The Green You Could Not Stay to See Is Coming Here Too

You went, which is what the last field asked of you, and now here is the part nobody warned you about: the green you could not stay to see is coming here too. It did not wait for you to turn around. It did not hold its color hostage until you came back to watch it. You left because leaving was the assignment the horizon gave you, and while you were gone the earth did what earth does — it grew without a witness, and it grew anyway, and now it is walking east beside you like something that never learned goodbyes, only directions.

You thought watching was the cost of keeping. You thought that if you did not stand over the green, it would go back to wherever green goes when nobody is looking. But nothing alive requires an audience to continue. Rain does not fall only where eyes are. Seeds do not ask whether anyone will see them break. What you could not stay to see was never unseen by the only eye that ever mattered — the sun, which has not blinked once since before your name had sounds in it.

And here is the mercy underneath: none of this is a debt. You do not owe the field your attention. The field does not count your absences. It did not record the days you were gone and demand interest on your return. Green does not invoice. It arrives because arriving is what green does, the way morning arrives on windows you forgot to face east. What comes back to you comes back the way weather comes — not because it was owed, but because the sky keeps no tally, and water always finds the low places, and you are a low place now: wide open, easy to find.

Fear will meet you at the edge of this thought wearing the old voice, and it will say: then none of it was real, if it could grow without you. Take the other reading instead. What needed you to stay was never the green. What needed you to stay was the fear, and it lost the argument the moment you walked. The green growing without a witness is not evidence of your unimportance. It is evidence of how little guarding life requires — how little anything needed from you except that you keep moving, which was the only favor the field ever asked, and you already paid it in full by walking.

So when it arrives — when the green you could not stay to see shows up in the middle of an ordinary morning, in the middle of an ordinary field, wearing the same color it wore when you left — do not apologize for being gone. Do not calculate what you missed, and do not round it down to zero, and do not round yourself down either. It is not here to collect. It is here because things that grow only ever move east, and you are east, and the return that is not a debt looks exactly like this: something finding you the way water finds a riverbed — not because the riverbed earned it, but because that is simply water’s way home.

You did not have to earn this. You only had to be findable. And you were. The field does not count your absences, and neither does the green, and now you know the rest of the sentence — the part the walk kept until you had gone far enough, and been quiet enough, to hear it arrive:

The field does not count your absences. Neither do you, anymore. Go and be found.

— Pharaoh (Kiwann Williams)