Darlene

still feel like a little girl looking up at her.

Darlene is tall and majestic, or at least she seemed that way to twelve-year old me. Perhaps now she is a bit full-figured, but there’s something queenly in her curves. She doesn’t hide her sensitivities; her limbs and leaves quiver in the slightest breeze. In the spring, she blossoms into white flower miracles that seduce the bees, and in summer her fruits will grow plump, ripen and fall to the ground where the wasps and ants devour them.

I place my hand on her trunk and gaze at my beloved pear tree.

Never once have I eaten her fruits. It seemed sacrilegious, like ingesting the flesh of a queen. Besides, I loved to watch them rot and decay, lending their nutrients to the soil, becoming nourishment for their own mother.

I named her Darlene and never told anyone. After a fight with my mother, mostly silent aside from a few poisonous words, in which she always bested me, I’d sit on the rooftop and tell Darlene about it.

My mother seemed not to notice my existence most of the time. I was on my own to scrounge up dinner, buy my clothes with money saved from babysitting, hoarding grapes and bananas in my room so no one else could eat them. Then, unexpectedly, her attention would fixate on me and she was reading my diary, snooping through my room, even rifling through the bathroom garbage to confirm there was real blood in my tampons and I wasn’t pregnant.

I wondered aloud if my mother loved me. How could she, when I was so undeniably broken?

Darlene’s answer came on the wind without words. Her bountiful green limbs held me like a small child. She sent the message of her mother wisdom: nurture your fruit until they are grown, until they fall, or are plucked from your arms. You are connected; there is simply nothing to do but nurture them.

I couldn’t believe this to be true about my mother, but somehow Darlene’s advice soothed me. As long as she could stand there, pure and true, outside my window, whether scorched by the summer sun or buried under feet of snow, and survive, so could I.

I’m leaving all this behind after sixteen long years. With Darlene as my witness, I drop my diaries into the metal canister Mom uses for burning leaves. I add the clothes that make me think of him: a plum-colored silk blouse, the black teddy that only touched my skin for a few minutes, an ankh necklace. Everything that makes me think of her: the pillow embroidered with my birth date and time, the cheesy poem she wrote calling me her “darling baby,” my drawings of cigarettes. There isn’t much, really. It barely fills half the canister.

I’m leaving it all behind. If I can’t have them, they can’t have me, either.

I douse the pile with lighter fluid, strike a match and toss it on. The flame consumes the papers first, licks at the silk until it melts. The fire is not as satisfying as I’d imagined; I longed for a huge bonfire to incinerate my past life. Instead, it coughs out a few puffs of black smoke and dies. I am embarrassed at how little of me and them there is to burn.

More lighter fluid and another match does the trick. I stare into the flames until there is nothing but charred remains. I poke a stick through the embers, covering the still recognizable ankh, then turn and smile at Darlene, who seems to shake her branches at me, sadly.

“I’m leaving, Darlene.” I place a hand on her rough trunk and look up at her. “I’m sorry to leave you alone with them.”

She doesn’t mind, I feel it. She never feels alone.

Darlene’s make-believe serenity pisses me off. I want to leave in a wildfire of rage, burning everything down. But I can’t stay mad at her for long.

Slinging my backpack over one shoulder, I walk towards the road. It’s three miles to the interstate where I will hike my thumb for a ride to the bus station. And then? I don’t know.

My future is a black canvas.

“Where are you going?”

I turn around. My mother stands there in her fuzzy green, impossibly-warm bathrobe. She looks concerned, for once.

“Leaving,” I say, turning my back again.

“What would it take for you to stay?”

My mother’s voice is like warm milk with maple syrup and powdered donuts. My eyes fill with tears. I drop my bag, wrap my arms around her and squeeze with everything I’ve got. She hugs me back for what feels like the first time.

* * *

I wish that was how it happened.

I left. Again and again. My life has been one long leaving of everything I love.

Here I am now at seventy-three years old, watching the scene play out in the backyard under the silent pear tree. It’s a lovely fantasy.

They’re all dead and gone now. My mother, the boy, the house I grew up in. Even Darlene. The new owners chopped her down and planted a forsythia bush in her place. Fucking weak, yellow blossoms.

I tried to burn it down, but I couldn’t. I wanted to leave clean, but you can’t incinerate what lives inside you. You carry them all.

I place a hand over the wrinkled skin of my chest and feel Darlene there. She says the words I’ve always longed to hear:

“Stay.”