They came for the trees that day. That day when I realized that everything was going to change. I had known how you were slipping away from me, brusquely and alarmingly quickly, for far too long.
I told myself to let you. To let you go without trying hard, but only because I knew you would be back again to coyly slip me a smile that promised more but never delivered; and so I left easily. I shrugged aside the unexpected burst of sunlight in my face as I hurried on my way, ignoring the yellow hardhats bustling about busily.
But then the sunlight spread into my street. Not just along the neighborhood, but right into my street and so it was the next week I returned. And the next. The chickens and squirrels moved on while the birds cried in despair, as they overlooked from the few ancient branches that were left standing.
The fences went up yesterday. Construction fences.
*************************************************
I don't know how to say what I have to say. How those corrugated metal sheets that fenced the dead sand where the forest once stood took away my dreams. My idyllic dreams of lying about on that patch of land. That flat lump of ground often decorated by an overnight beer from someone else who found it charming. Or maybe simply because they had been working there.
No longer would I be able to camp there, or wander there in the middle of the night for an illicit tryst or adventure. No longer would the forest promise to house some mythical ghost or beast, or a colony of dissatisfied teens hiding in refuge from their parents and the world, strangely within 100m of a shopping center.
And I wouldn't run there in the middle of the night on a whim, and she wouldn't pick up my call and be there with me, not least because she didn't even live there anymore. She moved a while back. And it tires me to ask for her so anymore. Too much today. Too much.
It's over.
Time to build something new on that overgrown mess that is my heart.
I told myself to let you. To let you go without trying hard, but only because I knew you would be back again to coyly slip me a smile that promised more but never delivered; and so I left easily. I shrugged aside the unexpected burst of sunlight in my face as I hurried on my way, ignoring the yellow hardhats bustling about busily.
But then the sunlight spread into my street. Not just along the neighborhood, but right into my street and so it was the next week I returned. And the next. The chickens and squirrels moved on while the birds cried in despair, as they overlooked from the few ancient branches that were left standing.
The fences went up yesterday. Construction fences.
*************************************************
I don't know how to say what I have to say. How those corrugated metal sheets that fenced the dead sand where the forest once stood took away my dreams. My idyllic dreams of lying about on that patch of land. That flat lump of ground often decorated by an overnight beer from someone else who found it charming. Or maybe simply because they had been working there.
No longer would I be able to camp there, or wander there in the middle of the night for an illicit tryst or adventure. No longer would the forest promise to house some mythical ghost or beast, or a colony of dissatisfied teens hiding in refuge from their parents and the world, strangely within 100m of a shopping center.
And I wouldn't run there in the middle of the night on a whim, and she wouldn't pick up my call and be there with me, not least because she didn't even live there anymore. She moved a while back. And it tires me to ask for her so anymore. Too much today. Too much.
It's over.
Time to build something new on that overgrown mess that is my heart.
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