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.
