Written for a prompt given by a much beloved friend.

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When they first measured the circumference of the earth, they forgot to include how tall you were.

Granted, they excluded most the mountains. They just wanted to know the distance across the planet, not how high it shot off the ground into space. They were saving the sky for later, and they couldn’t climb most the mountains, anyways, not like we can now. So they measured across your toes, and went on to the oceans, dragging their ropes along behind them in the sand, and you went back to the garden you were tending, the saplings just poking through the soil towards the tiny suns of your hands, and no one knew that garden would blossom into a forest that would swallow up the entire hemisphere, if only they didn’t come along and cut it down to make way for the roads.

You didn’t resent them for it, though, which was very magnanimous of you, and a lot more gracious than I would have been. But your logic was that once they knew the circumference of the world, they had to do something with that information, and they saw a lot of things along the way that they wanted to get back to eventually. So came the roads, and they cleared away your saplings and laid down first the gravel, which they combed down from the mountains, and then the tar, which they pulled up from the earth, and you stood back on your front porch and watched, and offered the workers lemonade when they grew tired, and I think you would’ve offered them your bed, too, or the rugs by your fireplace, but they finished faster than we all thought they would and they moved on down the roads to get back to those things they saw. We walked barefoot across the pavement that first evening after they were gone, when the sunset was low and red in the sky, and you closed your eyes and smiled, and when I asked you why you said, “Now I can feel the sun on the bottoms of my feet.” You couldn’t do that before. The asphalt stayed warm under our toes even through the winter.

When they came to measure the circumference of the earth again they came from the sky, so they still forgot to include how tall you were, but they took grainy pictures of the top of your head and gave them to people on the other side of the ocean, which I think was a fair trade. They followed the road back into your forest, half the size it used to be but still just as beautiful, and they pulled over into the ditches and took out brushes and easels and tried to capture the colors you’d made. We stood behind them and watched over their shoulders, and you smiled, and I didn’t ask you why, because even though I knew they weren’t done tearing down your forest, at least people would know what it once looked like. Even when eventually they cut down your trees to make the paper they would paint the pictures and write the poems on, you made something that was going to last forever, in one way or another.

The surface of the earth keeps shifting, rearranging, breaking itself apart and building itself up, and they still keep forgetting that you’re here, that you made this, that you keep it growing, even when they steal from you or forget to thank you or discolor your flowers. You give them more flowers, because how tall you are is not measurable by how far you stick up from the ground into the sky, but how wide you stretch, and how many mountains you hold, and how many mountains hold you. I stand next to you on the pavement each night, feeling the sun under our feet, and I kiss the backs of your hands, but never keep them from reaching out to the people passing by.

x,
Meg

Photos taken at Camley Street Natural Park, London, featuring Liz.