walnut girl
BY ABIGAIL MOONE
They are whispering words of encouragement to me. I can feel it coursing through the bark grating the naked velvet of my bare feet. “It’s okay to breathe,” they remind me, “this is youth. You are youth. This is now and this is exciting.” The murmured frenzy is bubbling over, and I can hear them shouting at me through the leaves, “Kiss her!” The girl with walnut hair turns her head away, looks across through the muted yellow flush of streetlights. “Do you think it’s disrespectful to climb trees in a graveyard? Is this okay?” The soft focus of her lips fades out. This tree is massive and dancing in a canvas of young grass littered with headstones and spilled paints. I haven’t climbed a tree in a long time. I am glad that I am barefoot; this is human and the bark is just uncomfortable enough to hold me here. I have no space for sadness in this moment—melancholy is not welcome in a dancing tree with a honey girl who glows warm brown. The stars are gone, but the sky is hued a streaky red, and this could be the end of the world. Tonight. Right now. And they know this, those people of the past who are buried and whose bodies are strewn amongst the reaching roots of this midnight tree. They push again, “Ask her! Be bold! Moments like this are what life is for; moments like this belong in hand-cut wood frames, hung in museums of glorious love stories. Moments like this are what makes death okay; knowing that moments like this exist makes death okay.” And I want to believe them. Who am I to question the dead? So I turn again, to this girl with walnut hair. Her hand is on my thigh now, and now my hand is in hers. I ask if I can kiss her, I ask if I can kiss her. She says yes, she says yes. We are kissing. We are kissing. We are kissing, standing in a tree that knows how to waltz under an apocalyptic sky in the middle of a graveyard shaking with the weight of two young girls who are going to fall in love. We are kissing in a graveyard in the dark and her hand is firm on my face, and we are kissing in a tree and my left arm is tight around her back. We kiss in a tree and laugh about kissing in a tree in a graveyard under a sky that screams danger but mumbles jubilation. It hurts a little bit, jumping out of a tree barefoot. That’s okay though. It is not disrespectful to kiss pretty girls in climbing trees. In fact, as I’ve recently discovered, it is quite encouraged.