I’m in the middle of the woods… I ride out unpredictable beats. Spasm songs. I look up to the web of stems, watch them dance like a stream of wind. The crown shyness rocks the creaks of branches. It all sounds like a swelling ovation, the sweetest applause.
November 2020
The leaves are a bright orange, practically fiery red. The colours are so bold I almost stagger and drop my coffee mug when I open my door. I am in a studio for the second week in New Hampshire, and I have cried almost as many times as I’ve eaten meals. My sides hurt from crying and still from incisions made on my abdomen just weeks before. Instead of the droning frenzy of American News media, instead of social media blaring the numbers and the swing states, I decide not to look at my phone at all. Don’t touch it, consider the trees, I tell myself, tend to your body and consider the trees.
*****
The boots I bought were cute and practical in black to go with my predominantly black and grey motif, which speaks to a go-getter twenty-something NYC transplant trying to be serious. I suppose it just became my default code of style from laziness by the time I hit my thirties. The pallet only amplifies the soft wood fern ground and dips into the plump yarrow unchanged. I look like a city kid, but my father was a son of farmers, and my mother was the daughter of fishermen. Don’t let fashion fool anyone. You cannot help who you were born. I bounce a pebble with my cane, as sunlight funnels through tall swaying vertical lines of the woods. I see passed the birch skins, many in C shapes. They are unapologetically peeled back, their curled vertebrae each dangle from trunks as though they are Queers entering the meeting or club, taking off their coats saying Hold this. I am ready for the sun, soak me up. How the trees can take advantage of sunny, colder afternoons to create carbohydrates for themselves even when the leaves have fallen, and branches go naked. How I wish I had intuition to shed my skin, to be exposed to elements to become braver, not rely on such performative gestures. Not to let what covers me become armour, armour that prevents me from feeling much.
*****
The birch trees prove packaging isn’t what it seems. In Mackinaw City, where I grew up, there’s a restaurant that’s meant to be high class called Neath’ the Birches, and so I can’t help but think of Shirley Temple cocktails swirled with syrup as I sat with other people’s white families. Me, in my long braids, keeping quiet, looked out to the draping of the trees. Here, the stalks are paintbrush strokes against a robin’s egg sky. I hear squirrels commence their rounds, bounding from one leaf-laden mound to another, small firework steps as they pause to bury some secret food, some fuel for the harder months ahead. The squirrels are like jostling darts gliding tree to tree. They look my way, small marble eyes match my direction, and they continue to chatter. Good guys, those fluffy tails and cautious planners.
*****
I haven’t slept. The bed here slouches like a ravine, two mountains of sheets and my spine the stream that never shuts up or shuts down. The leaves hush together. They wade in the air and rain down to the ground. Here, there are at least squirrels unencumbered by sirens, one of which stares me right in the face. Their toe-tapping sounds of a quick burglar on the ledge. He presses his face on the screen. His nimble scurry resembles a tap dancer. I almost expect him to break into a quick song. I have named him Sebastian. Both teeny hands were placed on the window, as if to say, Hiiii. What is this? Is there food? What can you do for me? Like a polite cousin who comes over thinking there’ll be an extra plate if he orbits long enough or maybe I just think in capitalist terms. Maybe I’m wrong and I’ve lived in cities too long where someone always wants something from you, or something is about to be taken away. He scavenges for as long as the weather lets him. The birches are bare, and the leaves are a muted crackle from last week’s frost and snow. How different am I in my warm blood? I stay in bed when winter is on the precipice; even the smallest animals swing from twigs, check to see if I’m still breathing.
*****
I go on these hikes. I’ve taken liberty to use the word hike, which for my cane-using ways means longer walks along the dirt path. Meanwhile, deer ping pong, dart their speedy limbs as I maintain a wobble. To hike means I lean on a mossy rock and look down to see which plump fungi are too poisonous for me to consider. I am a late millennial so yes—I do have an app for that. I meander to find firewood. It’s very on brand: me searching for kindling. Me, waiting for spark. Me, checking to see if something is ready to burn, catch a flame, have it be good enough to change into smoke. Me, making words to hope something heated catalyses some sort of reckoning. I go from studio to studio, all of them empty, and stash splintered, broken branches. One with a grey façade is home to a grand piano, the ivory shimmer a full smile of teeth. Another has a small twin bed pushed to the corner like an afterthought, while the entire floor is open and waiting for back bends, plies, arms and legs to fill up the room. Moving up a gradual hill, my feet spasm a small twitch at first, like a beat that can’t find the drum. Then my body builds percussion; I’m in the middle of the woods making music only my joints and the trees seem to understand. I ride out unpredictable beats. Spasm songs. I look up to the web of stems, watch them dance like a stream of wind. The crown shyness rocks the creaks of branches. It all sounds like a swelling ovation, the sweetest applause. There’s a long moan of sturdy trunks; I can only listen and hum in my own way. Of course, this has happened before in the city near rushing unbothered pedestrians. There are no hurried men in suits to veer around me. I am no interruption. An owl swoops as my toes twitch high snares. Calves beatbox on the gravel. Vein imprecisions start to quantise. As the cadence of the lower half of my body levels, I reach for breath and a nearby tree to steady; I wheeze a combination of gasp and a laugh. A bird cocks his rounded torso at me as I level, his coos warble and jingle. I want him to coach me as I stumble, but he hops on his way.
