The Willow

He took them like drugs. Photos from the summer of 07. The park, the woods, the crummy seats of an ancient Buick. Cocooned in Jimmy’s farm brown arms, soaked up by his firm lips, inebriated in the dirty jean blue of his eyes. Fireworks, birthday parties, sunsets. Dances, football games, just-for-the-hell-of-it’s. Hundreds of photos flickered across the computer pixels, dazzling Austin’s eyes. The pictures were like a favorite pair of jeans—he’d slip them on as often as possible, aware of every rip, wrinkle, and stain, but refusing to throw them away.

Slumped forward and concentrating on the computer screen, tennis-shoe-white in the midnighted room, Austin struck the figure of a desperate artist waiting for inspiration to strike, elusive as he stared down his LCD canvas. He had developed a mastery of noting every detail in the pictures—every cloud in the sky, every glass on the table or bystander in the street. In a way, what he was doing was his art.

“See how the Pleistocene white of his t-shirt seems to bounce away from his sun-tanned skin? This portrait is quite characteristic of the early Jimmy-Austin dynasty, which reached both its peak and demise late in 2007 A.D,” he could imagine an art scholar remarking a thousand years down the road to a full house at the museum, all the ladies oohing and aahing in their satin dresses, the gentlemen nodding solemnly.

Austin rubbed his eyes. It was time to go. A year previous he would have been sneaking off to catch a late movie with Jimmy; this night it was for a different reason.

Slipping on his dust-plastered Pumas and a jacket, he opened and closed the back door as loud as a breath, so as not to alarm his mother, roosting upstairs. He took off running down the side of the street; he soaked in the sleeping sights of the world with absorbent, artist eyes. Skirts of light draped from the streetlamps, guarding the quaint suburban homes dozing behind them. Crickets played Puccini on their leg-violins. Bits of gravel scattered like shooting stars beneath Austin’s flying feet, aimed for the city park.

When he arrived, slaking his cilia with whooshing breaths, the first thing he noticed was the air of reverence about the place. Row upon row of grass stood massed in a silent congregation; every oak spread its weathered arms to the sky like a zealous worshipper; even the weeping willows seemed to be hunched over in prayer rather than mourning. Austin stepped through one of the willow’s veils of leaves and was immediately drenched in shadow. Running his hands along the trunk, he began to search for something. A bolt of energy raced through his brain when he felt it, a few rough gullies in the smooth bark, and the memory came back swift and clear.

Summer sweat rolling down under his shirt, between the fans of his broad shoulders, Jimmy led Austin by the hand into the weeping willow’s arbor, where they sat against her body and admired how the sunlight sketched on the ground through her hair. They had been dating for a week. Their heads, leaning back against the bark, slowly rolled toward each other’s until their lips met, as soft as two leaves brushing. And Jimmy murmured, “Happy birthday.”

Opening his eyes and reaching into his pocket, Jimmy removed the key to his old Buick and scratched their initials in the bark (JH + AW) and enclosed them with a lopsided heart. Austin laughed at the horrible penmanship, leapt up, and walked hand-in-hand with Jimmy outside the leaved sanctuary. He didn’t know then that love is like food; something that, unless incredibly well-preserved, spoils and molds over time. Their expiration date was five months later; Austin still refused to look at the label.

He had come to the park that night with a screwdriver in his pocket to shred out the letters. He had decided two hours earlier, somewhere between birthday and homecoming pictures, that he would come to his senses and get over Jimmy immediately, as his friends had told him to. He had to erase the letters etched in the bark before him to prove to himself that Jimmy was now nothing to him. Symbolism, symbolism.

But looking at their jaggedly perfect shapes, weathered nearly into hieroglyphics since the last year, he realized a Phillips Head is used for screws, not screwed-overs. He dropped the tool.

“When I’m done with you, I’m done with you. I won’t need a naked tree trunk to tell me that,” he whispered.

It was time to go home. Austin jogged back through the park’s gravel trail, then stopped so suddenly he surfed along the rocks for a second, nearly tipping over. He balanced himself and turned around. A bittersweet smile cracked his lips while he reached into his jacket, pulled out a camera, and took a picture of the park, empty and dark, but the most beautiful he had seen it.