Palm tree memorial

It had been twenty-four years since she’d last seen it, but the place looked exactly the same. She checked her wristwatch. It was 3:00 pm. She decided to wait for 30 more minutes. And this would be the last 30 minutes she is going to wait for him. Not a minute more. “Not even a second”, the thought echoed in her mind. She sat down in their usual spot: a bench by the palm tree. For some inexplicable reason, the tree always seemed sick. The gardeners or government staff responsible always overlooked it.  

The tree had green leaves. But that kind of green is used to paint walls of morgues, not the eye soothing-plant-green. Its branches were always wilted, with two of them missing and their nodes rotten and dried to brown. But, miraculously it never died. Although it's true you would never expect a tree to die so easily, this tree would be an exception. Always there, to help her and him to ID their spot from hundreds of other benches among the filthy, underfunded, government-run park.

He often joked with that tree to make her laugh: 

“Hanging in their old-man? A few more days and you will get through this. Feel like eating somethin’. How about some bullsh*t? I mean compost, of course. Would that cheer you up? Okay, I will see if I can manage some tomorrow. You're gonna die soon anyway.” And once in a while she would present him a tight-lipped laugh but would frown most of the time.

 Once he actually bought a sack of compost and started tilling near the root of the tree to mix it. When she arrived, he let out the joke, he has been holding out for hours,” A pile of bullsh*t coming up for plant 73”. That was the time she laughed at first but frowned later anyway: it was unbearable to sit next to him or in their spot. They tried walking, but she kept her nose covered the entire time and he brought upon other frowned eyes with his compost-covered limbs and compost-flavored odor. They had to shorten their meeting that evening.    

The afternoon sky was turning red, bit-by-bit, from the western horizon. A gentle breeze touched her body. She saw other couples next to their trees: palm, guava, lichi, kodom all of them were sturdy and full of life force. Except for their miserable palm tree.

She started recalling her old theory about losses: "Some cuts are deep and require deeper and extensive cuttings to heal them. Say if one were pierced by a bullet(smaller cut), it would have to be taken out by surgery(deeper cut)". This analogy came into her mind at first a couple of days after the incident happened. She was waiting for him at the park, he was getting late as usual. She kept getting restless and was about to leave, and right about that time her roommate called. She sounded pretty uneasy. She said something like, “A big fight took place between the student-political factions at her college and her boyfriend was hospitalized”. When she reached the hospital, she heard the whole story: her boyfriend was getting out of the dorm just when the fight broke out. This almost never happens. The two student-factions keep foul-mouthing each other until faculties interfere and break them off but this time it went too far. He was caught in the midst of the fight and some guy bashed his head until he was almost unrecognizable. His defense was, “Never saw him at our meetings, so I thought it must have been one of the losers”. He was right, except he never went to any kind of political meetings or meetings that would not involve her. That's all he wanted. He wanted to keep making her laugh until old-age disagrees with their life. He never wanted power, or higher education funding, or a different government for that matter. 

So, since she was a med-student, she told herself, the best way to get rid of the despair would be to conduct a surgery. Hence, waiting for him hopelessly with the kind of makeup the way he liked. Promising herself that this would be the last 30 minutes she is ever going to be in that place. And appearing again the next Wednesday. Sure it hurt but she told herself: “Some cuts are deep, and require deeper and extensive cuttings…” 

Probably what she meant was: some losses require you to keep mourning until tears dry and the mind finally learns to live with the loss.  Except, in this case, there was no anesthesia. She knew she was not the type of girl to mourn over a once-funny-now-dead boyfriend her entire life. She would eventually move on, and get another boyfriend and date in this same place, since this is the only park near their college, and also because she is a practical, independent, and intelligent woman.  Therefore, she needed to get used to her memories to prevent her mind from snapping every time she would be here with someone else. Hence, the painstaking surgery.  But that was just an excuse.

One day, she shared her philosophy with her roommate who caught her waiting near the sick palm tree and she intellectually disagreed. Her roommate went even further to inform her parents, and they panicked. They married her off to a young-ambitious-banker working abroad. The ambitious-banker-husband didn't bother to make her laugh, but he was okay. No one could say that the man treated her wife and kids unfairly. 

It's been 24 years and she has matured, had kids, and went through many ups and downs to let this event affect her like before. She almost forgot about the whole thing but the tree made her recall.  She felt guilty about not feeling the same pangs of sadness and hopelessness she used to feel but that's what she wanted anyway. She also could not remember his face well enough, as she could once, but could recall some of his jokes. As her friends arrived, she went to join them. But the palm-tree kept standing. And it would stand for many more years to come. Bearing witness of many forgotten comedies and tragedies on behalf of nature herself and that's all that mattered.