much like us

It`s the place she goes to, when she needs, the place of the mighty trees. They stretch up and up and up, like they`re going someplace. Maybe they are. Bamboo is a lonely tree, thin, hollow. It creaks in the wind like an unoiled door. A thousand unoiled doors. Creaking unknowable things. Something about near-leafless trees, disturbs us. Too much like us, perhaps. Maybe that`s it. Even on the hot days it`s cool in here though, in this forest of bamboo, and something in their straight lines comforts her. Suggests there might be some sort of order in the world, though she knows that to be untrue. Things are as they are, as they were, and the only thing worth finding is the will to go. All there is to it. Too many to be pleasing, in any case, too suffocating. They tilt and they lean, the old and the weak, there amongst the strivers. Much like us.

She hears them, the voices. They live in the shadows, live in the roots. In the spaces of impenetrable darkness. They sing, the voices, they sing. They`re all here. The maid. The lady. The mother and the bride-to-be. The Queens of Someplace and the Lost of Another. Even the office girls. The waitresses and clerks, cashiers and secretaries. And all the dreams they had, they`re here too, stuck like wet newspaper to the shoots. All the words that went unsaid. The quietness of it all. The centuries of stoicism, the aeons of obedience, the never-vented furies. All here. In the moss that covers the stones. Floating with the microscopic fungal spores in the air. Ready to take root in the hearts of the unborn. Ready, as everything always is, to start all over again.

He held out his hand to her, she remembers now, and she took it. Noted the firmness of his grip, the calloused palm. But something soft there, too. Something to hang hope upon. Odd, that, how hope hangs. She knew that love was a thing you found in the cinema, it burned brightest up there on the screen. Burnt enough to leave you blinded, breathless. Could carve your insides out. Men killed for it, and women wept. Threw themselves to the rapids, drank poison when denied it. Maybe that was America. Perhaps that was how they carried on in the great empire. Everything writ large. Made you wonder how anything got done. Here, from what she could see, from what she saw of her parents, and others in the village – love was a flat sea, calm, gathered, a thing of weight. Immense, yet almost still. It wore boulders to rocks, could drip a hole in stone. It lasted. But it wouldn`t engulf you. It lived in duty, was felt in a meal, valued in a touch. Measured in a glance. And so, when she felt that hand, felt it wrap around her own, felt its pull on her – she knew she didn`t love the man, but she sensed that she should hope. Nineteen years old, desperate to be free, she willed herself to hope.

She lets out a sigh, and she listens to the trees. Whispering their mysteries.