Elitsa and the Trees

 

Elitsa stood by the window, watching the morning light glide across the bark of the trees — that old, cracked bark that resembled the hands of elderly people who had survived more winters than could ever be spoken of. The air smelled of dust and damp soil, and in the distance came the metallic sound of chainsaws, slicing through the silence like a harsh thought intruding upon a prayer. Even before she saw what was happening, her body understood. There are pains that arrive before words do. Pains that live in the nerves, in the chest, in the deep memory of the soul.

They had begun cutting the trees.

Large. Old trees.

She remembered how, as a child, she believed that trees kept human secrets. That they listened. That they absorbed what a person could not confess to anyone else. Her mother had once told her that when someone cried beside a tree, the tears were never wasted. And perhaps that was why Elitsa had always felt a particular silence around old trees — not an empty silence, but one that was dense, profound, almost liturgical. As though decades of prayers had gathered inside their trunks.

Now that silence was being torn apart.

Several had already been cut down.

She saw one of the men high above the ground, almost among the sky itself, and the chainsaw gleamed in his hands like something impersonal, stripped of doubt. For a moment it seemed to her that the tree was trembling. That it was afraid. And the thought filled her with such sudden grief that she could no longer remain still.

She waved her arms and shouted for them to stop.

Her voice dissolved into the air. The man looked down. Shook his head. Then began pretending he could not see her.

That was the most painful thing.

Not the refusal.

But the pretense.

That ancient human ability to erase another person from one’s awareness in order not to feel guilt.

And then something deeper than anger rose within her. Something psychoanalysts might call the repetition of an old wound — that primal experience of invisibility, when the child speaks and no one responds. When the soul sends out a signal and the world answers with absence. Perhaps that was why the destruction of the trees hurt her so intensely — because she was not seeing only severed trunks, but reliving that ancient human abandonment once again.

She began making calls.

To all kinds of phone numbers.

Voices. Transfers. Institutions. Numbers. Explanations. One woman spoke with exhaustion in her voice, as though she had long ago stopped believing that anything could still be saved. Another man said there was probably a permit. Probably. That word terrified her. How many crimes had lived beneath the shelter of probability.

While she was speaking, the noise outside continued.

The cutting.

The falling.

That heavy, muffled collapse of a living being onto the earth.

And Elitsa felt something inside her falling too.

She sat down on the chair by the window and did not move for a long time. She only breathed. Slowly. With effort. Like someone trying not to come apart. In moments like these she always wondered why the human soul was capable of feeling such pain for things others called simply trees. But perhaps this was where the last remaining humanity still lived — in the ability to suffer for what cannot speak.

Outside, the light was beginning to fade.

The branches that remained swayed gently in the wind, as though searching for the absent ones.

And she thought how much human life resembles a forest after logging. How many absences we carry within ourselves. Cut-down loves. Broken beliefs. Childhood hopes left to rot somewhere beneath the layers of adulthood. And then we learn to live among the stumps and call it adaptation.

But the soul remembers.

The body remembers.

The psyche remembers even what consciousness has forbidden.

Elitsa had once read that depression is sometimes grief that has not been allowed to speak. And as she listened to the echo of the chainsaws, she wondered whether the world had become so sick precisely because it endlessly cuts away the living — outwardly and inwardly. We cut the forests. We cut away our feelings. We cut away memories. We cut away pain instead of understanding it. And then we wonder why our souls have become dry.

The silence in the room grew dense.

She lit a small candle.

The flame trembled almost imperceptibly.

And in that moment it seemed to her that God was present not as an answer, but as a silence that does not leave. Perhaps the divine never stops violence in the way we expect. Perhaps it is present in the one who suffers because of it. In the one who still has tears. In the one who raises their hands and says: stop.

She closed her eyes.

She remembered an old tree from her childhood. An enormous walnut tree. Beneath it her grandfather used to sit silently in the evenings, looking at the sky. Back then she did not understand that silence. Now she was beginning to understand it. There are sufferings that cannot be explained, only shared with the sky.

How strange, she thought, that people so often call spirituality an escape from pain, while perhaps true spirituality begins precisely where a person stops running. Where they remain. Where they look at the wound without turning away.

Outside, darkness had already begun to gather.

Elitsa went back to the window.

She saw the remains of the tree.

Scattered branches.

Freshly cut wood whose inner flesh was pale and almost golden.

And the sight was so beautiful and so cruel at the same time that she felt tears gathering in her eyes. But she did not cry. She only placed a hand over her chest.

Sometimes grief is too deep for tears.

She simply stood there listening to the evening.

Somewhere far away a dog barked.

Someone was closing a window.

The sky slowly darkened like a tired consciousness.

And then an almost invisible thought appeared within her — that perhaps trees do not disappear completely. That in some way they remain in the air, in memory, in those who loved them. Just as the dead sometimes continue to live in our gestures, in the way we pronounce certain words.

She prayed quietly.

Not a prayer with rules.

But a whisper.

May there be mercy for all living things.

May there be forgiveness for human blindness.

May her heart not turn to stone.

Because that was the greatest fear — not the loss of the trees, but the loss of the ability to feel. The world was slowly teaching people not to feel. To pass by. To pretend not to see.

Like that man up in the tree.

And Elitsa understood that this moment would remain within her for a long time. Not as a memory, but as a question. About humanity. About the soul. About God, who remains silent while the world destroys its own roots.

But perhaps also about something else.

About the fact that despite everything, she had cried out.

She had raised her hands.

She had tried to stop the destruction.

And perhaps sometimes that itself is prayer — not victory, but the refusal to become indifferent.