How to Become a Tree
Tell him— your first boyfriend— that you’re not sure if you’re ready yet, which he will understand as an opening for him to prod at until it’s easier to just say yes, fine, you’re ready now. Let’s get this over with.
Long for the protection of a father, who is engrossed in something else.
Practice taking leave of your body, starting perhaps with the prickling soles of your feet, or the mysteries beneath your shoulder blades; fold up and pack away your awareness like t-shirts into a suitcase until you are ready to escape at a moment’s notice, until slipping away becomes as easy as flinging open a screen door and stepping into a hot night. It’s up to you whether or not you acknowledge this as a loss.
Know that it is your fate to be fertile.
When the time comes, drink beers beers beers beers, beers so light they are only the memory of a flavor, beers so pale you dream of impotence, beers so friendly in their poison that you are pretty sure you are having a good time tonight.
Spend a lifetime staying safe by pleasing others.
Suspect, perhaps, that the completeness you feel with him isn’t completeness at all but is simply the high-priced comfort of being effectively contained.
Throw up on your shirt.
On your way to his car, take hold of me for an instant. Notice how my leaves have the smell of camphor, the shape of a lance.
Allow yourself a moment of longing. The next thing you know, you’ve arrived: the wheels crunch to a halt in the gravel parking lot of a regional park.
Ignore a few things: the sensation of fullness, the lurch, the friction, the swelling. The seat belt buckle jammed into your hip, the wrench of your neck against the window. Find your suitcase. Head for the door.
Follow trails through the night that you haven’t visited since childhood, tracing paths lit by moonlight and memory until you sense you are about to reach a silver space that is new to you but is ancient in the story of the world. Pause for a moment on this threshold. Recommit.
And it is at this moment that you unspool yourself into filaments too many to be counted, flexible and glimmering; you burrow into the dirt like rain, like spores, like vibration, like a spearpoint; reconvene your parts on your own terms, marshaling atoms with the memory of flesh into a sheen of bark, spreading thin and limber. Survive now on the earth and the sky, stretched into a shape that is gorgeous in its unhumanity.
Accept the price, which you are still too young to understand. After all this, he will wear your leaves as his victor’s crown.
Max Schmidt Wheeler is a trans teacher and writer from Oakland, CA. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Metaworker, Astrolabe, Heavy Feather Review, Ouch! Collective, and Rough Cut Press. You can find him on instagram @mxwheels, where he mostly posts pictures of trees and his baby niece.
