I was looking for the berries of our childhood. You must remember, even if they’ve been folded away in the file cabinets of your mind. Maybe they’re hiding under the paper weight on your desk—check, perhaps, in the lint screen of the dryer. Or else I will look for both of us, in the forest where we used to run.

Here, the bridge edged in jewelweed flowers. We would pop the seeds out one by one, seeing who could propel them the farthest. Here, the toads, fat bellies brushing the ground, feasted on muddied water. Here, the fiddleheads, only good for a few weeks a year, but what weeks they were, tender fern falling beneath our tongues. Here, the sumac clusters, fuzzed and tart, each hiding small seeds you would spit out and I would bite and swallow. If I could, I would’ve folded the forest into dough and eaten it whole. There, it would stay with me, all its rot in my body and you, treading softly after. 

Behind the tree struck by lightning—if you look closely, our initials are still there—our berry patch. White Baneberry, Doll’s Eye, Actaea Pachypoda, we knew all the names. When we first came across it, we looked it up in your field guide to the plants of New England and marveled over sketches of white berries, black dotted, red stems like popping veins.

Requires rich, loamy soil, it told us—perennial, and when I said I didn’t know what that meant, you told me and took so much joy in it. Native to North America. Up to two feet tall. Poisonous. The last word is what we giggled over, imagining the taste of those tiny white berries. If they hadn’t been forbidden as they were, what our mothers would pull us away from and our little sisters would squeal at, I don’t think we would’ve come back. As it was, we would sneak out after school, climb over toads and fallen sumac until we found them. Sometimes, we would hold the berries, grasping greedy handfuls until we crushed them in our eager palms. Other times we would lie on the forest floor, lazily throwing them at each other, pretending to open our mouths as if to catch them, but closing our lips at the last second, letting them bounce off our noses and to the mossy ground. Sometimes, we held them under our tongue. We let ourselves dream of their poison, dared each other to take a bite and never did, felt the berries roll in the pink underside of our cheek. 

Later, you put plastic flowers in your house and hired a man to cut the weeds on Tuesday. When I came over, you would be cleaning marble countertops, shined with antiseptic wipes. You would pour me wine. This one with earthy notes, full-bodied. It tasted chemical. 

The berry is cold on my tongue. I know the juice is bitter, but right now I imagine it will taste like spring. If I close my eyes and forget, I can pretend I’m at a picnic, and the air is cool and sweet, and you are there, not how you are now, but the you of our childhood I can only find in death, and there is no work or traffic, and the clouds are gently heavy, and press us all to stare at sky and fall backwards into loving rest. I am in the clearing, and the sun is coming in. It is quiet. Sometimes there are hikers, and I leave quickly then. Even if they don’t come near, this feels too tender to share. This was yours and mine, and even if you don’t want it anymore it is still mine, and it’s still yours too, and neither of us could change that even if I wanted to. Mine and yours, and the ants in the dark of the log I’m sitting on. This is all I need. The berry is warming, and I know that I should bite it now. It feels so good to just hold it in the arch of my tongue. Maybe if I sit here long enough, I won’t even have to chew it. It would just dissolve into my lungs, and while I was waiting for it to dissolve, the fungus would’ve already rooted itself in my chest and I wouldn’t even have to move or scream when my heart gave a little jolt and fell still. The fungus would swallow me and I would dissolve along with the berry, and I would be the berry, and I would grow again, and in twenty-three years you would come across me again and feel strangely compelled and bored with your husband and picket fence, and you would eat me too, and it would all repeat, and wouldn’t that be the loveliest thing of all?