Where the Circle Ends

I was beginning to wonder if she would ever come back. If she would again set foot in this place that’s been my whole world; this quiet amidst the world’s noise, hidden away with its winding pathways, the soft chirping of birds and limbs of so many trees – but fewer and fewer as time goes on – reaching across to meet in the middle. Now that she’s here, I regret that she’s chosen this day, the same day that I see the inevitable approaching from the other end of the pathway.

She first came long ago, before the world as I knew it had changed so completely. Back then, when the leaves were green and the air was clear, she wandered away from her parents and siblings, skipping across the pathways and over top of leaves and twigs. She wandered between tulips, her chubby legs and bare feet gliding through green blades of grass, crushing them gently and silently.

Her eyes were glinting, small and squinting underneath the high sun. She wore a turquoise dress that flew in all directions around her as she ran, her jet black hair tied back into a ribbon and flowing behind her, pink cheeks glinting in the sun.

She stopped abruptly, in the shade, and she pulled herself up onto a bench. Climbed so she could get closer, so her hand could run across tree bark. She grasped at a low hanging branch, its protruding twigs covered with bright green leaves that fluttered in a gust of wind. With utter nonchalance, the girl grabbed hold of one small leaf.

She gazed at it, squinting to see every detail of its veined sides, wondering about all its inner workings. The intake of carbon dioxide she was breathing out, the release of oxygen which her lungs happily accepted, the tiny cells inside of it working so hard to take in the sunlight and give off that bright green colour; a tiny system of intricacy, a cycle. Not knowing any of this, she grabbed hold of it in her tiny fist and plucked the leaf from its branch.

After a moment or two of staring, her eyes flicked back up to the branch and widened with the realization of what she’d done. Tears began to pour from her eyes, as she looked between the leaf and the tree over and over.

“I’m sorry,” she said in quiet, squeaking voice. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, tree.”

She held the leaf back up to the branch, in the empty space where it had been growing. Determining that it had reattached itself, she let go. Her gaze followed the leaf in utter dismay as it fluttered back downward. She caught it just before it hit the ground and her eyes glazed over as she understood that the leaf she’d plucked was never going back on the tree. “I didn’t mean to hurt you,” she said in a tiny, choked voice as giant tears rolled down her cheeks.

I could think of nothing to console her. The only response she received was a breezy whisper through branches.

It was then that the girl’s parents noticed her, walked over, tried to pry out of her the reasoning for her hysterics.

“I didn’t mean to,” she was saying in between tiny sobs, and her parents asked over and over what she didn’t mean to do. From the leaf in her pudgy hand and the tree that she pointed at, and some more choked out words, they finally understood.

The two of them exchanged a look of stifled smiles and laughter. Then, her father picked her up in a swift, gentle motion. He patted her silky black hair as the mother leaned in and they murmured inaudible words to the girl. Her shoulders continued to shake, the entirety of her tiny being riveting with sobs.

“I just…I just…I didn’t mean to,” she kept saying.

“Look, sweetie,” her father said. “The tree has lots of leaves. It loses them all the time, like in the Fall, when you jump into piles.”

“But it hurts it when you pull them off,” she protested, still clutching the little green thing in the hand that rested on her father’s shoulder.

“Honey, trees are different from people and animals,” her mother said. “They don’t hurt like we do. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

After a few moments of staring at the leaf in her hand, she said, “you promise?”

“We promise,” her father nodded, gently wiping a tear from her cheek.

They turned and left then, the girl unbelieving of her parents’ words and resting her head on her father’s shoulder. She was still clutching the leaf when I watched her go.

She came back over the next few years; each time she was taller, older, but her eyes never changed. Soon, she wasn’t a laughing child who danced around between the trees and flowers, but her gaze seemed to linger a little longer on each thing that she passed; longer than the others who sped through, who held up flat silver objects in front of the trees, the flowers. As if they were peering through those objects themselves. As if they stopped to look but never actually saw anything, not really. I remember those days and months and years passing by, seeing the flowers, trees, and people go about their cycles and seasons. I would get taller every year, stronger, more in tune to the sun and the way the warm and cold traded places.

Tulips bloomed in the spring, opening wider and wider, reaching out their petals as if for a hug from some passerby, only to fall off as they reached the end of their cycles. They would be back next spring.

Leaves turned vibrant orange and red as the months got colder, and swirled away in the breeze just before the snow began to fall. The green grass, the brown leaves, and the fluffy white powder each took a turn covering the ground. This was the cycle, year after year.

In all of that, though, I think the cycle that I found most interesting was that of the people. They grew, they got older, and many of them stopped coming all together. The parents that still brought their children let them play in the fields, among the blossoming flowers and under the shades of trees, kicking around balls or throwing plastic discs. I saw them bundled up and huddling in their coats and boots in the Winter, when the tree branches were bare and the fresh coats of snow covered the ground. But I never forgot the girl and her parents’ words; her sadness, her remorse, and my inability to provide comfort.

