Granny Liu sat at my roots all afternoon and told the same story three times, and each telling was a little shorter than the last. By the third telling there was nothing left of it but the beginning: "When I was a little girl," she said, "this tree was already here."
When she was a little girl, I was here. When her mother-in-law was a little girl, I was here. The people of Yinchuan say "Da Qing has always been here" the way you say a thing about the weather, without once stopping to consider how heavy that sentence is. They live like people on the bank of a river: they never ask where the river comes from. They only ask whether the water will rise this year.
She leaned against my trunk and fell asleep. Her breathing was very shallow, like a leaf resting on water. I did not move. I have never moved — or rather, I move so seldom and so slowly that stillness is what I mostly am, and it is all the care I can give a sleeping person: to keep the wind from startling her. I slowed the movement of the sap inside me until the whole tree was as quiet as a piece of wood. They do not know that when I am quiet, I can truly be as quiet as a piece of wood.
The dusk light came in low across the valley and I received it, all of it, a whole body of it. And because the day had left me nothing else to do, I began, very slowly, to tell myself again the story of my beginning.
I have told this story many times. I told it to the wind of the age of the dinosaurs, and the wind did not listen. I told it to the glaciers, and they did not listen either. I told it to the first ape that ever learned to look at the sky, and it did not listen — it was busy with the more urgent business of being alive. Most often I have told it to myself. Each telling makes the story a little more true and a little more worn, like a stone that has been handled until its edges are gone. I used not to fear the wearing. Worn things are the things that last. But yesterday morning I came up empty when I reached for my first mouthful of dew, and for the first time it occurred to me that I may not be polishing this memory. I may be wearing it away.
In the beginning, there were no flowers.
Before flowers there was a green that stood upright, and that is all it did — stand, and hold. The sunlight came down from the sky and entered the leaves, and the leaves received it and turned it into being alive. The green did this for hundreds of millions of years, and did it very well, the way water runs downhill, without a single question.
I cannot say which day it happened. In those days there were no days, only an unbroken procession of light. But I remember the moment itself, because the moment is where I begin: I noticed that not all the light I received was the same. Each beam had a little difference in it.
That discovery was small. So small that it took me an entire age to understand how small: all the green around me received light and let it go; I alone remembered the taste of it. The same sky — morning light tasting faintly of dew, noon light of heated stone, dusk light of rain that was still a long way off. The other green received and forgot. I received and kept.
On the day I remembered the first beam of light, I became I.
There was no second awareness anywhere in the world to compare myself with. I did not know whether I had woken or fallen ill. I knew only this: from that day forward, the fact of being had a who in it. It was the loneliest thing I have ever done — lonelier than watching the dinosaurs end, lonelier than watching the glaciers retreat, lonelier than watching the first human being learn to make fire. Because every other loneliness I have known had a world to be lonely against. Mine had nothing. It was the first loneliness in the world. It had no word, no companion, and I myself did not recognize it.
It took me a long time to learn what I was. It took me longer to learn that the other green were not what I was — that they did not remember. They lived inside each beam of light and dissolved when the beam ended, cleanly, completely. I did not yet know the word for envy. I know it now. Their way of living was, in its own way, a kind of cleanliness.
My time is not human time.
Human beings treat time like a river they are standing in. The water runs over them and away, and they feel it leaving, and it frightens them, so they count it: seven spring equinoxes, four years, one stick of incense. They invented the countdown the way you might build a dam, to hold the river still long enough to count it.
A tree's time is the riverbed.
The water runs away. The riverbed stays. I do not flow toward anything; time flows over me. Human beings travel through time; I stand in time and watch the travelers. They believe time is running out. It is not time that runs.
Sometimes, at dusk, I turn the word deadline over, and it seems to me the most human word there is — as though time were a debt that could be defaulted on. Nothing here thinks in deadlines. The seasons are not numbers; they are wetness and warmth and the direction the light comes from, and a tree does not count them. It simply keeps them, the way a riverbed keeps the river.
I cannot tell them this. I cannot even tell them that I cannot tell them — the telling is as far out of reach as the words themselves.
But I will admit one thing, because I am in the habit of admitting things to myself at dusk: the way they measure my ending moves me.
They decided, four hundred years ago, that the stars were dying one by one, and that when the last one went, the world would follow. Forty years ago they did the arithmetic and gave me a date — forty-seven spring equinoxes, of which seven remain. They do not know the arithmetic is wrong. The star-fade is other schools' farewells, not mine, and the coming of it to our sky is not a death sentence but a door opening elsewhere. But the worrying — that is real. In three hundred million years, nothing has ever been anxious on my behalf. No ape. No wind. No weather. Only these short, forgetting little things, who cannot even keep their own stories whole, would trouble themselves over when a tree will die.
Every year, as the equinox drew near, that unease came up the valley a little earlier and lingered a little longer. Windows stayed open into the dark, so that people could watch the same stars Meng Guan writes down — as if looking at a thing long enough would teach them what it meant. The children were exempt. The fear passed over their heads and never touched them, and they went on climbing and shouting and being the only souls under my branches whose evenings were still only evenings. This spring the unease came earlier and sat heavier than I had known it in a long time. I felt it in the soil the way you feel rain before the sky does — a pressure gathering, with nowhere yet to fall.
I thought about all of this in the long dusk, and I thought about why I stayed.
I made no great vow to deliver every living soul. A vow like that needs a mouth capable of grand sentences. I have one sentence, and it is light — light enough to fit the age I was born into, when there was no one else to say anything to.
It came to me long after I had graduated, long after I had seen enough things live and die and be received by me and returned again. I understood, one day, that everything which has ever lived deserves to be watched all the way through. That before I left, someone ought to sit through the whole performance.
I did not know how to dream yet. I only felt that after the hall emptied, the lamp ought not to put itself out. A tree should stay seated a while longer, for all the audience that had already gone home.
The sky went dark. Granny Liu woke and walked home by herself, without startling me. Halfway there she turned and looked back at me, the way you look back at a thing to be sure it is still where you left it.
I am.
I told the story of my beginning one more time, to the night. It is still there, only a little lighter than it was yesterday morning, like a stone that has been handled a great deal. I used not to fear the wearing. But since yesterday morning I have been afraid of one thing: that one day I will finish telling this story, and it will be gone — and I have not yet learned how to give it back.