Tractor or the tree?
mini memoirs
If I told my story it would be how a tree manages to grow up through the middle of an abandoned tractor left to die in a forgotten meadow. Am I the malleable tree, or the rigid tractor, now bent and rusted steel? Both wood and steel intertwined, both separate and inseparable in the end, yielding to the plans of nature.
In my story, all of it happened, and none of it happened, all true in a world where no truth is absolute. Mine is a story wrapped in the skin of a small tall tale, it did happen - to me, to others, to someone. I play with the hue and saturation, the exposure, or the length of the lens set to reach my subject. I enhance, I make it clearer, then I give distance so it's safe to view.
Some mornings writing a single line takes twenty minutes of my life, the next all of my withheld words fly out like a battalion of fighter jets, quick and deadly. In this story, I am the all of everything. I am the good and the wicked. I am the hope and the desperate call for help. I am the beautiful, ugly one in your midst, grateful to stay a while longer.
I want to be the heroine at the end. I want to be like Karen Blitzen, fighting through the heat and perils of Africa, torn and dirty but still arriving to deliver supplies to the battalion, worse for wear but triumphant. I want to be fucking triumphant, a risen christ, a shining light of hope at the end. I want it all to have mattered.
Maybe that’s why I write. So I can control the ending. But what if I am just the tree? What if my story is that I have spent my life trying to reach the sky while having to grow around the goddamn immovable mess of someone else's wreck?
Maybe, but I will still reach for the sky.
I love this line! What a nice surprise:
“What if my story is that I have spent my life trying to reach the sky while having to grow around the goddamn immovable mess of someone else's wreck?”
💚🤜🤛💚
Yes great last line. Love the rollercoaster passion of your writer's heart.