Congratulations on Finding that Poplar You Forgot!

You’ve had a full life: wife, kids, dog.  But underneath it all was a lie.  A relatively massive lie: that you were a straight man.

You weren’t.  Ever.  Every time you were inside your wife you just closed your eyes and imagined Alan Cumming’s smiling face with a weird, very cushiony asshole in the front instead of a dick.  And while you avoided throwing up during the birth of your children just barely, you never really loved them.  It took all your strength not to call them “spawn” when they were young and “breeders” when they started make motion towards forming families of their own.

All of this covering took its toll.  Not just on you, miserable ulcer cementing on your insides burning a hole through your gut and into the world outside where your rage could flow from it, but on your first and only love, a young man whose name we cannot speak to you who you killed with a brick one night in a fit of sorrow that you could never run away with him and buried under a sapling twenty years ago.

Today you’ll be driving through the countryside, reflecting on your wasted life on your way from one chore to another, when you’ll spot a shadow that you don’t recognize so much as feel rising above the landscape: a gesture of memory  cascading up the line of the horizon.

You won’t have visited that tree in a decade and a half, but you’ll know it, every twist and tangle.  Every knotted root.  Every chip of stilled bark.  You’ll pull off the country road, on to the dirt road, up to the base of the hill the tree rests atop.  You’ll climb it, failing knees aching with each step, letting the tree grow larger and larger in your vision until it is your world: its branches stretching above you, gently encompassing you.

You’ll sit down, back to the tree, and begin humming tunelessly.  Slowly, surely, the tune will come, the song he’d sing you as he held you, face pressed into the back of your neck as you wept.  You’ll feel tired under that tree, and you’ll sit there for twenty, thirty, forty, and so on minutes, waiting for sleep to come for you.  You’ll wait until the sun has gone down, the moon has risen, until your cell phone beeps and vibrates and announces its death.  You’ll wait a little longer without a means to count the passing minutes before you return to your car and drive home alone.

Congratulations on Finding that Poplar You Forgot!