My memory is an album of leaves, preserved— pressed between waxed recollections, laid flat not by time but by heat: the heat of shame, of longing, of silent dinners and mowed lawns, of wars beginning on televisions no one dared turn off.
Each leaf, once trembling with green hope, now labeled and muted, becomes a document, an affidavit against forgetfulness.
I catalog them in sequence: the blue spruce of my aunt’s contempt, the birch grove of my mother’s obedience, the mountain ash of my exclusion.
Others see trees; I see lineage. Others see a lawn; I see conscription. Others see a summer; I see the beginning of exile.
And yet, from this quiet herbarium of sorrow, something unfurls. A sentence, perhaps. A leaf that writes back.
