Time Enough

A short story

This is my story. It begins in years long forgotten, when the world was a different place.

In the time when I was a girl there were skyscrapers and apartments, where rolling fields now grow, and telephone poles and cell towers replaced the tall forests of today.

I remember that my father had been a very important man, although I never really knew why. He owned a great deal of buildings, including the sprawling mansion which I called home. We had a large pool, and many toys and games, and other means of entertaining me, but above all those my fondest memories are of the great big pine that grew in our courtyard.

It fascinated me. For one thing it was the only tree I had ever seen. I loved looking at its boughs, laden with needles and pine cones, and running my fingers over the gnarled twisted bark. I loved how it looked wise and old, and yet young and gentle.

Once my father had told me that that tree was nearly 100 years old, of course he was wrong it was nearly 300, but it amazed six year old me that anything could be that old and still be strong and firm.

By the time I was eight the lowest branches were within reach of my fingers, and it wasn’t long before I had hauled myself into the branches, pushing continually higher and higher. It became my resting place, my refuge. Often when I was sent to bed I would instead climb with my favourite books high in the branches, where no one could see me, and read for hours on end. Many a time I slept the night there only to be wakened by the panicked cries of my search party.

I don’t know when I first saw him, but I remember it as if it were only yesterday. Looking up into the branches and seeing him crouched there, brown skin and wide eyes, what I thought at first was green hair, but later realized was a swath of shrub like leaves. His voice was young and gentle, but rough as the bark of the tree in which I lay. Sometimes he would perch there and watch me, other times we would converse long into the night. At first I found his presence disquieting, but soon it felt like he had always been there. I cannot explain in my own words exactly what he was, and so I will do my best to quote him “I am the tree, and the tree is me. We are one, and that is all.”

I was young enough not to question, but accept. On the night of my fourteenth birthday, after being laden with gifts and cards from my ‘friends’, I slipped away from the party and climbed into the branches of the pine. It was then that I realized that he was my only friend, of course there were many others who I called friends. But none of them were truly mine, they were my father’s, my name’s, or even my money’s, but not mine. He was the only one in the world who cared about me for me. My mother and father were loving as any parent could be, but I was more of a pet for them. Something small, which they could coo and giggle at, and love with all their great big hearts, but whom they never really understood. Not like he did anyway.

I remember repeating an argument I had had with father to him, and saying “It must be so easy, being a tree. Not having to worry about anything. Just letting time go, growing as you will. Never having to worry.”

He turned to me with a bemused smile. “Is that all you think it is?” He said, tucking a strand of hair behind my ear “If I die the tree dies, If the tree dies I die. I always have to be prepared, who knows what will happen next? There may be a plague of mites, or beetles, there may be a drought, or a flood, or perhaps some day I’ll open my eyes to the sight of a gleaming axe. There are a million ways for a tree to die, and many of them I can’t prepare for.”

I thought about death a lot after that. How it must be, waiting for something inevitable to happen. In a way we are all doing that, death cannot be avoided, only delayed. And so it is that we wait for the inevitable to happen, though we try to fight it and spend our whole lives dreading it. But he only waits for it, while he is alive he makes sure he is comfortable and cares for himself, but when his time comes he will embrace it whole-heartedly. Perhaps the only reason we cling to life so, is that, unlike him, we have so little of it, but then I think of the mouse and the vole, who’s lifetime is equal to one sixtieth of ours and I am sure that is not it.

Unlike when I met him, I remember exactly when I realized I loved him, down to the minute. It was a rainy night, I sat at my desk, I had just finished an assignment, and was getting into bed, when I looked out the window. He was reclined in a bough reading the book I had left up there, water droplets splashing on his head. And suddenly it struck me, how empty a place the world would be without him.

I told him just that the next day. He smiled and said the same thing about me. I asked him if he had ever loved anyone before, He laughed and said “When you have been around as long as I have, you are bound to fall in love. But I never spoke to them, it would only go wrong. They would die eventually, and I wouldn’t.”

It was a year later when tragedy struck, both my parents were killed in a car crash. I was put in a foster home, where I would stay until I became of age and was able to access my inheritance. I was alone then, all the people who had loved me were gone, or out of reach. I missed my parents with a terrible aching, and I missed my tree with something sharper and less hollow. For he was alive, so close, and yet so far. It was then on some sleepless night that I remembered something he had told me long ago. The words came back to me then.

“Over the mountains to the west, there runs a crystal blue brook. Follow it to the molten cooled well, and descend through where many have fell. Deep in the heart of the night of the earth, there runs a light, shining where none else can glow. There you shall find Maurass, spirit of secrets. In exchange for your deepest secret she will grant you one wish. But you must be wary, for she is tricky, and things are not alway as they seem.”

