Tree
To stop himself, Mark learned to let go. To stop himself from killing his dad, Mark learned to forget the constitution of his past, his present and his decaying future. In acceptance of his effortless power to end his dad’s life, Mark underwent a sense of a freeing relief, knowing he has a choice.
His dad’s face stood in awful abhorrent complexion, in front of Mark’s fuelled by freedom eyes. He was free, Mark thought, although chained to the present actuality, he was free. In his boundless mind, he was free, from the mass belief, the accepted belief of what freedom is.
His dad’s deathbed so accurately defined, exposed in its realness in Mark’s unbounded mind was not the same deathbed where his mother’s fresh corpse was lying in, and not the same deathbed where he saw his own self resting beside his loving body of his mother.
Dad’s old malicious hand would so spitefully hold the handle of Mark’s chair on which he permanently sat. He’d push him into the garden and stand full-bodied, mocking Mark for his incompleteness, his fragmentary existence. Then he’d sit, lowering himself to Mark’s level and placing his heavy unfatherly arm on his shoulder, as though Mark was ever loved.
- Do you remember when your mom planted that tree, she said it’d never grow. Look at it now!
The apple tree growing in its natural might. Birth and re-birth. Mark had hope that he, like his mom, would die and be reborn into something that was free and eternal. Into water, grass, or air: the shapeless forms of being. When incompleteness is just another element of what is whole.
They watched the leaves and the white apple blossoms emanating with a new surge of hope and fleeting expectations. New life that was old but turned new because of the shift, the outward shift. They watched unnoticed by their impatient eyes, the movement, they watched not as a collective through the mutual object of their seeing, but as an antagonistic rivalry of whose seeing was the real seeing. His dad did not see what he saw. He did not see his mother. He did not see her eternal life in its eternal formless paralysis. He only saw the
simplistic beauty of the tree. And Mark envied his dad, that his dad could see him beyond what Mark saw of himself.