Under a Tree: the Beginning
By Brett Koehler
The Last Tree
This story begins under a tree, but it doesn’t begin under a tree. It is neither the beginning nor the end of this story it just is. It is true and untrue at the same time. Under this tree I lay with my best friend, my lover, my other half. The dragonflies are flying high above our heads in a whimsical dance fluttering between the birds and the branches talking to one another in some unspoken language that I could only dream to understand. Under this tree is life, the pure type of life that can only exist under a tree. It doesn’t matter that this tree is in the middle of a bustling city surrounded by obnoxious roads with more obnoxious cars, which are further surrounded by houses full of obnoxious people.
Speaking of people, why are people so obnoxious? I’m not just talking about you or me I’m talking about everyone. Take under the tree for example as people why can’t we just be? Like really when under the tree all we want to do is get back to the reasons why we are under this tree in the first place. For me I’m under this tree to be free, free of thoughts, worries, and ambitions. Life is just so full of all of these little things stacked upon little things that we need more time under a tree. Why can’t life just always be under this tree? I’m envious of the grass that gets to spend all of its time in this perfect environment just existing, feeding the world with it’s peaceful energy. Let me get back to the story that I’m trying to tell, you know the one that’s true and untrue at the same time, grounded in reality yet exists in a time and space that I have yet to understand. Before getting back to reality though I just can’t stop pondering what the dragonfly thinks being above the tree. Truly, what does the dragonfly think?
If this story is going to start under a tree let’s get back to reality. Reality says this isn’t a happy story, this is a story of grief, of love, of pain, and of loss. But in this story is grief painful, is love happy, is pain hurtful, and is loss really something to lose sleep over? These are all questions that no one has the answers to, not you, not me, not nature, not God, not anyone. Why do we need answers, why do we need to have peace, and why do we need to know what’s waiting at the finish line for us? This life that I’m living, toiling away every single day is no way to live; what is life and what is living? Henceforth lies the problem of what to do with life to live or not to live. This is not some sort of physical manifestation of making that ultimate final decision to live or not live in the physical world that we all exist in. What I’m talking about is do we live that life that we all long for, you know that one that we idolize and strive for in our minds. That life that is full of everything that we could ever want, and everything that we never knew we wanted. Put simply this is a story under a tree about life, no more complicated than that just under a tree.
Well this story is slightly more complicated than just being under a tree, as the tree in question is not the beginning of the story. This time and place where this tree exists is the end of the story, but for the dragonflies, and the grass, and my other half you’re going to have to divulge in the past. The past is where this story lies and it’s not pretty, but isn’t that all of our stories? Complicated to say the least, full of twists and turns that we would never expect. Put your expectations to the side and divulge in this long-twisted journey to see what’s on the other side.
Hallways
Oh, the dreaded place I like to toil and wither away, the place I call my home base. This is a place full of dreadful individuals trudging through life at a snail’s pace looking more and more like zombies every single day. Lights flickering the second you open the door, in the summer it’s the escape from the blistering heat, and in the winter it’s the refuge from the freezing cold. Oh, how sad it is to say that this is a place of peace, of solitude, of familiarity. This place is my office, my workplace, my base, my safety net. Herein lies the problem: it’s a safety net, and this is where my story, maybe even yours takes a turn for the worst. My life has been full of safety, I’m not just talking about the type of safety where I can sleep at night knowing that no one’s going to bust my door down and hold a gun to my head, but I do have this safety as well, I’m talking about a safe life. A life where nothing ever could go wrong for me at least from the outside looking in.
This is where my story begins once we leave the safety of the tree. See for me the tree is true, it’s true of what I want in life. I’m envious of the tree with its deep grounded roots that can weather any storm, so it’s fragile leaves that can wither away when the seasons change but come back stronger at just the right time. This tree is not old, and it is not young, for the sake of this story let’s say this tree is twenty-five years old. In the life of a tree she is just beginning her long and beautiful life rooted so deeply into mother earth.
