In the dying summer light, your father lifts you up into the low-hanging branches of your front yard’s oak tree. You are a tiny thing, younger than the tree beneath your bare feet, braver than your father below you, the wide-eyed offshoot of your mother making dinner inside the house. You can smell her cooking from across the lawn, blooming something soy-sauce and ginger, and your stomach squeezes in anticipation. A dry breeze rustles through the leaves, knocking you off-balance, but you are not afraid— your father, sturdy as the wood beneath you, will catch you. You know this to be true as well as you know the bark under your small, warm hands is real. Hues of sage brush against your cheek, burnt-gold seeping in at the tips, and the sun is warm against your face.

Since the moment you were born, your parents have towered over you like giants of old. Even when you didn’t yet know how to walk or speak, when you spent your days drawing clumsy shapes into your food with wobbly fingers, tottering around on unsteady feet, you knew certain unshakeable truths about your parents. Your father does what is best for you. Your mother knows you better than anyone in this world. You never had reason to doubt their strong hands, the ones that had bathed you and fed you and lifted you into trees. Even in the dim glare of memories you would rather forget, when those hands struck you, shut doors on you— you believed in their pretext, their grounded rationale. How could you not? At that age, you had to look up just to see their faces. Their height predicated their wisdom. Being under their watching gaze felt like sitting under the shadow of that great, perennial oak– the comfort of a heavy, all-encompassing shade.

Despite your mother’s best efforts, one day you learn how to walk on your own, then run, and then you never stop running. Turning ten and trading homes is the beginning of this slow estrangement: the chill of the moving truck awakens you from the shelter of some long childhood dream. It’s as if you’ve grown extra sets of eyes on the sides of your head—your buggy peripheral stretches horizons. Your mother chemically straightens her hair. Your father changes his glasses and you think they make the lines of his forehead look deeper, sharper. Like it would hurt him to touch. The gritty definition of the world around you keeps coming into focus, and with it, your growing self-realization, your worldly irritations, your juvenile self-importance. You are a person, now— full-fledged, flesh-and-bone, splayed out under sterile lights. It makes you combative. You feel the weight of your own body when you tense your knees and it makes your skin crawl.

Nowadays, just being in the same room as your mother brings you both to messy, gnashing odds, equally awful and equally stubborn. A genetic fault. Arguing with her makes you angrier than you thought you knew how to be, and a terrible boiling heat climbs into your throat. The shrill sound of her voice and her tense furrowed brow splits you in half. You taste salt on your gums and know that even though your mother is right in front of you, she is further away than she has ever been in your life.

You want to reach up and climb into her arms, but suddenly you realize that you are the same height. The loss takes root in your chest— that blind faith you once held like a god to your tiny heart has shrunk to the distance between your level faces. When she looks at you she sees a stranger, and when you look at her you see a girl, trembling and furious, the skin of her fists stretched thin and white around bone. Fractured bits of wood trapped under the surface. 

A week before you leave for college, you drive past your old house and it feels as though you’re looking at it through videotape. The place you grew up warps in foreign angles and gauche blue paint. You realize with a startle, and a growing, choking sense of grief, that your once-great oak tree has become a paltry stump in the ground. You thought it would watch over you forever. Now, if you wanted to walk across the lawn, you could step over its height without breaking your stride.

In the middle of an argument with your mother, you raise your head to the sky as if in prayer, and flush in shame at your childish wishing: You’re looking for the ghost of something that no longer exists. A tall oak tree shifting in the sunlight of a distant memory.