an explanation for the tree on my arm

The best thing we can do is move forward from the pain. It’s only logical. But logic has never made sense to me, and I suspect the same is true for my family of bears. We sit and marinate in it, as though perhaps if we wait long enough, it will all make sense, and it won’t hurt at all anymore. Moving forward means leaving things behind, and I’m a pack-rat of the heart.
The other day, I was trying to rationalize a rash decision, like I am always trying to do, and which everyone always knows I am doing. I told my mother “I like trees. They seem so patient. Like they can’t go anywhere. And their okay with that.” There is something comforting about the permanence in trees. They stick around unless they are cut down or uprooted and even then they make a silent scene, something so awful it could make a person cry, or wretch, or whatever they are inclined to do when they’re upset. I am no tree now. But that’s what I want to be when I grow up. The chances of me growing up in this life time, they’re not so good. But when I die, and all that death wisdom soaks into my bones, all I want to do is be buried, and decomposed in to dirt and be mixed in with leaves, and worms, and other little things that live underground and to somehow, through all of that become a tree. I take comfort in the fact, and this is the only comfort I have for the thought of death, that when I die, I will be returned to the Earth whence I come from, be part of something bigger, and more beautiful, and more purposeful and functional than myself.
I spend a lot of time thinking about ways to get attention, though I don’t think I realize that is what I am doing most of the time. I am doing my best to look for a new goal or perhaps not look for a goal at all but figure out what I like for the sake of liking it, not for the sake of impressing someone.
Did you know that people can stop loving you? You can say the perfectly wrong thing, just once, and it is over. “sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me” what a crock of shit. I did that once, ya know. Maybe more than once. But only once that I know of. Said the wrong thing, spent months trying to swallow it back up, the ‘cause of a half year of stomach aches. Mistakes are tough on the digestive system. In return, they erased me. So I had to erase them. So it didn’t hurt so much. But we can not swallow or erase things. Just like your stomach gets full and the paper gets thin, people get tired. If you get broken once, can you ever get pieced together properly again?
I am beginning to believe there is no such thing as “moving on” in the sense I always assumed people meant. It is more like learning to be at peace, for a majority of the time, with the things that have happened or the things that have not happened or the things that will never happen at all. So you better find the love of your life fast, because the older you get, the more you have to carry, and it gets harder to know a person through and through, and it gets harder to explain yourself, because you have all these things, these memories, these, these things branded into your heart and your bones, and how do you sort through them properly to explain yourself? I am scared that I will be this way forever. It is not really a bad way to be, I suppose. But I can tell that it will get lonely. Lonely like being swallowed by the sea. Sometimes, it just doesn’t matter how hard you try. I am wondering if redemption is even a possibility ever. You can’t take back things, even if you didn’t mean them in the first place.
It seems like I’m stuck on this one thing, but it is not just one thing, but many things, perhaps all of the things. We all have our own personal terrors, and whether one person’s is worse than the others is really not the point, because our terrors seem big to us, because they are what we know, and they ARE important, even if they aren’t in the scheme of all the terrors ever heard of.
The trees are a comfort. I can hear them trying to sell me something, just by their existence. They’re whispering some sort of secrets with their leaves, and it is the only thing that convinces me that someway, it will be ok, even if I can’t understand how now. So I’m sticking with the trees.