Trees

Published in Fast Forward: A Collection of Flash Fiction Volume Two

Black-eyed Susans tangle along the sides of the interstate, choking each other for sunlight. The tops of corn tassels are beginning to turn, silken tufts ready. Sunflowers without petals bow their heads as you drive by, alone in your minivan. There’s no way you could be this close and not go.

Each town name is strangely familiar, distant and familiar and every now and then a bend in the highway prickles you with recognition, Troy, Mound City, Rockport, Thank You for Visiting Missouri, Please Come Again…Welcome to Iowa. You’re approaching Offutt Air Force Base and a combination of instinct and memory tells you not take the first exit into Omaha but to keep going and take the second, the one with the big view across the Missouri River, gushing brown and opaque beneath the skyline. Casinos sparkle along the river now, flashing advertisements and upcoming acts. The Woodman Tower, once towering above the skyline like a solitary penis, has been upstaged.

You exit onto that ramp that curves gently under the interstate and softly drops you into the middle of downtown traffic and you think how much you love these kinds of city exits, and then it occurs to you that maybe it started here. Maybe preference is just nostalgia. We like a certain kind of mustard because it reminds us of a boyfriend, or we like sunsets because they remind us of our grandmother, and what if this bridge, this city, is the source? Could this one little city and that one little year of your life have mattered so much?

The trees have gotten so big, leafy monstrosities that make your memories seem smaller. You’re driving on that one road that you can’t remember the name of but you remember its long, curvy stretch from your dreams, clearly, and then you wonder which version of the street is more poignant, the real one or the dream one?

You navigate on pure instinct. You recognize a gas station with a green sign that hasn’t changed in 20 years, you feel it as the place to turn. And yes, there is your first apartment building. Well, it’s not really your first because your first apartment was with that girl from high school—you slept on her broken water bed and she slept on the couch and you lied about your age, even to her, and you let the upstairs neighbor go down on you just because he was older and bartended at the clubhouse next to the pool and you thought it might give you some status. But this, this was your first solo apartment, rented to you at age 16 because no one bothered to check your ID, and funny how often that was a theme, then, and the tree in front has gotten so huge, the whole building is in gorgeous shade. This was also the apartment that was haunted, the one you played the Ouija board in too many times until that dancer named Snow, the weird, coked out one that claimed she was a witch and would read your tarot cards on slow nights, she said that you had let in the demons. This was the apartment that Suzi lived in for that month. She never paid rent and she hardly ever slept in it, either, she just needed a place to store all her crap, and when she did sleep there it’s not like the two of you had any romantic rendezvous, that was all over by then. You wanted to be in love with her but she didn’t want to be in love with you, that was never her goal.

You pass the building slowly, then turn down a street you must have driven a hundred times, it feels as familiar as rolling over in bed, and you note the unchanged combination of rundown, antique, and functional shabby. People walk the streets with lunchtime hurry, more people than you remember, or maybe you were always just too absorbed in yourself then that you didn’t notice, and you wonder if here, on these streets, was where you developed your love for dying city centers and rundown buildings.

Between the trees you catch glimpses of the Missouri River; there used to be a make-out spot around here somewhere. The Skateland where you used to go on Saturdays and had your first sexual urges—always for the older ones, the ones who looked like they could take your hand and lead you through life the way they do in a couple skate, backwards—Skateland has become a warehouse of granite tabletops and kitchen tiling. The Ben Franklin craft store has become Dollar Tree. That quirky Italian restaurant where your family used to get pizza is now a Grease Monkey.

There is a certain kind of memory embedded in these places. A kind of memory poured between bricks and mortar. We cannot alter it. We breathe and dream in a place and then it holds us, it remembers us. But it remembers us as we were. So to return is to become a fool, everything illuminated with the glow of nostalgia, a yellowing around the edges, a softening. Maybe that’s the tragedy of living the same place all your life—you can’t return. Leaving, which takes one sort of bravery, and then returning, which takes something completely different. Which repaints you. Bravery and humility in order to grow a person. Like the trees.

I drove by my childhood home last, almost didn’t go at all. I went slowly, stalking the streets of the leafy, overgrown neighborhood and cruised around the old cul-de-sac slowly, remembering children I babysat and boys I loved. The tree in front of our old house was the only one gone. Amongst all those trees my house was exposed, naked in the bright sunshine.