Willow & Lark: A Tragedy

There’s an odd sort of feeling I get sometimes, like when you wake up clutching a dream until you become fully conscious and realize it wasn’t real. It’s like chocolate melting on your tongue, the flavor notes lingering until they disappear, and you’re left wondering if they were ever really there. It’s like something you once held close, now forever beyond the grasp of your outstretched fingers.

I get that feeling from the brightness of daffodils and from the sweetness of honeysuckle. I get it from the coziness of campfires and from the wildness of climbing trees barefoot. I get that feeling from red hair, hazel eyes, and tender voices.

I suppose I'm being too cryptic. 

It started with a boy who could whistle like a lark.

“Do you think the birds get jealous?” I asked him as a few of our little friends fluttered through the trees above.

“Figures,” he said. “After all, they sing to their lovers. And what if their music is not returned to them, but to another?”

It was a very good conclusion, I thought.

I can’t really tell you where he came from, or where he lived, or how we became friends. I’m sure I know those things deep down, but none of it would matter to you or change anything for me. So I leave it buried. But I know his name was Beckett, although I never called him that. I called him Lark, because of how he used to sing. He never called me my real name either. He called me Willow, because I was slender and lanky, and when I hung my head in sorrow, he said that I had the same beautifully somber appearance as the trees themselves.

Every day we met under one of those trees, a monster of a willow that felt like a cave when you crawled under it. A glistening creek trickled nearby, and we replanted wildflowers Lark would bring to me when he found them along the road. It was like our own little house. We could call to animals and name the constellations and forage for edible plants. Mostly we talked for hours. I asked Lark all my questions, and he always had very good answers.

“I wonder if the stars.” I said one night as we gazed upwards.

“If the stars what?” he asked.

“Just that. I wonder if.” I couldn’t explain exactly what I meant, but it was the best way to word the feeling I had.

“Well,” Lark said slowly, “I think the stars do. If you wonder if they feel the warmth of their own light, I think they do. If you wonder if they grow lonely from being so far apart, I think they do. If you wonder if they get scared of the darkness around them, I think they do.”

“What if they don’t?”

“They do, Willow.”

It was fun, having made-up names and secret worlds. As if the lives we lived in the woods were our real ones, and when we went home with our families and to school and to town, we weren’t really in our true realm. No, the two seemed so far away and separate. After all, Lark and I spent more time together than apart. The stories we lived in the forest, well, we lived rather than imagined them.

Yet, time passed for us as it does for everyone. Lark outgrew me, in height and strength and broadness of shoulders, but he was always tender and thoughtful. He always sang. We always went to the woods. He always let me ask my questions about why sometimes it feels cold even in the summer and why the woods seemed realer than our other lives and if mist is romantic or eerie or possibly both.

Then we were nineteen. We met in the woods, but not to play, not to imagine. We met in the woods to make dreams into reality.

“I love you more than flowers love sunlight,” he whispered, kissing my hair.

“I love you more than the larks love music,” I whispered back.

But something was wrong. Lark’s breathing changed. His hand slipped from my waist as he collapsed to the mossy ground.

I screamed. I shook him. I ran my hands through my hair so violently that the diamond ring on my left hand became tangled, popped off my finger, and fell neatly onto a slab of stone on the ground.

Lark wouldn’t wake up.

Now it has been many years since Lark’s cruelly sudden death. Not a day goes by that I don’t miss his red hair glinting in the sunlight, or his soft quietness. Most of all I miss his music. Not a day goes by that I don’t think about that glorious little diamond on a skinny gold band, a symbol of eternal love between Lark and Willow.

But after the funeral, a sickening thought struck me.

I never picked up my engagement ring.

When it fell to the ground, I barely noticed. All week, I had been too preoccupied with grieving my love to remember—the ring was still in the woods.

My family and I went and searched, and searched. We went to the spot where Lark died, we crawled on the ground, we dug in the fallen leaves. But our agonizing search came up hopeless.

The ring was gone.

Lark was gone.

I had nothing left of him but the flowers we had planted and the tunes he would whistle. Everything he left behind was ephemeral; had he even been real?

And the ring that symbolized the promise of his love for me?

It would forever lay hidden within the woods we loved so dearly.

It makes me want to scream, to shout loud enough for my past self to hear: “Just pick it up! Just pick it up now before you forget, or you will have nothing left of Lark!”

I wonder if I’ll always have this ache. This ache with a voice. The voice that says, “Remember your loss. Remember your loss.” And I remember.

And I feel a little bit emptier.