The Reason For a Breathing Subalpine Larch Tree
Trees have always reminded me of lungs. They even kind of look like them. They branch out in the same type of widespread, fleshy mass with exposed meat, and their introverted veins; veins as in branches, veins that act as passages. They convert carbon dioxide into oxygen with the heavy sighs that match the exalted gasps we press out through our lips and tarnish the world with. They create just as fast as we destroy; it's corrupt to believe that the world was built for us. The mountains, the skies, the oceans, the vast spreads of desert; they were never meant to be violated by human hands. In the same selfish behavior that snow demonstrates when it begins to coat the mountains in a ravishing hunger, bleeding the clor out and filling the space with positive atoms, we humans tactfully, and maybe sometimes vengefully, leave our disembodied fingerprints across the areas, forgetting what we've actually touched, but claiming it as our own anyway. Putting aside all vengeance, I would love to paint your skin with my particular, disembodied fingerprints and tickle the tendons that weave chaotically under the flesh of your wrist. Your smell is potent like pine, and your legs stretch to the height of a Great Oak. I can't help but think that I am doing the w orld good by loving you. And love you, I do. I imagine that our bodies intertwined, like the break off twigs of every branch on a Subalpine Larch, erases the carbon footprints that had been carelessly treaded by all of those terrible people, and give the trees a reason to breathe. I like to believe that thy breathe for you and me.