Kamila Rina

The Secret Life of Trees

My body split down the centre when I was little.
A little tree—a willow, an oak, a magnolia?—I would have
told you if I’d been allowed to say how I was neither boy

nor girl, though wanting, desperately, to be successful
at one of them, and never having skill enough to conceal
the roots, even with long skirts, nor the bark creeping out

from under sleeves, the leaves and branchlets crowning
my head. My mother complained—as mothers do when
casting offspring as reflections—that I didn’t brush

enough, wasn’t ladylike when getting my school picture
taken, I just stared into the open slit of my wrap skirt, knees
parted wide, mossy head down. I didn’t smile enough. Or

at all. I didn’t cover up well; she could see the craggy bark.
I knew I disappointed my mother, with the lack of girl (but
abundance of tree) in me, with my messy presentation

when living through a messy present. And what could she
blame this on: my autism? Or, was I just a bad child?
I know she did not blame herself, not when she stood

and watched me being beaten, bleating plaintively but not
intervening, not when she delayed taking me to the doctor
for a febrile infection from recurrent rapes: I was seen

one month in, with several organs on the broil; there was
concern about permanent damage. Her share of the worry
thinned over time into scolding me about covering up.

While she was firmly preoccupied with not being at fault,
my body split, a thunder-struck willow, and began its fight
for survival. Tree struggles are slow, steady, take years

to show results. My willow hovered at the edge of dying
for a dozen growth rings: water-logged, its roots cooked
by the bolt, its too-human mind misplacing the will to live.

I spent a decade patching the sites of injury, nourishing
the adjacent branches, growing back root-veins
and purpose. Another decade honing water balance:

moving from flooding with tears in the sliding-scale therapist’s
small office week after week, wondering if the damage
ever mends, to hydrating virescent shoots of new growth.

Then building resilience: tightly packed cells, more robust
xylem and phloem, healthy, affordable nutrition,
gentle companions. Finally I was ready to discard

the camouflaging skirts, to let go of the years
I had spent trying to hone girl but ending up with sapling,
let in an oaky swagger, allow myself the low arboreal voice—

my natural timbre—even to at last own my twiggy
spiraling tresses. This finding of self and place pulses
like slowly shaking off a weight of snow so heavy it might

have broken my trunk, like having my roots reach into
new loamy soil, like sharing food and warnings with
a cohort, a coppice of friendtrees. Being a tree means

never needing to go home. It just takes us decades, centuries,
to uncover ourselves, to grow up and out, to spread
our crowns, to hold our good bodies up to the sun.