The Indicator x The Student: “The Calf on the Open Field”

My Evergreen, 

I wish you could watch life change as I do. How it dies and learns to grow every year. 

Breathe and rest. 

I wish you knew distrust as I do. The silence of not understanding the predictable. The pain of not believing simply because it is not in my nature to accept the change of things. 

Green, orange, bare, and white. 

I wonder if you know the pain of wishing as I do, of longing for the absurd. And it is foolish to ask. Perhaps you understand longing in a way that I never could. 

Have I told you of the drive? 

About how it was late summer in the year after everything ended? And the car windows were open just enough for the smell of dew and grass to come in. I was going to the river when I saw it. A calf, brown and white, standing alone in the open field. It was there that day, and then it wasn’t. And I returned. Almost every day to see it again. My breath fogged more and more as time passed, as the sun set earlier and earlier, as the crushed clover that stained my socks green turned brittle and dry. 

I wonder if I’d care this much if that hadn’t been the last time. If I would still look. Maybe I cherished it only because I saw it pass, because I almost had it, and it went by without ever being mine. 

The forest painting warm, the purple over the river, the snow resting at the mountain peaks. 

I thought that moving far, really far, would let me forget. I wanted clean, like the trees undressing for winter. But I’m not sure that’s what I found. And when there was nothing in the meadow surrounded only by acres and acres of mountains and trees, I figured there was really no forgetting or changing the truth. 

It happens every season, and I don’t think I’ll ever learn. But I envied (and still do) everything around me — their ability to move on and change with time — bloom, grow, wrinkle, die. I wanted it selfishly, unashamedly, for you, but in reality for me.  

And I wonder if it’s selfish to ask you to be something you are not. 

Not frozen, young, missed, Evergreen. 

But I don’t think most people understand the feeling of looking up and seeing so much that you feel like you see nothing at all. But this, this is my evergreen. This imagining and longing for cycles of becoming, undoing, and remaking. The curse that comes with knowing the end but thinking it could be different, too. 

The snow began to melt today. 

The smell of grass came back. 

I almost knelt in the mud, some still-frozen fractals digging into my skin.  And how do I explain to you this need for closeness, my desire to dig into the dirt? How can I explain my need to disturb your peace, your evergreen? 

I see the grass and bits of dirt clinging under my fingernails as I scoop hand after hand of mud, roots, and plants. I’m getting closer, and I’m still so far — my heart climbing up my throat as I make my way down into the ground. And when I’ve dug deep enough to see you again, deep enough to hold your cold body against mine, maybe it’ll all stop. 

When I finally understand that I cannot replace your heart with mine, 

When I learn to accept that you’ve met your time, 

When I stop fighting the nature of your permanence in death. 

Then, and only then, will this evergreen of wondering end.