Kala

by Colin Walsh

Mam used to write that people were like trees. Whenever I read this, I pretended to understand what she meant. But now, walking through Caille Woods, steeped in the heat and smell of twisted tree branches, I see: a growing tree, upon meeting an obstacle, does not stop, or reflect. It pushes itself blindly on, a surge of dumb life eager to continue itself, and it does this, again and again, till it becomes a warp of limbs, and this is how people are like trees; live long enough, and your life becomes a tangle of trajectories, a crooked monument to its own mutilations.

Somewhere around thirty, hangovers become apocalyptic events.

“It takes strength to be that delicate.”

you’re not a flower opening to the sun, you’re a thick, solid tree that stands in the rain with its arms folded and never flinches at anything ever.

you knew then, in the face-to-face, that it had been wrong to think of Aidan as a lost cause, that no one is the simple playing card you reduce them to, that the versions of people you shuffle in your head while going from one moment to the next are just that, playing cards, flat and one-dimensional, that there’s this whole animal being to everyone and that in this animal being there’s a point where you and everyone else in the world can meet,