Above me are the branches of an old magnolia tree. It has been here for a while and it has seen some things. Last year it saw me sitting here with her week after week. It spoke to me in hushed tones, doing its dance, the wind gently moving through its branches. Every week, the bulbs of the magnolia flowers would have opened a little more. The tree began to raise its voice but its message was always the same and it said, the end is coming soon. The sounds floated down from the air like paper fallen out of an airplane. The sounds became letters and the letters words, and eventually the sentence was formed in my mind.
For everything going on above my head last year there was as much happening under my feet. Beneath my feet on the way to the park every Sunday were mulberries, flattened by my steps, bleeding out on the sidewalk. Mulberries are edible but not as sweet or plump as blackberries. They look a lot like blackberries, but every time I plucked and ate one, I understood again why they aren’t sold in stores. I wouldn’t buy them, but I sometimes picked a few and crushed them between my hands. I remember the way the juice stained my skin. When the color faded, I still thought about it, as if I had held hands with the tree, wondering how it came to be that a fruit was more valuable for its intangible qualities than for its taste and nutrients.
Today I brought a book to the park bench. I opened it and turned a few pages before closing it again and putting it under my head like a pillow, staring up into the branches of the magnolia tree. Today it’s hot but the bench is by a pond and the air here is cool and soft. Last year I left a thumbprint on her hand stamped in purple mulberry juice. She hadn’t looked up from her book when I did it, and I had looked back at mine. We used to read together often, but I don’t remember finishing any books. On the day I saw the first hint of the white flower within the hard brown shell of the magnolia bulb, I heard it whisper to me, the end is coming soon. She had said something like “Did you hear me?” and I hadn’t and she said “I think you might be going deaf.” I told her it was a good thing I was taking sign language and she told me yes but still, you should have taken Spanish so we could practice together. I never use sign language now and I’m trying to learn Spanish. I have no one to practice with, but what can you do?
It’s the heat of the summer now, the dog days. The summer is lawless. Spring feels like getting out of jail. Summer feels like you might as well get thrown back into it. This year’s magnolias have opened all the way and the mulberries have stopped growing. The purple juice was washed away from the sidewalk by 20 minutes of light rain. The mosquitoes hate me, I think. I’ve heard if you have a certain blood type they attack you with more ferocity. If that’s true, I must be one of the unlucky ones, but I’ve never had a doctor tell me what type of blood is in my veins.
I already used some of my summer vacation days to visit the salt plains in Utah. I stood on that white expanse. I ran across it. I had my picture taken there by a stranger. The film in my camera was scrambled by the X-Rays at airport security. So there’s no hard proof I ever went there, but I remember it with all my senses. The harsh brightness in my eyes. The roughness of the dry ground and the coldness of the puddles of saltwater. The scratching sound of the salt under my feet. The taste transferred from the ground to my tongue on the tip of my finger. Of course the smell of salt in the air. I also remember mountains rising from the land, thinking as I drove through it how close they seemed, knowing how far away they really were. When I got back from the trip, people demanded grand stories about my adventures, and I couldn’t give them any. But people can make you feel bad for not doing what they want you to do, so I told them about those things in the white desert in utah.
Every summer is like a life. There is never enough time to do everything you want. I wish I had another lifetime to be a pastry chef. Another to study linguistics. Another to start playing the piano before I start forming memories. One to go to college on the east coast and one for the west. One for mathematics because even though I stopped loving it in this life, maybe in another the affair would never end.
Right now I have a lifetime to sit on the park bench and read only a few pages of my book. I have a lifetime to wait for my friends to get back from other countries, feeling a little sorry for myself because they’re in those far off places without me. From the bench I saw a duck jump out of the pond and shake the water from himself. He turned back to face the pond and stared out across the water for nearly half an hour. I imagined he was drinking in the nature in front of him, not knowing he was part of it to me. I saw a squirrel drag a plastic cup up into a tree. Twice he dropped it and in an instant was back down to pick it up. When he dropped it a third time he didn’t come back for it. I suppose he realized you can only try so hard.
On the day the magnolias were halfway open, we talked about the future. She was going to graduate in a month’s time. She was moving to a big faraway city to keep studying. And between graduation and the start of fall classes, she was going to Egypt to see the pyramids. Most people go on vacation to a big city or a beach or somewhere the people speak romance languages. But she wanted to see the pyramids, which she said “Existed for centuries before her arrival and would last for centuries after her departure.” I would have liked to see them too, but I was working with a construction firm for the summer. I couldn’t take a week off to go to Egypt even if I had the money for travel. Half finished construction sites are like open wounds and I saw a lot of them that summer. I mostly remember all the wet concrete. I’ve always wanted to leave my handprint in a slab of concrete. It might not last as long as the pyramids, but it would last a long time. I never did it though. I remember leaving the job site one day after work and stopping to kneel next to a square of concrete that had been poured half an hour previously. It was blocked off by caution tape so no one would step in it as it dried. I looked down at the smooth gray surface and imagined how it would feel to press my hand into it. The coldness, the grit that might stick to my skin when I pulled my hand back. I thought about her in Egypt with the hot sun and the yellow ground, her against the giant blocks of stone thinking about how long they would last. And then I blinked and the sun was going down. The concrete filled my vision again but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
On the day the magnolias were all the way open, they were finally silent. She said, “I think we should go our separate ways.” I think she expected me to be surprised, but I wasn’t. The whispers of the magnolia tree had prepared me. I said only, “OK.” Later I would think I should have fought against it, and later still I would realize I had been right the first time. When she said we should go our separate ways, I could have asked her why, but I knew why, and it was because we already were. I stopped under the mulberry tree on my way home that day. I picked a berry and smashed it between the pages of my notebook. The juice on the page was paler than I thought it would be and a seed stuck to the paper. When I did it I chose a page that was far ahead of my progress in filling the book. Now the area is all filled in and there is ink surrounding the juice. If I keep my eyes from focusing, I can make myself think I have drawn the tree back around the berry.
On the day I almost put my hand in the concrete, I rolled my car windows down on the way home. I stuck my hand out into the wind. The air felt so strong and solid at the point where it hit my skin. The faster I went, the more the air thickened. I thought of how nice it would be to hold a ball of that thick air in my hand. So I closed my fist on it but it turned out, the air was holding me.