Acorn

You stood there holding the acorn, rolling it back and forth between your thumb and fingers, from your pinkie to your pointer finger and back again, back again. A grin played around your lips, unsure whether or not it should settle or vanish, like the flash of a leaf across my vision in a dry, dry windy autumn. It seemed like it had always been there, hesitating.

I crunched through a field of acorns under the bright, clear sky, and wondered what was wrong. I smiled as I did so, unable to think of a single thing. Before me stood an endless forest, soft striped shadows and translucent greens all wrapping around me, catching my gaze in a mother's gentle embrace. I smiled, happily, wondering what was wrong the whole time.

She crushed an acorn underfoot, mercilessly grinding it into the floor. Lifting her foot to discover its cracked and fragmented husk, the only remains after a worm infestation and the rot of a wet storm, she decided it wasn't good enough and stomped back down, foot slamming down perilously close to my own face. I cried and cried and a bird called.

We sit in the forest where I lost my mind, in the moment of the world before the axe came down, and in the end we're to fend for a world of us? Where the monks and the mad mean the end of us, and the man and his wife are the means of us? While the glad are never wrong and the sad are not themselves. The wise man says it is all a phase just to pass the days.

Find a way, he said, you'll find your way. So we sit in the forest where I lost my mind, and I think to myself, is this my mind or is this my lie?

I am not your savior. But I am your savoir faire. I'm sorry. I have to be like that.

I can't be your silk worm. But someday I'll be an oak tree, and you can wait for the squirrels to scratch my back, for the birds to make their nests on my shoulders, for the ground to shake when the sky sighs as the acorns strike the soil. Rest beside me, rest.

I'm so sorry. I still visit you every year to place an acorn by your head.