Boston Common at Twilight

Much later, it was the trees he thought of.

They were so tall and bare. He must have seen them when he’d first gone to the Boston Common when he was eight years old, but he didn’t remember noticing them. Now when he thought of that day in December, he would see the spaced-apart oaks, spidery, reaching into the stark afternoon, leafless, like black skeletons, and how towering they felt above him. He would also think of them from above, looking down past their branches to his fifteen-year-old self, beside the snowbanks and other people teetering around on the paths of the park.