Safety is such a funny word for me because what does safety even really mean. Freedom, security, assurance, refuge, shelter, all of these words define safety in the sense of the definition, but that’s just the problem; these are all words made by man and therefore are inherently flawed. Safety is just a feeling that you have deep within your gut that is by all means unexplainable. As you’re reading this thinking of what safety means to you, let me tell you what safety meant to me. It meant waking up every single day knowing exactly what I was going to do down to the millisecond. Leaving not a single room for error or deviation of the plan. Does this sound like safety to you or insanity? For me I don’t even know and therefore am posing the question. Is walking into the zombie filled hallways of a workplace; the safety that I need, the safety that I deserve, or is it just the safety that I’ve grown accustomed to in this fast-paced materialistic consumer driven society?
Insanity is defined as the state of being seriously mentally ill; madness. This definition doesn’t bode well for me though, in this story walking those hallways is pure unadulterated insanity. Yet peace and solitude must be found in insanity otherwise why would after over ten years I continue to do this insane thing every waking morning of my life. Seeing the same faces over and over and over again, nodding and saying good morning, or hello, or good afternoon over and over and over again. All of this without knowing someone’s name that I pass by in the hallway daily, was it Ashley, or Michelle, or Blair, or Taylor, or oh what the fuck how do I not know your name after this long. This is so insane! See what I mean, pure and true insanity. Don’t judge me for this. You know that right now you’re thinking that this is you just walking a different hallway with different names running through your head. In this story a common theme will occur and that theme just like your theme is trudging through life with your eyes closed. How do I know that because you and I are built the same, indeed we are all human? Don’t tell me that you can’t relate to that trudging feeling, you know the one where you’re walking through the swamp, or the snow, or the sand and everything is just that much more difficult that your brain shuts down and you go into survival mode, that’s the safety that we all deserve. The sad feeling of melancholy that we all dread waking up to in the morning.
Getting back to the hallway of the office, the one with drab gray walls with the split down the wall ten feet once rounding the corner. The water stain surrounds the split in the wall after all of these years but why? Is this just like everything else in life, walking by with our blinders on consumed within our own egotistical mindset; lost in thought as we carry on day to day. Today was different than any other day though, on this day I dropped my keys on the squalid carpet and upon picking them up I was face to face with the crack in the wall. Tears rolled down my eyes and, in the moment,, I had no fucking idea what was going on with me, was this me going crazy, or insane, or whatever term society would like to label this breakdown as? Was this my wakening moment that I had been waiting for, but I hadn’t known I had been waiting for? Was this life rousing me into leaving the slumber that I had been in for my twenty-seven years on this earth? Yes, you read that correctly twenty-seven years in this slumber and now it was a crack on a wall that I had passed for ten years of my life that was about to change everything.
With tears rolling down my face my body stiffened, and it felt like one of those action figures from my childhood that were full of some sort of sand like material and would stretch for what felt like miles. My feet frozen into place feeling like they had been nailed to the floorboards I genuinely had no idea what to do. My sense of safety was crushed that morning and the crack in the wall was the physical manifestation that drew those tears out of my body. Tears that were like nothing I had ever felt in my entire life thus far. It was with a sense of relief that all of the feelings that I had been internalizing up until this point were finally given permission to be free.
For this story to make sense you are going to need a little backstory of what shattered my sense of safety that morning, and why I ended up at the tree just one chapter ago. Let me just put it like this and then we can get back to this meaningful crack in the wall. Everything I had ever known in my adult life was crumbling around me in one fell swoop and I had no clue who I was without this identity in my life. Picture an old, decrepit, tired, worn out building on its final hour before being imploded for the erection of a new building that trumps everything about what’s about to be demolished. This was me that morning and somehow, I found my solitude in that crack in the wall.
Container
Welcome to my container, you know the one that everyone has, the one that exists within the physical realm as well as in your mind. Well, maybe you don’t know and maybe only I know, who knows what normal even is, and what is a container even for? This one container that exists figuratively in my world is split into two separate yet distinctive parts. My container is an old rusted out shipping container, you know the ones that have been sitting on the docks for ages just withering away from the sun and the salt. Originally a hue of dark blue but now faded into an indistinguishable color that would be completely unidentifiable nowadays. My container is fluid and ever changing based upon all of the factors within and not within my control.
