The Island of Missing Trees

"If it’s love you are after, or love you have lost, come to the fig, always the fig"

"There is a tree for every mood and every moment"

At the end of a two-week holiday, I closed the last page of this book: The Island of Missing Trees. Sometimes in the morning, I take a run through forests and to the sea, with this book in hand. I feel more then ever connected to the trees and green plants I have been passing through.

a run through forests and to the sea

This is a story across generations, time, from humans to a fig tree. Cyprus in the summer of 1974 was not for falling in love, yet love happened between two teenagers against war, bias and their fates. London in the late 2010s is for their child to explore her parents' past and love story, unaware of the pain they have been carrying with.

“You don't share a language, you think, and then you realise, grief is a language. We understand each other, people with troubled pasts.”

"Grief is a language. We understand each other, people with troubled pasts.”

From the views of both the fig tree and human beings, immigration is a process to find balance between leaving the past behind and struggling to embrace the new life, between nostalgic dreams and new start, between healing old scars and growing new skins.

"That is what migrations and relocations do to us: when you leave your home for unknown shores, you don't simply carry on as before; a part of you dies inside so that another part can start all over again."

“this melancholy I can never quite shake off. Carved with an invisible knife into my arborescent skin.”

Love in this story is also many times interpreted with heartbreak and melancholy. Youth love with absurd leaving; old lovers reunion after two decades. If Cyprus is an island with water on all sides, then love ought to be "a deceptive thing with heartbreak in the end".

“Love is the bold affirmation of hope. You don't embrace hope when death and destruction are in command. You don't put on your best dress and tuck a flower in your hair when you are surrounded by ruins and shards. You don't lose your heart at a time when hearts are supposed to remain sealed, especially for those who are not of your religion, not of your language, not of your blood. You don't fall in love in Cyprus in the summer of 1974. Not here, not now. And yet there they were, the two of them.”

This is a book I will come back to, as it talks about love, loss and relief in a such sad and beautiful tone. It also reminds me of the endless green, the salty air, the changing season between late summer and early autumn.

“Love is the bold affirmation of hope.”

"People assume it's a matter of personality, the difference between optimists and pessimists. But I believe it all comes down to an inability to forget. The greater your powers of retention, the slimmer your chances at optimism. And I'm not claiming that butterflies have no recollection of things. They have, surely. A moth can recall what it learned as a caterpillar. But me and my kind, we are afflicted with everlasting memory - and by that, I don't mean years or decades. I mean centuries.

It is a curse, an enduring memory. When elderly Cypriot women wish ill upon someone, they don't ask for anything blatantly bad to befall them. They don't pray for lightning bolts, unforeseen accidents or sudden reversals of fortune. They simply say--

May you never be able to forget.

May you go to your grave still remembering."