, “for still being here,” though I could not leave. “You’re the only one I have left,” you said when you were sappy-drunk; and angry-drunk, you shouted: “I bet you’d go if you weren’t rooted in place. You don’t even care for me.” Sometimes you punched the trunk, just above the initials you’d carved inside a heart when you were twelve. (I did not feel a thing.)

They cut me down one morning while you were at work. You’d just got a steady job selling bus tickets in a booth. When you came back, I was still lying there, and the men who’d cut me milled about, smoking. You yelled at them, asked to see permits. It almost came to blows. In the end you asked them if you could have me, and they shrugged and said, “Suit yourself.” You dragged my trunk to the back of the building, leaned it against the wall.

That night you slept shivering, face pressed against my bark. “Don’t worry,” you said, “I’ll never leave you.”

You found someone to stay with and hauled me into his garage. I was neither alive nor dead: we live slowly and take a long time to die. In the dimness you stood hunched, gray like the day I met you, running your hands over my bark. Then you took a chainsaw to me.

You cut carefully. You cut long, straight boards, and practised on other logs until you were sure to get it right. Those days, you smelled of nothing but turpentine and wood. (I still sensed you, like an arrow flying past its target, but no less certain.) You reassembled me, bent my boards and nailed them together, brushed them with resin. In your hands I became something new. I became a boat.

When you took me to the river, I could have warned you. I could have told you grief makes careless work. But you got into the boat, sat on the bench you’d made from my body. When you paddled out, the water rushed at me, searching for a crevice, a weak joint.

We birches are not strong; perhaps that is why you were so drawn to me.

We had already left the shore far behind before you knew something was wrong. I tipped to the side, and the water lapping at my wood felt like relief. You had to leave me behind and swim to shore. By the time you got there, I was lost in the current, and your friend put his arm around your shoulder and gave you some advice. I imagine he might have told you: a tree is not a home, though I doubt those were the words he used.

From here, where I lie half-buried, taken over by moss and polypores, by slugs and rattlesnakes, I think of you sometimes. And among the whispers of stories that tangle under the earth, touching the decaying substance of my body, your story reaches me.

I don’t know how you live now. I know you have a house, and a spouse, and a son; but I don’t know if you burrow into living things. I don’t know if you etch your name into them, if you shape them with your hands into a boat for you.

That is a lie. I know you do. You are older now, but the world is still your mirror.

I know you’ve planted your backyard full of birches. Together with your son you pushed each sapling down, tied them to wooden stakes. You watched him run his hands over their smooth bark. And in that moment, I think you felt at home.

© 2026 Diana Dima