As The Trees Whisper

An early spring breeze was gently shaking the newly born leaves as the awakening trees kept whispering good morning to each other. She was sitting on a cold stone bench trying to warm her face with small rays of sunlight falling through the branches. There surrounded by absolute silence broken only by the ceaseless singing of birds, which eventually faded into the background, he stood on the few yellow leaves that had remained from the autumn and rubbed his hands together in an attempt to warm them up. He squirted his eyes, trying to make out the features of her illuminated face, even though he already knew them far too well. She turned her head half way to the side and slowly opened one eye.

“Oh, you’re here” he just stood there with a confused look and a small smile that he was trying to hold back lingering and playing on his lips. “Well don’t just stand there, come on” She returned her head to its previous position. He slowly walked over and seated himself beside her at friendly distance. “Oh, God you reek!” she exclaimed. Of cigarette smoke is what she meant. He just moved away a few inches.

“So…” started he, looking awkwardly into the distance “What’s up with this meeting out of the blue?”

“ It wasn’t out of the blue, it was actually well planed” said she matter of a factly “ And I never told you you had to come, I just said you could.”

“And this place…What’s up with… I mean” He waved his hands around as if to stress out the weirdness of the place they were in . “Is hanging around in the middle of a cemetery suddenly this new thing I’m not aware of?”

“Sadly no, though it would be great if it was” She straightened up. “Don’t you like it here? I think it’s beautiful” And beautiful it was: Small gravestones burred inside untrimmed bushes, long forgotten graves covered under blankets of dead grass, marble inscriptions reflecting the cold morning sun and all surrounded by an atmosphere of joyful rest.

“I like going around and looking at people’s headstones imagining what they were like, how they lived, how they died.” She pointed behind her using her head. “Like Mr.Schutz, he was a writer and a journalist, and he has Mary Frye’s poem carved on his stone, you know Don’t stand at my grave and weep, I am not there. I do not sleep. Isn’t that cool and it’s a pretty good poem to.” She pointed to her right”And Katy Cole, she was only thirty, but she was really beautiful.” Upon catching his questioning gaze she answered. “I can tell from the name”.

“And this one?” he asked pointing to a grave with no name in front of them. When there was no answer he spoke again. “Is it someone you know?”

“Not yet” was her answer.

“What do you mean?” She threw her head back yet again, took a deep breath of fresh air and smiled.

“I’m gonna be buried here.”

“Does your family own this land?” He asked calmly.

“No, my husband will. He’s the type that has everything just in case.”

“What’s his name?”

“David. He’s really tall and has honey colored eyes”

“When did you get married?”

“We haven’t yet. My mother would kill me if I got married at this age.”

“Legally you can.”

“Barely.”

“So where did you meet him.”

“I haven’t yet.”

“When will you then?”

“In about three years. He’s really nice and loves me a lot, but I can’t say I’m really looking forward to it”

“And when are going come here to stay?”

“In about 11 years or so I think.”

“Isn’t that kind of young?”

“Yeah I guess, but l have enough time. I even have a daughter Maggie, you should see her sometime, she’s beautiful. “

“And where does that leave me?”

“At a place far away with a future far more exiting”. He turned his head around and stared and her. She was looking and him with her shimmering eyes half closed and half curled stripes of hair sticking to her cheeks. In her own, weird way she was beautiful, much more than all the girls inside the magazines which he steals form his brother’s room and then hides under the mattress.

She got up and stretched. “So I guess this is goodbye” She said in a half questioning manner.

“For how long?” He asked trying to hide the hope inside his voice.

“Forever I would say if I thought it existed.”

“Why?”

“The same reason I have to be buried here”. She turned on her heel, skipped over the bench, sat back down and leaned against his back. Something was welling up inside him, he was beginning to shake, his breath coming in short gasps.

“I don’t want this” he said his voice shaking “Can’t I do something? I…I mean I… you”

“You can if you want to.” She said in a low voice filled with knowledge and acceptance far beyond her years “It’s hard, too hard, to a point it almost impossible, but you always can, most people just never try, and when they do they realize they are too weak.” He felt her hand fall on his, and her head lean on his as she smiled “And I’m the weakest of them all.”

Something exploded inside him. He could see himself turning around to grab a hold of her, could feel his lips touching her soft skin, but a thousand invisible strings kept him stoned to the place he was at and instead of her beating pulse he felt a wave of numbness wash over him as every muscle in his body relaxed and his eyes gently closed.

She got up and in silence and walked away. He listened to her footsteps as she crushed the old yellow leaves left from last year’s autumn. The autumn when on a warm and windy day they first met each other right across this cemetery.