That is your hand trembling, that dead leaf there. Your arms are thrown to the sky, and you stand and groan as the wind brushes against you and moves on. Your many bifurcations, your many moist centers of pleasure, the many places where I could touch you and make the hairs on your arms stand up. The many junctures where we could have chosen differently.
I speak your name, the syllables flowing over my tongue like warm water, turning to silver and white clouds in the freezing air. I address the tree by your name, calling it Jolie, Jolie. You'd probably think me mad, if you saw me, my feet slowly turning to ice in the snow and my ear burning where the metal in it meets flesh. You'd say, "Stop it, Adria. You're talking to a tree." I try to believe I am rehearsing lines for a play or poetry for a reading, making it all go together smoothly, but I'm not, I'm talking to you over and over again as if this tree was you and you were here in the tree to answer me.
I tell the tree that its breasts are lovely, trying to force the tree into a blush as I did to you once, the red creeping across your cheeks and spreading down past your collarbones. I wondered, at the time, how far down the blush went, if it touched those breasts whose form and movement I so admired, if it stained your belly pink, if it touched your mons. I wondered at that moment if it had made you wet, that I had looked at you and found you good, as any creator might. The blush was as hot as my fingers might have been on your skin, and perhaps as pleasurable. In that moment, I wanted you, outside on the railroad bridge, the warm air stirring you to action. I wanted you more than I had when I saw you and your violin, face beautiful in concentration, your arms bare and muscular under the spotlight. I had wanted your for your pale arms and your long legs, then. Now I wanted all of you, wanted to burrow inside of you, wanted to lie along you, entwined, breast to breast, stroking your hips. I wondered if your skin was soft. I wondered if the passion I heard in your voice when you spoke of music was echoed in the way you moved when a tongue touched your innermost secrets.
And then, in the grove between the railroad bridge and the street, under this tree, you kissed my cheek, and I felt, for a moment, your breath in my ear. Which is why I am here, talking to this tree. The memory of that breath is unbearable, darkening all of my thoughts, driving me to this. Not even the memory of kissing you for the first time, your hard mouth against mine, not even the memory of making love to you can match that instant when your life reached out and invaded mine through that single, sensual contact.
We talked about that moment only rarely, and only after making love. Your hands would brush against my hip and up to my shoulder, the fingertips rough with violinist's calluses. I thrummed to your caress, responding easily to your practiced hands, my gasps and moans the music you wrung out of me and my arched back and curled toes the echoes of your skill. I said, once, jokingly, "You're playing me like that damned fiddle of yours."
You said, slowly, "Well, of course. Isn't that what you are, lover?" And then you flashed me a grin I could only feel in the dark and said, "It's not a fiddle, it's a violin. This is what a fiddle feels like--" Your fingers attacked me without delicacy or restraint, yanking an orgasm from my all-too-responsive body. Later, you allowed me to return the favor, but your way. Always your way.
The memories bury me where I stand, all the times you kissed me until I cried and the times you made me cry before you would kiss me. I am tuned too high, emotions strung across my body like catgut, quivering soundlessly. I can only whisper your name to the tree, over and over, calling you. "Jolie. Jolie, ah, Jolie!" Your voice was high and breathy, not like mine is now, rough-edged with tears. You called out wordlessly when I touched you, sometimes, like a bird. The memories crowd in now, scraping across me like a bow, forcing me to speak, to sob, to scream. "Jolie!"
I can hear your voice, now. The tree has your voice in the way it rubs its branches together in the wind. Creaking, like your voice did, cracking like your voice when you said, "I need you, Adria. I need you."
"Tomorrow, Jolie." I am helpless against the memory. I cannot change it once the choice has been made, and this choice plays itself out again, rosined with blood. "Tomorrow, Jolie, tonight I am doing homework. Tonight I have rehearsal. Tonight I have other plans."
I know now that the right answer was "Tonight, Jolie. Tonight I will be with you, tonight I will talk to you, tonight I will make love to you and I will break those walls that are crumbling around you and we will make something new and beautiful out of decay, together." They told me I had to identify you, Jolie. They pulled you out of your bathtub and laid you on a metal desk and asked me if that was you. And I had to say yes, even though it wasn't you, it was something you turned into once you cooled and the edges of the cuts had turned puffy and waterlogged and your mouth fell open and you started to smell dead.
It wasn't you, Jolie. That's why I'm here, talking to this tree. It wasn't you and I refuse to let it be you. This tree is more you than what they pulled out of the rusty water, this place much more you than the thing they buried a week ago in a closed coffin. You wanted to be burned. You wanted to be floated down the river out to sea on a wooden raft, and you wanted flaming arrows to be fired at your dry wooden boat. You wanted to be the bonfire on the water, flowing down to the ocean. And they put you in the ground, Jolie, to let the rot eat away at the body I loved so, at the shining eyes and the graceful hands.
That's why I'm here, Jolie. I'm keeping you alive. I'm breathing you through this earth, I'm keeping you company by talking to this tree. You remember me, don't you, Jolie?
I'm here, Jolie. I'm here.
In memory of Renee.
February first, 1996