Kendra Fortmeyer | 29
life. How important it had been that she never used the words someone else had chosen for her. And her life now was so still, so few words, and gradually becoming fewer: summer. Winter. Rotting. Done. The creeping comfort of inevitability that she once raged so hard against, perhaps because she sensed it was true.
In the last shreds of her consciousness, the tree grasped that there was something inevitable about this, too: that somewhere, some part of her was still trying to find the perfect word, not realizing that it was okay to be simple and obvious—that she’d been struggling in vain among the synonyms and roots when all along, in front of her face, were sorry and love and you. How a whole life could be spent looking for these words to fling into a still-open window. If you are very lucky, someone will write one for you. If you are luckier, they are writing it now. They are throwing it back down through the dark, and your hands, your inevitable hands, are stretching up to the
light. ♦