The Weeping Birch
We dance in the hot July evening in the thick swamp air, letting it layer itself upon our naked coats as the clouds blush an afternoon pink. We twist and turn to the beat of her drum, the jangle of my rusted tambourine, kicking up dirt as we circle the fire. Zecora chants in her rhyming tongue a song from her old lands—a lullaby about dreams transformed into something frantic as we holler and whoop into the endless, lonely miles of Hayseed Swamp.
My home is the same as when I left it all those years ago, stolen from my time by force, locked in limbo for a thousand years, and spat cruelly back into reality. The trees still sway in the summer air. The docks and houses still rot alongside the bayou oaks, dressed in funeral mosses. The brush still rustles with critters and buzzes with mosquitos and bees.
Some say that I am the most fortunate of the six. That it must be easy to return to my life as a healer and a mage, practicing the same art I have known my whole life.
They are wrong. They are ignorant. I lost just as much as everypony else.
I lost her.
Smoke coughs itself from the burning wood and billows into the sky. My eyes sting with tears that soak into my coat, mixing into the moisture of this hot night like everything else. Slowly, my mane, still as orange as autumn leaves, comes loose from its tightly wound braids, falling over my face like a widow’s veil—a curtain of orange for the glare to bleed through like sunlight.
I try to dance this feeling away. To escape memory itself. But it won’t go away.
And it is in this moment that a sob unfurls from me, a true blossoming of emotion that makes no effort to turn a blind eye to itself. I kneel to the earth, my tears finally great enough to fall from my face as if my grief is too heavy for the swamp itself to contain.
Zecora is there in an instant, hoof around my neck, pulling me close. Her lips murmur along the surface of my head as she strokes my withers. I can barely make out her words over the sound of my own sorrow.
When I pull away, she looks scared. She knows I’ve made up my mind. She holds me close anyways and kisses the bridge of my nose.
***
In the morning, we hunt through the duckweed and stagnant ponds for rose mallow and hyacinth. We are quiet. We speak only in plucked petals and dug-up roots. Somewhere far into the trees and gnarled roots, a gator bellows, long and angry.
It is mid-afternoon by the time our baskets are full of everything we need.
What I need.
To forget. To move on.
When she asks if I’m ready to go back, though, I shake my head. I don’t know what drives me to make this meaningless goodbye, but I feel that I owe it to Zuri.
Zecora and I both know the path to her resting spot. Through the firefly grove. Past the tangle of thorn flowers. To the quiet lake surrounded by its clan of guardian palmettos, their spiked leaves acting as a sharp barricade before finally reaching the peaceful and clear water.
In the center of the lake is an island. In the center of the island is Zuri, her long branches forever still with no breeze to push them.
Driven by unbound heartache, my lover inhaled the spores of the white lilypad, infecting herself with swamp fever. In the small chest we kept beneath the floorboards of the house she left a note. With me gone, she succumbed to the torment that comes with the vanishing of a loved one. For years, she waited for me, well into the time that I had promised to grow old with her. She never found anypony else, even as time rolled inevitably by. And in those desperate, final days, Zuri did the only thing she had known for the majority of her life.
She decided to wait.
You’ll find me on our island. Right in the center. Our favorite spot. I hope I become a black gum tree or a silver maple. One of the ones you like. Promise that you’ll find your way back to me, Meadow. Please.
In the end, she became a weeping birch. Her black and white stripes became the bark, and her zap bee-yellow mane became the long, somber leaves.
I stare at her for the last time across the motionless water where the herons stand still as statues, watching me with their accusing, stark eyes as if they are surprised that I dare to show my face.
“Goodbye, Zuri,” I say, and I let the swamp eat my words just as it has eaten my misery and regret for the past six years.
***
Under the blinking stars of a rare, cloudless night, Zecora and I brew. The cauldron bubbles as flames bathe its sides. The ingredients are simple, according to her. Milkweed seeds and sun-dried moss, followed by cracked eggshells and the petals of red marsh marigold.
It seems laughably easy to concoct a potion of forgetting.
My lover stares at me from across the fire. I am tired of seeing Zuri in her. I am tired of seeing Zuri in the trees and in the meadows and in the tall weeds every time I look out our window. For months and months, Zecora has tried to convince me not to go through with this. I know that she and I share the same pains, but mine is a thousand years older than hers. She will understand one day, I hope.
The smoke is in my eyes again, but I do not cry this time.
Zecora takes my hoof in hers and tilts her head to the sky. She asks the stars to turn my memories of Zuri into a dream—to keep them high above in the heavens where they will not reach me down on earth.
The night sky twinkles back a message that only she can read, and she nods.
Her language, still new to me after all these years, pours out of her and I can feel her magic drain into the pot like a thick syrup.
Digging into my basket, I pull the final ingredient out. A leaf from Zuri’s tree. Dropping it in, I watch the last piece of her dance along the surface before disappearing beneath the white bubbles.
Taking a ladle, I scoop the drink into a wooden cup, blowing the curling steam into the air. I wonder if that is what my memories of Zuri will look like as they leave my head. Once it has cooled, I bring the mix to my lips to find one final cruelty.
It smells exactly like every good moment we ever had together. Every sunny morning awakened in each other’s forelegs. Every night spent across the table from each other. Every kiss that shared the taste of wild berries.
I sip, letting it slide down my throat.
And then I
start
to
forget.