So we’re under the apple tree, the three of us. Among the curling trunks of the orchard’s shallow end. Behind them, the dark submerging density. And behind me, a sparse peppering, quickly breathing out into open field. Light drips through the leaf lattice above. Faces I knew from different sides of the same place, gathered mysteriously without much of a thought behind why. Unplanned, this is a real talk. Why are we so different? It seems that we’re all feeling that we aren’t. J was part of a friend group that accepted me when I showed up here, not knowing anyone after moving out to the edges of this new tree line. I consider him, after much deliberation, my best friend. He stands across from me but doesn’t keep still, moving his whole body around in expression as he talks, the way someone older speaks with their hands. F is someone I met threading early mornings in the sleepy square waiting rooms with thin attendance. Both unsure if we wanted to be there, we became unlabelled friends making the best of it. She sits on the bark where the tree bows and forks out shallowly, forming curving bridges, or in this case benches, of sturdy branch. We talk in the shade as a warm afternoon is passing.
Without us noticing, our nervous conversation gradually lifts out from the static it had been swimming in. The other sounds carried themselves back inside. We stay caught up enough to miss how far our honesty now sings. Shielded by the leaves and nothing else. Things I have wanted to say in all the little times, only just finding the words to translate the dumb language of glows and winds you feel under your skin. Their cathartic rush clutches me and it all dilates. Our disengaged peripherals fail to warn us of how bare we have become, how openly we are now exposing and mixing our vulnerabilities.
A cloud catches the sun and the light softens for a minute, before silently moving on. As it drifts away the shards of sun kaleidoscope through the tree’s canopy, searching for their resting glow.
Each of us has said some things we can’t take back, in this rare honesty we have coaxed from each other. We would deny it all in any other moment, but in this one we have each relinquished ourselves. It was real and it was dangerous and it was electric. Under the gentle dancing branches on a low warm wind, the only sound among soft green serenity was the urgent rumble of our pounding hearts. My blood is filled with beautiful panic at what I’m saying. I fizz and swim in what I hear back. And now I think I’ve told them every truth I had buried in me. Breathe. I had truly believed that some of these secret wonders I would hold onto forever. That at eleven years old I already had things I would take to my grave. And now I had none. Another deep breath. And then F spoke, and I sharply discovered I had more.
This wasn’t anything I’d sworn to keep to myself, this was something I had never even known. Her words cut into me and I began to sink and deflate. F had something she’d left until the end, and in the mist of all we’d said, she felt our galvanized trust anchored enough to support it. She wants to know what it’s like to be kissed. A new secret echoes in me. Something incredibly deep gets caught on these words and is yanked up from the depths of my subconscious. This thing that sat blurry and mushy underneath me is violently pulled into unflattering focus. I suck in a shallow breath. Her eyes nervously flick in every direction. Except for J’s, or mine.
Quit Vision 