Chestnuts

My fingertips almost brush yours beneath the soil, the shroud of anonymity between us, a nameless witness as a hopeful sapling of American Chestnut is plunged into the ground at my feet. The soil embraces it, our carefully selected plot of dark loam at the edge of the forest already home to a cluster of optimistic siblings. Eaten to slumbering near-extinction by a fungal blight in the late 1800s, you’re captivated by the idea of giving reality to the historical forests of mature chestnuts, towering woods as deep as the sea floating in your mind’s eye. In the cracking-openness of early spring, you motivate me to go out and make a difference, to feel the Earth against my skin. 

The sun is just a little bit too bright, and the ground cool with the shiny newness of winter melting. I smell new beginnings surrounding me. Early spring is the best time for planting, you said. As always, I follow your lead, the roots of the chestnut connecting our hands the way I wish I could. 

We planned this in the fall, over an eclectic picnic of tortellini with walnuts, arugula salad with almond slices, pecan pie. Why not chestnuts, you asked, as we looked out at the changing leaves from our hilltop picnic spot. Don’t trees grieve? Before the research, before the careful plotting of tree placement, the start of the indoor germination process, I just sat and watched you. Your eyes reflected flames of red and orange forest. Your lips curved softly, philosophically, and your too-big gold earrings dangled, dancing on the acoustic breeze of rustling trees. I remember wishing to sit inside your mind, to know, for a moment, why I was the one sharing this hilltop with you. 

I’ve only known you two years, an oddly liminal duration that could have been a lifetime, yet leaves even early memories of you raw and stinging. You, introducing yourself with a dazzle of warmth and a crooked smile. You, your nose tipped in red and cheeks frosty, expression all too zen as you lower yourself into a frozen pond and wear my proffered sweater around the campfire afterwards. You, reading Camus and Nietzsche and Baudelaire, constantly searching for poetry and meaning in everyday experience. You, singing softly to your guitar in the way you do when you don’t mean to be anything more than background music but end up giving an impromptu performance anyway. I hope you mean it when you say you like talking with me.

In two short years, you show me what it means to want. Dreams of freedom, vague and foggy as freedom is, travel from your words to my thoughts. I imagine running together through a yellowing field, your smiling eyes upon me. You say we’re destined for more, and I start to believe it. Time with you is time spent in maybe-one-days, leaving me warm with possibilities. Planting chestnuts is just a passing fascination on the way to greater things, hopefully leaving a mark on the future. Planting chestnuts is simultaneously wanting what was and what will be. In two long years, you show me what it means to wait. 

Once, we drove north without a destination, just following your need to be away, away, away. We parked at a beach somewhere, nowhere, and put the back seats down so we could lie in the open trunk. The sea air smelled dangerous as cold waves crashed, frothing and biting at the shore with the power of the unknown. You felt safe though, and we pointed at stars from the trunk and I laughed as you told me made-up mythology. Why are the Greeks always right, you asked, why shouldn’t we write our own histories? At the time, your spontaneity filled me like a wave thundering into a cliffside cove- sudden, all-consuming, thrilling. To simply go is a freedom learned, unwinding years of shoulds like tugging loose a thread in a sweater. In the morning, I woke with an empty stomach as the tide subsided and remembered what illusion meant. You had forgotten your wallet. I bought you an egg sandwich at the McDonald’s drive-thru. I watched the trees rush by on the four hour drive home, and wondered how many of them had once been chestnuts. 

The fungus of the chestnut blight only eats the above-ground body of the tree, leaving the roots alive below the soil, the infection dormant within them. 

You always did seem a bit better than me. You, constantly chewing on all the issues of society, leaving room for nothing but tasteless desires. You, explaining in that oh-so-wise tone of yours why humans are fundamentally unhappy, all the things we need to abandon in order to find purpose. You, describing human connection as a type of liability, smiling throughout, and telling me that we should just go out and live. I thought we were. 

You’re convinced there’s a need to see beyond what we perceive, while I don’t even seem to realize that I’m blind. The world is something to be solved, something coming between you and understanding. I’m not sure I agree, but in all our discussions, I could never quite voice why. 

Humanity is a destroyer, people are sick, you said. Humanity is human, people are trying, I thought. Do we need healing, or do we need to try to heal the Earth? I see you now, surrounded by a society you perceive as illness, trees shedding tears of grief as the snow melts from their branches. Planting chestnuts is atonement, perhaps. For me it’s a kind of thanks-giving, I think. When you told me you wanted to go away for a while, I always assumed it would be to do something great– to shape the Earth between your steady fingers. My memories of you are glazed in sunrise and passing landscapes, the light bending around you like a sculptor bends their clay. But maybe you were never a sculptor. Maybe you were the sculpted– a newborn vessel casting about, hoping to be filled by something, anything. 

You’ve been gone a month, and I plant American Chestnuts at the edge of the forest. I thought I loved you. I think I still might. My hands meet the illusion of yours in the soil, and I think you would have wanted this, but maybe you’re not the person I thought I saw. Maybe these chestnuts will grow a new generation of fairytale forests, or maybe the blight will take them too. Maybe one day I’ll grow again, but for now, you leave me wanting and waiting, simmering beneath the soil.