A beautiful Bonsai tree measuring just twelve inches tall sits in my container. Visualization of this tree keeps my sane and intact when I’m unable to lay under the final tree, the 25-year-old tree in this story who is so deeply rooted in mother earth. The small Bonsai is perfectly trimmed in a dark green planter with white stones covering the base of the perfect soil that feeds life into the tree.
My container holds all of my deepest, darkest, and scariest secrets that I have shoved to the back of the filing cabinet to never touch again. This filing cabinet is even pushed as far back into the darkest dingiest corner of the container for no one, including myself to witness. These emotions are like crumbled pieces of paper that just keep sliding out of the crack in the back of the cabinet never to be seen or heard from again. If this isn’t a representation of my life and where I was then I guess you can call me insane. This was my safety and solitude, just shoving and filing more memories in until nothing else would fit, and the cabinet was so stuffed that it would be impossible to even grab a page that luckily still hasn’t fallen out of the crack.
The water damaged, cracked wall is what finally broke the overly large and rusted out lock off of my container; out came flooding everything that has been hidden for so long. I had been hiding my emotions and true self from the entire world playing the part of the person with the “perfect” life. My logical mind said let everyone know everything from inside your container and within your cabinet. Let it flood out and open the gates just like my tears with seeing the crack in the wall. But for some reason I couldn’t do it at that moment or for that matter I couldn’t release myself for the next four years.
I hope that doesn’t make you shy away from the rest of this story now that you know this was a four-year journey to get to that final tree you read about in the very beginning of this story. This is a recollection of my truths, they might not always be the truth, but they are what are true to me, and that’s all that matters in my story. No one is going to rewrite my history that’s for me to do and for you to consume.
Welcome to my life.
Cutting off all thinking is true emptiness, this is how you wake up, by finding your true emptiness.
Hiding
I have this deep sinking feeling that the crack in the wall wasn’t thoroughly explored yet, nor given the time that it deserves in this story of mine. That morning I had what I thought at the time was one of the lowest points in my life. I was so in my ego at that time that I figured this was the worst thing that had ever happened to me; not just me anyone in the world for that matter. How self-centered and egotistical of a way of thinking was this. If I could go back to that moment when the discovery was made, I would change everything. At 26 years old I had just found out that the woman I had built my life with from the young age of sixteen had been cheating on me. FUCK! That’s literally all I could think of in that moment, not a single goddamn rational thought was running through my head. My life was over. It had to be right, who was I without her, could I even have an independent thought, was I lovable, was I a good person? What the fuck did I do to deserve this? Wasn’t I the perfect partner? I didn’t understand.
At this point is when my life was in trouble and the hiding began. That morning I ran to hide at my safe place, my office, my workplace, my base, my safety net. Why do we always do this? I’m sorry I meant to say me; really, I mean you too because don’t lie to me. I know that you do this too, hide just like me. Ok maybe not everyone hides like me from their problems in life but humor me for a minute please. Is hiding really a bad thing? At this point in my life I thought it was the only thing to do, because once I walked into that hallway and I saw that water stained crack in the wall again I knew that what I had wasn’t as bad as it could be. Here I go again with the minimizing of my problems and shoving them back into my container. That old faded hue of a blue container with the filing cabinet shoved in the back corner is exactly where I was going to stuff this speed bump in my life.
With this decision made standing in the hallway I slowly crept up to my office entrance and was greeted with a customary good morning from the front office staff member, then it all began, and she uttered those words I was dreading.
“Are you alright?”
“Why of course,” I said.
“Why?”
“Because you just look exhausted.”
“Well I didn’t sleep well”
“Well I was running late”
“We’ll let me know if you’d like to talk,” She said.
That was that, with those last fleeting words
I hung a quick left to make it to the solitude of my chair. Let me tell you about this pleasant chair that I had just recently acquired, and boy was I excited that I was now the proud owner of this wonderful piece of furniture. Before I had my safe place in my office but with a painful and rough on my ass kind of chair that didn’t bring me the type of comfort I so longingly wished for in my place of safety. If any day called for a comfortable piece of furniture today was the day.