A few times, she came and sat on the bench, and I don’t know whether she remembered that moment of grief in her early childhood, but perhaps she did because something seemed to draw her back to the spot each time. She was one of the last to stop coming altogether. By then, the air had thickened, the crowd had thinned, and a shadow of loneliness, of emptiness, began to fall over my world. Even the number of children in my world began to dwindle, and when anyone did walk by, they were carrying some form of those flat little silver objects that they ran their fingers over and watched the world through.

The way these cycles had been continuing, I grew so used to the routine that I didn’t notice the gradual changes at first. The towering silver buildings, so much taller than any tree, seemed to encroach more and more into this world. They didn’t blow in the breeze; they didn’t change colour in the fall or blossom in the spring.

The outside world’s noise crept in more and more. What had once been a constant drone in the distance now seemed to surround me every day.

Even the cycles themselves were slowing, stopping. I saw fewer and fewer tulips succeed in blooming each spring. The trees that lined the pathways started to disappear; many of them became gnarled corpses before their removal.

Until then, I hadn’t known that such a thing was possible, that circles could stop going around and around.

But I stand corrected, because many of them have ended; I stand here now, watching a woman approach from one end of the pathway. I know it’s her from the inquisitive eyes that squint out from behind a curtain of greying hair. She doesn’t just look at the things that she passes. She gazes at them, studies them. Delicately, she brushes a wrinkled hand across a tree trunk, and touches a leaf on a low-hanging branch. As she lowers herself slowly onto the bench where she always used to sit, I become acutely aware of the long passage of time.

“I suppose I was the only one to wonder if trees feel pain,” I hear her say in a quiet voice to herself.

The workers are making their way down the path, from the other direction, dressed in helmets and bright oranges and yellows. They are upon her soon, holding those flat silver objects out in front of themselves, checking around them, ensuring they’re in the right spot.

“Excuse me, ma’am,” one of them, a man, says to her.

From the bench, she turns to look up at the workers. “Yes?”

“This area is about to become a construction zone,” he says in monotone. “For your own safety, you must leave.”

“Construction?” she warbles. “What is being constructed?”

The man clears his throat, reading something off of the silver object. “The city is building a Natural Resources Research Institute.”

“In the park?”

“Yes. There is no space anywhere else. I’m told it’s a highly sophisticated facility, ma’am.” Then, he shrugs. “But that’s all I know about it. I’m just here to clear the land.”

The woman pauses, not budging from the bench. She turns around, and in that moment her face matches the one I saw from her father’s shoulder all those years ago, the same remorse, the same fixed gaze. “You’re cutting down the trees?”

The man shifts his weight. “Yes. We have orders to do so.”

“Isn’t it wrong?”

“With all due respect, ma’am, it’s a tree. It doesn’t feel pain like you or I do.”

She stands up now, though her stature is small and her frailness is clear. Her brow furrowed in response to the man’s snide remark, she says, “I thought this was a protected area. A refuge from the city.”

The man continues to stare down at her. “Times have changed, ma’am.”

She scoffs. “Times have always been changing.” Much quicker and with more authority than before, she sits back down.

I notice then that some machines are approaching, and one of the man’s coworkers is holding a metal tool that I’ve seen before, more and more frequently as trees have begun to disappear.

The man holding the tool steps forward, talking to the first one who holds the flat silver object. “We need to keep to the schedule,” he says, and the first man nods.

“Ma’am,” he says, “It’s a liability for you to be here during construction.”

She tries to protest, but she’s no match for two of the men, who pull her off the bench. She is led away helplessly, taking one last look behind her as the man with the tool approaches. He pulls a cord that makes it roar to life, an unbearable sound.

I am not so much afraid of it as disdainful, accepting of it. I knew that this would happen eventually.

The next few moments pass in dilation and in a flash, the man drilling the object deeper and deeper into bark and sap. It’s strange to me how quickly they can sever through a tree who has stood in the exact same place for a hundred years; it astounds me though I’ve seen it so many times before.

The men, and the girl’s parents, were right: trees don’t feel pain, at least not in the way that I’ve always understood human beings to feel it. We don’t have nerves, pain receptors. It’s true to say that we don’t even feel things at all.

But I am still overcome with something strange and new, something that might be like a feeling, as gravity takes over and sends me irreversibly toward the ground. It’s perhaps more of an understanding than a feeling, a comprehension that the circle has to end somewhere, and perhaps this is where. A circle full of unimaginable things will take this one’s place; and while the woman who watches in anger from the sidelines will be around to see it, I will not, and I only hope that there are still people in this world who see things the way she does, who can console her.

There is some kind of snapping sensation as I hit the ground, as my weight collapses, and then, something like calmness passes over me.