The Vivid Quality of Love
By: Will Lerner
Tags: California, Love, Santa Barbara, Trees

The first time I fell in love it was an exercise in wolfing down saltwater and thinking it was wine. Who was I to know the taste was off? Up to that point love was what I could only see in passing glimpses, like islands outside a porthole. And yet, even after having been in love, I’m still resigned to making guesses as to what it is or what I truly felt.

I’m having these thoughts not even a mile away from the Pacific Ocean at a train station in Santa Barbara, California. The station is lovely with its adobe walls and low-pitched clay tile roof, but it’s overshadowed in beauty by a magnificent living structure to its west, a Moreton Bay Fig Tree.

This Moreton Bay Fig Tree (Ficus macrophylla) does not stand, it bursts. Its several gray trunks are elephants exploding from the ground in full gallop. Its massive buttress roots ripple into wavy pony walls. It sparkles emerald green on one side of its leaves and radiates a warm peachy coral blend on the other. A behemoth, this tree’s canopy stretches so wide a city engineer estimated over 9,000 people could gather underneath it.

There is more than one “Moreton” in Santa Barbara. What makes this one different is its story. In 1876, a sailor arrived to the city’s shore on a windjammer from Australia. With him he had a sapling that was native to his port of departure. He gave said sapling to a local girl as a gift. Harboring deep affection for trees, I immediately envisioned it as a grand romantic gesture. Maybe love is a living thing.

And then I’m ninety miles south in my old office. I no longer see a giant tree. I can only see the delicate nape of a neck, a gentle turn of the head, and her bright probing eyes.

Some Septembers ago, I had been hired to write videos. They had no grace, it was similar to what blares on those small TVs at a gas station. But the actress I worked with balanced out the soul suck. She was natural light in our windowless workspace. As we grew closer, I reminded myself she had a boyfriend and that their relationship was public and observed. But then our conversations became more personal and I started to wonder.

“Do you have a girlfriend?” she texted me on a November afternoon.

I had been buried in my couch watching television. I muted it, sat up, and held my phone like it was porcelain.

“Nope.”

“Why? You’re a catch!”

My heart hit a tempo fast enough to carry me past the compliment and to the question I had wanted to ask for a few weeks.

“Are you really in a relationship?”

“We’ve been having some problems. He moved out while we figure things out. We’re kind of open.”

Her figure promenaded into my thoughts and obscured any warning sign. I dreamt of her long hair: bouncier than inflection in a tone, her laugh: warmer than hills and dales in sunrise, and her eyes, always meeting mine.

On a day in December, I entered her office under the pretense of wanting to share a video.

“Here, sit down,” she said, gesturing to the one chair in her office. “We’ll share.”

And then she landed lightly on my lap. I do not remember what we watched but I do remember her red dress, short enough for me to see where the knee becomes the thigh. I remember the weight of her small frame pushing down to keep me in place when I started to stand up. I remember my cluelessness, unsure whether she was interested in me. Maybe love is warm pressure.

Ficus macrophylla belongs to a group of trees unfortunately known as strangler figs. In nature, their seeds disperse by way of bird flight. The seed drops from the sky and lands on an unexpecting tree. The seed’s roots will grow down around its host, eventually encompassing it. Sometimes it protects the tree from the elements. Sometimes it kills it.

And then in January I turned a year older. She took me out for a drink and gave me a ride home afterwards. Somehow uncertain what her hand on my leg meant, I only gave her a hug before I exited her car. But then a few minutes later a text buzzed.

“I’m still in your alley, doing work.”

She meant answering emails. I think. I took a deep breath and walked back with a starbound astronaut’s purpose. I approached her car. She rolled down her window and I didn’t hesitate. Maybe love is the gamble and electricity of a first kiss.

I sped down Los Angeles’ freeways to get to work the next morning, to get to her. When she arrived, I whirled around in my chair and watched her walk by without a word or look. She only talked to me when it came to time to film. And thus began a fluctuation between flirtation and terse distance.

