Broken trees and promises

My mother says I was born in the forest, given birth to by a tree. She said she heard me as a newborn gurgling from within the hollow of the trunk. She sent my sister up the tree looking for a hole, a gap, or some kind of cavity where I must have been dropped in. She found nothing but seamless bark.

She marked a line around the trunk with a stone, called my father and uncle, and told them to cut it down. She said they must cut along the line exactly, and they did. The great tree waited patiently for them to cut deep enough for it to fall to its resting place. It leaned, and began its farewells around the forest with creaks, crunches, and whip cracks. It reached the forest floor with a great splash of green leaves. She made me swear I would never return to that great tree, cut down in the forest.

The base of the trunk was left, and there I lay in its hollow, covered in a shower of tiny wood shavings, resting like snow in my curly black hair. She said I was born with hair down to my shoulders, black as a crow. That’s how she knew I was going to grow up strong. She wept the day my father had secretly cut it short, thinking it made me look like a girl. She said now I could never grow to have the body of a giant, or the strength of horses, now my strength would have to come from within, but it would certainly be flawed.

The women in my family see things, not with their eyes but with some other sense. Even my wife, once she took on my family’s name, started to see them too. The men in my family lack this ability and see as everyone else does. My mother says there’s nothing mystical about the things she sees. Just that she learned to look when others refused. Adults see things that they think shouldn’t be there, so they trick themselves into thinking they musn’t have seen it. A trick of the mind, a mistake. We all see these things. She just allows herself to, when the rest of us choose not to.

When she made me swear that I would never return to that tree, I listened. I promised. She said it would try to swallow me whole and chew forever. It didn’t make total sense, which wasn’t irregular for her. But wherever she said something would be, it was. When she told me danger laid in wait, wait it did. The advice I ignored as a stubborn young man, always came to be true, either immediately or years later.

However, there comes a point when every man wants to know where he came from. This is true whether you are born from a woman or a tree. When you are born from a tree that you have never seen, a tree that only remains in words spoken, and your mind’s eye, it is a draw you cannot refuse. I ran from it with all my energy for years, just to chase it when I got tired.

It is the only promise to her that I have broken, and the only one I wish I could repair. But there is no way to repair a promise. Once promises are broken that is how they lay, in pieces, with apologies nuzzling at them softly. Even after pushing the pieces back together, they’re never fully healed. There is always a crack, a gap, where the trust used to be.

I went into forest. The end of autumn was approaching. Most branches were bare, the forest floor covered in its thick rustling carpet. The wind prodding it here and there to sound like a campfire, making the orange leaves like flaky embers.

It’s impossible to walk through deep leaves like these without sounding like you are dragging your feet, dragging the weight of something behind you. I shuffled onwards with my mother’s warnings pulling at the back of my shirt, the guilt pressing down like sandbags on my shoulders, and just enough curiosity to pull me forward. It doesn’t take much to tip the scales.

There was part of the forest she never took me to. It's all I can think of. That the hollow tree stump lays somewhere in there, with its gaping mouth. My sister had also described the surroundings to me. She had been young, but had some blurry memories to share. I had to look for a huge boulder and three trees. The boulder would be the size of a small house, with a layer of moss all over oneside, like a blanket to keep it from shivering. She said of the three trees, two of them were stocky and strong, the third was slender and beautiful. The two stocky trees had tangled their branches around the slender one’s. The slender tree bent reluctantly, helplessly towards them, as if it was being pulled away from the hollow tree. On one side, the slender tree’s roots could be seen exposed, pulled from its soil.

After three days of methodically combing my way through the unexplored part of the forest, I came to that great boulder. Sitting still and silent, covered in a layer of thick moss. It was like a giant hunched over, showing its back, thinking it wouldn’t be seen under its blanket. There was something childish about it.

There was a clearing with just one solitary tree standing firmly in the ground. There was a faint ring drawn around the trunk but it was not cut down. It towered over me, and spread out confidently to touch the branches of other trees in the surrounding forest. I looked around and there was no trio of trees, maybe they had finally dragged her away, but I knew this was the tree I was born in. It seemed as if it had rejoined and healed almost perfectly, except for the faint line my mother must have drawn. The line was a fine crack, it reminded me of my broken promise, of the slither of trust that could not be put back.

The tree was as wide as a family tied together. I circled the tree and saw there was a hole a few meters up on one side. I climbed up. I could stick my head all the way in, but it was too narrow to fit my shoulders. I looked down into the hollow center of the tree. There laid an abyss that seemed to hold all the nightime without the stars. The air held a charge, my ears hummed, the hollow was ready to explode the darkness out of this hole like a swarm of bees up into the sky, to reclaim it, after the sun went down. I thought back to what my mother had told me. It would try to swallow me whole and chew forever. She said it had given me a chance as a baby, but if I returned it would consider me ungrateful for my spared life, and like a whale breaking the surface of the forest floor it would finish me.

The hole in the tree may not have been big enough to swallow me, but I felt the darkness of its void pulling me downwards. It was daring me to find a way to crawl in further. Reassuring me, that I’d be able to turn around and crawl back out. That the answer to my question lay at the bottom in the darkness, like a beautiful women, a siren.

I felt my breath being drawn out of me, the charge began to take hold, fingers of electricity gripped my neck and forearms. The hole began tightening. I yanked my head out and fell from the trunk to the floor. My whole body slammed into the ground. Even though it was soft with moisture and leaves, it felt like I had landed on stone. I felt like the boulder had been rolling stealthily over to this patch all this time, and now rolled onto my whole being. I was dazed, I thought I could hear a voice coming from within the hollow tree. My body was splayed, I looked up and saw a wisp of long black hair flowing out of the hole in the tree. I snapped my head away and pushed the image from my thoughts. A trick of the mind, a mistake. I turned and left the way I had come, trying my best not to look back. Every now and then I stole a glance over my shoulder, half surprised not to find the hollow tree wading through the forest after me like a great ship, carving through waves of leaves. I returned home and never spoke of it.

Unable to tell her the promise I had broken, that she had been right about it trying to swallow me whole, it has been chewing away at me ever since.