The joke is that birch in many rural and Indigenous cultures is medicinal. The exfoliating bark has got a side hustle. She helps humans with troubled stomach and joint inflammation. Smooth new bark underneath is frequently multicoloured, sometimes even green. She luxuriates and exfoliates, shedding her outer layer so much that some people Google birch trees because it feels uncomfortable, squirmy, and even indecent for them to stare at their transition. Some tree in a backyard gets her facial or a full body peel, the original spa treatment, photosynthesising the outer layer of what we see. What if it’s a new gender? The original gender affirmation surgery is sappy and means flesh unfurls before our very eyes. She doesn’t care if others fidget at the moulting. Birch is only one letter away from the word Bitch. I think the woods know that inherently. They are that B—-. They, without permission, do the work, slouch off their old self, become open to receiving nutrients to stay alive. Clearing the old, making space for the new. Fuck the onlookers, they affirm to only themself, I’m gonna change and watch me become my best.
*****
It’s been officially ten weeks. Ten weeks since robotic slices went at my hips. I am now hearing the squawk and squeal of NH birds—as they murmur in the pines. Back at my studio, I coat my body now in oils, tamanu and jojoba, massage the scars and watch the bellowing of pine needles. My body still adjusts to stretching without a shirt on, sleeping on its side, as logs that have fallen grow poisonous moss no human is supposed to eat. Rippled sponges on trunks that look like they just told someone they love I must lay down, just a short nap, let me rest and somehow, they never became upright again. Microorganisms still feast on them, they bloom colouration in squiggles, become home to burrow into, become vessel for the winter-stockpiled goods.
I do not know what my own body stores. I just know that two months ago I went in for a routine checkup and my birth name was never corrected on my forms. A nurse smiled at me in the routine smile pledged to every patient, but just a glimpse as we are all wearing masks of course. I looked a white pensive woman in the eye, and she said urgent, said emergent, said in the next two weeks. There were framed posters of Matisse’s works up and I wanted to take the colour of them, make them coating over me, to shield the doctor’s sentences. Cancer specialist she mouthed, and I felt the rings, the age of me, split open, the years I thought myself invincible. The entire time shapes were forming; hazardous hymns the size of clementines inside me. The kind you get in a bag at Trader Joe’s, the hella cute boops called cuties. I was having cuties on my ovaries and pre-cancerous cells flooding my cervix. The skin of my organs lined with multiplication.
*****
I cried and texted my friend Bilen. My voice was achy and overjoyed. Somehow, I have stayed here two weeks and feel like I have done nothing but stare at the sky and stretch in the sun. Okay, I read a lot. I slap my palm on tree torsos like we are friends from high school and have been through some shit. I thank them for a wonderful time in their neighbourhood. Friends give pep talks, and she is no different: Of course your Virgo would let you think you’re not enough. If you wrote nothing and just sat in those woods for the whole time of this residency it still would be 100x more generative than not. You are here not only to produce but also to receive.
Receive, I choked back the word. I repeated if you do nothing else. I’m sewn up with scars still on the mend and the total count of stitches on my body is near triple digits.
*****
This morning, I looked at fallen sap on my feet from walking barefoot. I have been called this by girlfriends and my mother who thought I wasn’t hers due to my profuse tenderness, You’re so sappy aka You’re too much aka You give too much. I don’t think it was ever meant to be an outright insult, more a cautionary statement, assuming this tufted way of being was dangerous. It didn’t denote sweet but that I was a pushover, a cherished behaviour turned weakness. People eventually feel stuck with me.
Sappy means you give without asking. That can be a faux pas in love, a moniker earned after three months of new relationship energy. The bouquet of flowers and freshly cooked breakfast in bed becomes normalised, no longer romantic but regular or even monotonous. I have defaulted to giving as a form of safety planning from crude partners who grew less pleasant after months or years at a time. How I learned to coo and compliment, how I let the gush go unbridled, each time thinking, if I give this gift, this five-course dinner, this surprise birthday party, we can be in love the way we started.
Now looking at the syrup, I want to taste it as the ground gleams from a tree’s exertion. The syrup can’t be good, not even palatable, though the texture feels like it would be herbaceous, saccharine yet not too cloying to make you spit out or pucker. I imagine this honey with its antiseptic and anti-inflammatory properties could be a barrier. The sap apparently is a natural slather to fight off bacteria on the trees. Trees emit this gel as a reinforcement, gentle excretion, a way to cleanse even in the late July swelter or snappy breeze of October, where I am here gaping at logs and poking drops on fingertips. The deep dazzle, the liquid bejeweling cracked brittle bark. How it can’t help itself, it’s a beloved reaction, a constant christening or maybe in the morning light, a salve stored up for the unpredictable times, a protection, a spell that can’t help but try.
