Rotting Canopy
By Casey Douglass
Every time I dream, I
see a lone tree ahead of me. It stands on a small hill, mist
caressing its spindly branches. As I walk nearer, the scale changes.
What once seemed a normal tree now towers into the sky, the
proverbial tree of worlds linking the realms of heaven and earth. It
is usually at this point that the low sun begins to rise, straining
against the horizon, its golden rays weak and tentative, but
illuminating none the less. Light and shadow sway and morph, wooden
fingers conducting a celestial orchestra, filling time until the
bodies appear. They hang from vine nooses, their faces purple, their
bodies distended. They are all me.
I reach the base of the
massive trunk and begin my climb. The bark flakes and falls away as
my fingers and toes struggle in the grooves. The whole thing quivers
and groans, the corpses set swaying in macabre anticipation. Climbing
is like going forward, along my own personal timeline. The dead meat near the bottom
used to be my young selves, basically anything that had enough form
to be lassoed with a final bow-tie. Yes, that means teeny tiny little
mes, ill-formed little mes and even strange lumps of something that
would eventually become me. It used to shock me, but now I just
climb.
I climb through my
childhood, my scraped knees, long summers and optimism merging with
my teenage years of mental ill health, good grades and breakdown. I
climb through the years of quiet hope and yet more illness,
aspirations turning to the things that I believed could sustain my
soul and hopefully, me financially, those periods in which I studied
and prepared for being well again, a time when I might put my skills
to use. Times which didn’t really come.
It is at this point
that my head breaks through the rotting canopy of used-to-mes and
reaches the part of the tree that is barren. A force compels me to
look along one crooked branch to the side, seeing an empty noose
dangling from the very tip. Another one almost complete. I gaze up
the tree and wonder if it’s height hints at my longevity. The
spindly branches fork high enough that they are lost in the luminous
mist. I edge along to the empty slot, the bodies below reflecting all
manner of things: when I shaved my head a week ago, the cut on my
right hand, the deeper blackness that settled beneath my eyes yesterday.
I ease myself down,
hanging from the branch with my fingertips in a manoeuvre that I
could only sustain for mere moments in the other reality. I loop the
noose over my head, as I have done thousands of times before. The sun
reaches ever higher. As I let myself drop and feel the constriction
strangling my throat, my eyes gazing out further, away into the great
plain around me. The last thing I spy are the skeletal shapes of more
trees, each like mine, puncturing the mist with their heavy burdens.
I wake up to find a new
day has broken, memories of the tree already diluting in that special
way that dreams have. It will be there again tonight, waiting for
me to start its next branch. I’ve tried to fight it, to accept it,
to alter it, but there doesn’t seem to be anything I can do to
break the pattern. Until, I guess, the morning when I just won’t
wake up.
