8/30/19
Leaf tattoos.
Permanent, pain-ink reminders.
Reminders of an elf and a hobbit. Mountain boy and plains girl.
Reminders of five years of “doing life together”. A little here and a little there.
Life.
That single word that means a multitude of moments, an ocean of breaths—too many words to remember or fluttery minutes to count. I have danced them, sang them. I have walked, ran, swam, and stumbled through them. I have known you and grown to know you. I have grown with the ruddy red of your beard, and with your taste for a good, craft beer.
Sometimes, in the quiet moments, I rest on your chest—rising and falling. A butterfly of fear tickles the back of my throat when I think of losing these moments. So many of them are gone before I remember that they are no longer here. Sometimes, in the slowness, I believe that I could hold onto a moment forever…
But then, usually, sleep takes me away.
Thousands of these moments—like cottonwood down dancing to musty earth below. Moments, clustered together like a spectral grove of white aspens.
Cottonwood and Aspen. Nebraska and Colorado.
My aspen-grown boy with a love for the trees and the wildness of being in their gaze.
Cottonwood girl, watered by rivers running through the long, grassy valley like veins in an arm.
Populus Genus. Different trees from the same root. Both leaves shaped like a heart. Hearts tattooed on our wrists.
Nebraska is where we were both seeded. You, transplanted while just a sapling, to your mountain climate. Then, years later we grew together again in the land of plains and rivers, first year of Life—after tying together our roots under another tree.
Now Colorado is where we spread our leaves, for this moment, maybe forever.
We shall see where God pulls and plants us. Plants us, and our children.
Five tree rings later we got markings in our bark—to remember our journey. A journey of moments. Hundreds. Thousands. Never enough, more than enough. These leaves remind me of us. Of our roots.
Of Life.
-RNM
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