I do not think I would ever have done what I did if my parents had survived, but they did not. My restless boots and aching heart drove me from the foster home. I stole into the night, with nothing but my few possessions, some food, my wit, and his words echoing in my head. I walked through the night until I had left the city behind, and come to the foot of the mountains.

I walked until, exhausted, I fell asleep in the bough of a yew tree. It felt like an embrace from an old friend, perhaps we would have been friends, but I never saw anyone in that tree. I slept well into the next day. When I awoke I ate a little of the food I had brought and continued on. My path led me up the mountains, scrambling over boulders, and hopping streams. Clouds drifted over me in varying shapes and types. I felt a sense of wonder, stronger than I had felt before.

It was two days before I reached the valley over the mountains. I remember standing on a bluff and watching the sun set over the valley. The sight brought tears to my eyes, the waves the wind made in the grass, and the crystal like brook that cut through the valley…just like the story. I wondered if he had ever seen something like this, before the cities were built. I slept the night out there, and watched the sunrise the next day. I followed the brook like he had told me, walking in the cool water to soothe my aching feet. I don’t know how long it was before I reached the place where the earth fell away, but when I did it took my breath away. Cooled lava created ripples in the ground, all sinking into a massive hole, at least ten feet wide. It was like a mouth, slowly sucking the world into an endless void. I quailed at the idea of going down there, so I slept the night, curled up on the rocks outside. Perhaps it was fate, or some sheer accident, that before I had time to consider my descent into the dark, a root caught hold of my foot and sent me sprawling into the void. For a few terrifying seconds I was in free fall before the ground took a gentler slope, safely depositing me on the floor. I stood dusting off my legs. Rays of light shone down, illuminating the area around me. I thought of the words ‘deep in the heart of the night of the earth’. I did not wish to go deeper, to leave the light, which to me meant safety, behind. But I did. I stepped forward, walking until I could no longer see the tunnel entrance behind me. Every sound seemed as loud as a scream, and as frightening. Nonetheless I forced myself onwards into the dark…until it wasn’t. A thin vein had started in the rock, in the dark it appeared as a fluorescent blue. ‘Shining where none else could glow.’ For days I followed the vein. It nearly drove me crazy wandering in the dark, the only thing that kept me going was the thought of my tree, waiting for me. I thought of the night before my parents died, sitting awake with him, talking, and wondering, about the world. It kept me going. One day I woke up to the sound of soft singing weaving through the air. I thought I had finally lost my sanity, but still I forced myself to walk. And it was a good thing I did. Around the corner There was a woman. She sat against the roots of a wide, ancient tree, staring into the flames licking the top of a stone hearth.

My words were hardly a whisper “Maurass” but still she turned towards me. A small smile played across her face, flickering up to her eyes. I will never be able to tell you exactly what happened in there, I’m not sure I know myself. I know that I gave her a secret, my most treasured possession, one that will never leave my lips again, not even now, when there is hardly anyone to hear. I know that I whispered my wish to her, to let me be a great pine with a sturdy trunk and thick boughs.

She granted it, though I was not wary, not as I should have been. Right there I began to change, sinking roots into the soil, pushing through rock and soil until I rose to see the sun. I was rooted to the spot not two hundred miles from my tree, though it was as impassible as a thousand oceans for me. I cried out, though no sound came. I called to him, I called to my tree from across the world. I stretched my roots pushing through the soil, and the world began to change. It felt like minutes, though I am sure that it was not. My roots thickened and lengthened sending cracks across the world.  Spring turned to summer, the seasons faded away, one replacing another. Fall. Winter. Spring. Summer. Over and over in an endless loop. Years turned to decades, decades to centuries. Cities rose and fell, then vanished all together. My silent cry continued, unrelenting, until another silent voice joined, intertwining with mine. Next to me the earth began to crack, and a new sprout rose. Though it was small, no more than a sapling I recognized it, it was my tree. He had heard me, he had heard me call from across the world and he had pushed through the earth and come. Two hundred miles away, in the place that used to be my backyard, another sprout rose, it was a sapling that I had created, growing side by side with my tree. We were together again, though we continued to grow, merging into one entity, shooting up saplings across the earth, until a tall forest loomed on every mountain side, and meadow valley. We had split the world, we had changed it, we were together, and nothing would ever be the same. Not us. Not the world. Not anything. But change isn’t all bad, no, sometimes change is the greatest force in the world.