I'd stumbled long enough.
"Why do you think I hate the Trees, Mrs. Scurfield?" I asked.
She laughed at me. Quietly. Politely. In a way that was almost answer enough.
"I'd like to hear," I said, before she could begin.
"I don't know, Matthew," she said, straightening her jacket collar. "I think your hatred is a little bit ridiculous. But maybe you’re afraid that if you look it in the face you’ll see that it's unbeatable."
“Yes,” I said with all my courage, “that is my fear.”
“Well,” she offered, “I don’t know what to tell you. It might be better for you -in terms of your happiness- to just stay where you are right now, with all your questions unanswered.”
We sat in the stillness for a while.
“Happiness!” I repeated to myself. “Y'know, even if I was some genius and saint and heroin addict, hovering miraculously over the earth in -I dunno- transcendent, sinless bliss… Even if I was that, the Trees would still be there. They’d keep on growing and doing what they do. I’m not gonna to beat them.”
“No.”
“I hate the Trees because I want to.”
“We established that already.”
“Then I don’t even know what I’m struggling against.”
“Try to stop thinking of it as a hatred, maybe,” Mrs. Scurfield suggested.
“Friendship, not hatred,” I joked.
“Yes,” she replied. “Like a friend you grew up with and never really liked, but are still forced to get along with. Like family.”
There was more to the night than that, but I’ll leave it there.
Susan thinks the club is just Mrs. Scurfield’s way of getting a date. Which is fine with me.
"Figuring out the Trees is like a task I've set for myself," I told Mrs. Scurfield at one point in the evening.
“Is that what you’ve been doing?” she asked me. “Because I thought you were just drinking a lot and wandering around town, smoking your life away.”
I love her.
No comments:
Post a Comment