When a Tree Falls

May 31, 2023

To Olivia A Year Ago 

I want you to know you did the right thing. When a friend asked you what you were excited about you answered “to experience my own resilience!” When they asked what scared you, you simply repeated the previous answer.

Your choice is not unlike getting out of a warm bed on a cold morning; you’ll do that a lot here actually. The neighborhood sprawled along Ocean Beach will take you in as their own, though you live across the park and up a hill–in the wind. The snowy plovers will coax a smile from you on your slow Sunset walks where you’re the only one without a dog, a partner, a baby, to keep you company. 

You and I are still undecided on whether loneliness is more a product of honesty or of confusion. Even when I did have those deep wells of friendship available to me, it still took translation from mind to mouth. Is that a barrier? As much as we might like to try to explain a dream, unreal and vivid as it may be, no one can see what our mind’s eye does. Maybe this is wrong though; could my loneliness be a symptom of confusion? Is it the illusion of separation from the oneness of everything, both, seen and unseen? As dust we all began and to dust we shall return. For the sake of mysticism, let’s say it’s both.

Mary Oliver once wrote: 

When one is alone and lonely, the body
 gladly lingers in the wind or the rain,
 or splashes into the cold river, or
 pushes through the ice-crusted snow.

 Anything that touches.

Olivia, regardless of my philosophizing about your inevitable lonesome days, you will mine for sobriety in your usual way—that hasn’t changed about you. How you greet the ocean on a given day depends on a whole armful of considerations. When you have company, you’ll skip into the water, maybe a giddy scream, and surely, expletives will range depending on the temperature. When alone and sore about it, when you need the medicine, immersion ought to be more ceremonial. Slow and watchful: the horrible quiet above finally muffled by the sound of the Unknown Below. Other days, screaming underwater does just what you’d expect it to. Rinse and repeat.  

Clarity returns like it always does, then the wisdom of asking for help will dawn on you as if it’s the first time (for the hundredth time). You will see your new friends demonstrate their budding love of you in a million gestures: they will sleep over when you get scared of the dark, they sit quietly and listen to you sing, they ask you for a ride to the airport, they offer their own pain as collateral. Maybe most urgently, they will remind you of the smile you have after emerging from the water, the smile that’s there whether or not anyone sees it.