The Breaking

On amber and insects

For the last ten years, and probably my whole life, I carried things inside me, but it wasn’t grief. Grief carries weight, like the stones inside the wolf in that fairy tale. The things I carried were lighter, more insidious, a hollowing. It was as if insects had been gnawing away in the dark until all that was left was the bark and a memory of what used to hold it upright.

I was encased, preserved in amber with the insects, a woman who moved through her life with all the right gestures, but I was hiding, not even claiming the empty trunk. Whispering in corners, I had even forgotten how to sing, my voice a whisper that refused to make the note whole. I could see out. Others thought they could see in, but they were just watching a shadow, floundering, detached.

Last year it was three little birds that changed things. It was always going to be them.

They weren’t gentle, they were mercenary, like all children. They came tap, tap, tap on the empty trunk. I didn’t come out at first, that would mean admitting I had been hiding in the hollow the whole time, a prison of my own making. But their pecking was relentless. I Frisbeed toast through the cracks, bent stiff branches around them, but they knew. They sang on the branches and peered in the cavities. Peck, peck, peck.

They made a hole. It was small at first, just enough to let a wisp of spring air inside, air I didn’t know I was missing. I began clawing at the hole, picking off crumbs, little splinters digging in, then larger parts until I was breaking off huge chunks of wood with my hands.

I squeezed through.

I stood in the light, but I looked back into what was left in the dark. There was still some heartwood left, but there were other things too, things that had kept the insects alive, climbing all around it: poison ivy and brambles. There were beautiful things climbing too, that smelled sweet, full of promise but still smothered too tight.

I suppose I thought I had been protecting everyone, myself included, by keeping the heartwood contained. I had worried my mother’s madness might live in those layers too, but it wasn’t that, nor was it even the dark things I had always refused to let define me.

I pulled at the vines, steady, slow. Like scarves from a magician’s hat through the hole and into the light. They cut my hands, my arms, the poison blistering my skin. I sat in front of the pile of dark things, on the grass. We lay together in the sun, I on my stomach, feet in the air. We talked of what we knew. We cried together, shared wry laughs. Slowly, I unwound each vine and as I did, they became golden dust floating in a smoky sunset, alighting on my lips as I thanked them and kissed them goodbye.

Eagerly I went back to the trunk to see what was inside after such magic.

It was just me.

The dark things were costumes I had been trying on: the costume that showed exactly how much to reveal, the smile calibrated for every room, the coat that kept the wind at bay, so no one, not even me, would have to face what I actually contained.

What was left was a woman who would take up space again at the out-of-tune piano, sing with the birds in the woods and the Hampshire lanes, use all the oxygen she needed in any room. A woman who listens to what the trees have to say.

Oh, how I love her. How the birds sing in my branches.

Of course little tendrils of dark things come creeping around roots, but we are friends now and I greet them before they get too high.

And the wind always returns in waves, reminding you that with new growth, other things must be left behind. I am not the young birch anymore, nor am I yet too brittle for the storms that will come. Let them come. My roots might live in the dark, but my leaves still reach toward light. When it’s time for the insects to return, I will feed them gladly.