——-
Safe place within my head; hiding out from reality seeing what type of whimsical story I could tell myself. This was my plan, come on Brett what the fuck are you thinking! You can’t hide, you need to be strong, show her that you can do this, you’re a maverick; don’t give up so easily.
Pulling into that driveway; was that time of day that I was dreading since the second I left the house. Despair had taken over, served with a side of disgust. I wanted nothing more in the world right now than to just stay in my head, come on why can’t I do that. What is reality even? Why should I be doing this; isn’t it easier to not have to partake in the real world. What’s the point anyways? All I ever do is just make my life harder by letting people in and getting close; letting others down with my lack of perfection. Creating distance is my ultimate weapon against others to protect my own soul from being crushed. Like come on who really wants to get their soul crushed but we all do it; don’t we? I love pain, a masochist and at that point I didn’t even know it yet. See this whole story is just some sort of revisionist type of history that I can tell you after the dust has settled. The only two people that were there for these “incidents” were me and myself.
Me and myself are my two favorite people to deal with. Well sometimes I only know how to deal with one at a time; the other like a troubled child sneaking out of the house at night to partake in something unsavory. Unsavory behavior, unsavory mind, unsavory thoughts, unsavory love. These are all parts of my other self that I was grappling with in the driveway that day. Welcome old friend, it’s nice to see you again. It was a family reunion that I had forgotten I was going to that day, but since were here fuck it let’s do this.
Darkness, pure unadulterated darkness is all I was feeling in this moment of time; which had felt like it completely slowed down. The feeling of dissociation was growing larger within my chest as each waking moment passed by. The world was passing me by and I was not a part of it anymore; reality was fading away and my other side was grabbing hold. In these moments I’m envious of others who have had near death experiences, like what did they see; what did they hear? These are all nagging questions that I have in this moment, if you asked me what death felt like in that moment, I would have answered that I’m already there. That feeling of me and the world being completely disconnected is something that I will never get used to, I just hope that one day it will make sense to me. Make sense like death now makes sense to the person who has been there and lived to tell the tale. You know that person that you see on some evangelist TV show that is on some channel you’ve never heard of, blabbing about God. Seeing the bright white lights, then they have this amazing epiphany with their life changing forever. Yes, that moment, that’s what I was longing for. Just give me an answer, someone; anyone.
I keep repeating to myself over and over and over again that I need to just get my ass up and get inside and deal with reality; I can’t though. That would be to easy, I could just walk inside and murmur what I always would say in these situations when I didn’t want to deal with life. I’d walk through that front door and partake in a cordial conversation.
“Hi babe,” she would say.
“Good Afternoon babe,” I would say.
She would ask how my day at work went, what we should have for dinner, what show are we watching tonight, etc. etc. Thinking about another conversation like this brought rage about within me like I never thought possible, I just couldn’t do it. Not again, not today, not ever. How could I keep living this life for which I so desperately hated? Why was I putting myself through this torture every single day of my life? For what, so I can have these moments of pure insanity and losing touch with reality.
I wish I could say this was the last time for me that I walked through that front door; grabbed my boots, jacket, and my passport and never looked back. If that was the truth though you wouldn’t be reading these thoughts of mine and this story would be over. The end, the final page, over just as quickly as it started. How much nicer of a story would that be? For one constant repetitive heartache wouldn’t be a cornerstone theme of what you are consuming right now. Dissociation with myself and others, high intensity intervals of paranoia, and pure distrusts of society as a whole. Sounds fun right? Truth, lies, what does it matter it’s my story; my memory.
As of now the story of me is done, did I walk back through that door. Did I kick that door down, say exactly what needed to be said and left without waiting for a single response? Did I just turn that car around and drive, drive for hours on days with no end in sight? Well, I guess if you want to find out you’re going to have to wait a bit longer as myself has temporarily hijacked the story.
In death and in life are we one in the same?
General