Dear Ashley

Trying some stuff with heavy use of metaphor.

The oak was a monolithic sight that no other tree dared touch. She should've known she'd find herself standing before it yet again. The leaves waved to her lazily in the wind, a poor imitation of an old friend.

She once wondered if she orbited the massive tree—never quite able to achieve escape velocity—but friends and family had rid her of that notion. None of them were here now, though, and the sensation bloomed in the back of her skull again.

Her jaw clenched. She was here for something more than rumination. Suddenly she felt the weight in her hands again, the box full of junk. Nothing and everything. All that was. All that's left. A coffee mug from Niagara Falls. A half-destroyed sugar skull. A Zippo with a radioactive symbol engraved into its side—and so much else besides. They were the mortar. The oak was the monument.

She set the box down and began dutifully going through it, removing all of the objects, garbage, and mementos. She stacked them all together in the shadow of the oak's trunk, forming no shape in particular. When the box was empty she picked the Zippo up from where she had placed it in the dirt, flipped it open, and lit it. She gingerly placed it on top of the mound of memories and took a ruddy piece of notebook paper from her pocket. Her fingers fumbled with the paper, but she cleared her throat and opened it along the faded yellow lines.

“Dear Ashley,” she began, glancing up to the flickering light of the Zippo and the shifting shadows of the oak, “I forget when this forest faded away, and I don't know when it came back. How did I find it again? Did you guide me here? Did it burn away with the August sun and sprout from the ground again in February when you left through the emergency exit? I've taken a year to realize you had reached escape velocity from me, from the world. But I won't let you leave. Not yet, not before I shout one last thing over the roaring wind outside the exit. And now, it's been so long that I don't think you can hear me anymore. So I've taken it. I've taken everything. Everything that I could draw just a little bit of you from, so that even if it's just a shade of you I can still hold your hand in the biting gale before it whisks you away and say that I didn't want you to leave—if only you had asked. I would become the oak, turn my legs into roots, and catch you in my branches with the words that stick like sap in my throat, but whisper through my leaves and thrum through the concentric rings at the center of my being: I love you.”

Tears ran down her cheeks and her hand curled into fists, pummeling the dirt and loam of the forest around her. She could almost feel Ashley's hand on her shoulder

“But I'm not the oak. My roots were torn up from the decompression of the open exit, and I remain stuck inside as you grow faster and faster, escaping from me into the dark. So I came here, to the oak of our childhood, to combine our gravity and pull you back just long enough to say goodbye before you streak across the galaxy.”

The Zippo's flame had guttered out already. The tree swayed in the wind. She could no longer feel Ashley, the connection of their orbit was finally severed. Now it was only her and the oak she could never be. She looked up to the leaves, but they weren't waving to her anymore. They were waving goodbye to the girl who was flying across the galaxy through nebulae and oort clouds.

“Bye, Ash.”

interesting use of words though, it managed to poignantly convey a message implicitly. to me, it's about letting go from a memories of an old beloved friend, or maybe even a lover? the dead will still be dead but we've got to move on. i guess this kind of writing offers a free room for multitude interpretations, iirc.

to me it somewhat sounds like a combination of poetic verses woven together in a prose manner, and i kind of enjoyed what i read so far, so yeah, it's nice :D

Jerry, long time no see. However, you never fail to disappoint. If the purpose of this was to experiment with allusions, it is pretty darn good. An earthly and organic comparison to whatever this girl was dealing with. It's beautiful. If this is only experimentation, then I'd say it's a success, but putting that success and practice into a legitimate work is what will make that success complete.

Splendid so far.

Quoted for truth.

Yeah, except I think I made a grammatical mistake there. You never fail to disappoint? Is that a double-negative? The longer I try to say that, the more confused I get, but I do think that means the opposite of what I intended: You never seem to disappoint / You never fail to impress.

I believe what I meant to say was that you never fail to submit a work that nearly everyone seems to end up enjoying. So, I'll humbly await your next one.

It's not a grammatical error so much as it's a typo. I didn't catch that until now, and I probably never would have had you not pointed it out.

I don't usually mind typos unless they change the meaning drastically, in which case I can't ignore them and let them slide or else I might give the wrong impression. Misspellings I just edit out.

If you have read my whining and pining at the Writer's Lounge, you might know that I am bad with metaphors. That said, the more I read words like 'escape velocity', 'galaxy' and 'orbit', the more I think that what is described here is not really doomed or unrequited love as high is trying to imply.

Seeing that you have written an excerpt of a space adventure for the Winter Contest, I strongly suspect that this is the same.

I had problems with some of the expressions you used because I am not so familiar with them, like "They were the mortar. The oak was the monument". Mortars and monuments don't seem to me to have much of a connection unless the monument was made of mortar.

Love to hear what you intended to convey in that short story.

This was actually completely unrelated to any previous stuff I've written. I was just trying to work with metaphors and used ones that I could hastily construct. The themes of the metaphors became the oak and the motion of stellar masses. Besides that, it stands to reason that any monument that isn't one solid piece uses mortar. As far as I know, mortar is a binding agent used in construction. The idea was supposed to be Ashley's personal effects bonding with the oak in a metaphysical way to come together into a monument.

All I was really trying for was conveying a particularly poetic half of a young couple after the other had committed suicide, hence the "emergency exit" and "escape velocity". As bad as it is to say, the theme of this took a back-seat to simply trying to create a metaphor with brevity.

Also a thanks to High and Xenon for their thoughts as well. As always I hold everyone's opinion in high esteem.

So a spirit of a dead friend lived inside a tree, and someone was going to free that person by killing the tree with fire? Did I get it right?

It's actually about a girl going to a place that was important to her in her youth to perform a sort of ceremony to cope with the suicide of a friend that she loved. She assembled the items in the belief that it would help her message reach Ashley. The tree is never burnt. The Zippo is just serving the purpose of a candle. I intended the scene to be cathartic, not destructive.

Sorry I couldn't make it more clear, but I hope you still enjoyed reading it.

It might've been me not reading more carefully. Thanks for sharing.

I think you should include this in the summer writing event leonard is running. It does give a strong hint of it, and it came at just the right time, too.