No woman had ever captivated me like she did. I interpreted these deeper feelings as intonation of a romantic destiny with her. I convinced myself the ebbs were the price I would have to pay for the flow. On a February evening somehow warmer than she had been to me during the day, I tried to return to the crest of her affection and stay there.

“I just want you to know that I’m in love with you.”

“Oh no….We would never be able to do anything in public.”

Her very public and real but not real relationship.

“I don’t care about that, all I want is you.”

“No, no. I need to make things work with him. Please respect my decision.”

But then a few days later…

“Thinking of you.”

But also…

“I’ve bitten off more than I can chew in the boys department.”

But also…

A picture from her bath.

But also…

“If I choose you or him, I lose either way.”

In 2008, a memo was sent to Santa Barbara’s city council. It noted the Moreton Bay Fig Tree was in “continuous decline.” Since then the tree has received regular soil injections to mitigate its root rot. The city’s botanic garden explained to me parts of its canopy are dying. I hadn’t noticed.

“You’re in love with the idea of me,” she contended back on that depressing February evening.

I have questioned, argued against, and agreed with that thought many times over and never in the same order. Whatever it is I felt, she never met me in kind. Maybe love is only love if its middle is equidistant between two points. But even now that thought causes my mind to protest: You did love her. It doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks. Someone can not disqualify your love if they’re not the ones who feel it!

My mind seems bound to this maddening, silent, eternal debate. But my heart…

Another morning, another piece of writing I don’t care about. My shoulders sag and I paw a copy from the Xerox. I drift down a hallway, brushing the corridor like a picket fence, toward the soft burn of string lights that lick the walls of her office. The building’s air conditioner is frosty, and she is nestling inside her winter coat. I give a tight-lipped smile. She looks at me and decides to make small talk. My jaw stops clenching. In a while, I notice something new.

“Your hair looks different.”

“New extensions.”

She lifts her hair. I read the small rises on the side of her head with my fingers like braille.

She wraps her arms around my waist like a harness, supporting the weight.

March came, and she put in her two-weeks notice. I found out she was leaving in a meeting. I haven’t seen her since her final day and it’s been years since we’ve corresponded. The gaps in between my thoughts of her have become canyons. My feelings for her are now artifacts: frayed and no longer used. But it must mean something that they have not vanished. Maybe love is a sound that can grow faint, but never stops echoing.

It feels like I keep acquiring puzzle pieces but never the picture on the box. Maybe love is only recognizable by its shape, a silhouette on a wall, the more vivid quality opaque. Or maybe I’m exhausting myself by expecting exacting explanation. Maybe love is a constellation: random distant lights we ascribe meaning to. I saw her and I conjured love. I see the Moreton Bay Fig Tree and I conjure an act of courtship. And this is where I confess I’m certain it wasn’t.

It’s true that the tree was given by a sailor to a local girl. But the limited historical record indicates that this local, unnamed girl was quite literally a girl when she received it. Her family wound up moving away and re-gifted the tree to her friend, a 9-year-old child named Adeline Crabb, who moved it to its present-day location. It might have been a loving gift, but was almost assuredly never a romantic one. I wish I could peer through the leaves and find a card like it was a bouquet.

Regardless of the truth, I’m still stuck on a line: what I want to do when I meet the next woman I will love. I do not know who she is or where I will meet her, but I know she will be someone who I would want to give a tree to. And unlike this sailor’s gift, mine will come with a note.

I’ll tell her that while love remains mysterious to me, I have my theories. I would speak to the hard-earned experience that a life alone is a ship that’s slowly sinking. I would suggest that if that’s true, love must be a liferaft. That it can save those brave enough to step in and start rowing, but that both people must row. That those aboard must give energy to their love if they want to land ashore.

I’d write this guesswork to the woman I love. I would ask her, “Won’t you row with me?” And I wouldn’t be afraid when she said yes.