You could miss it if you weren’t looking for it. Just a simple placard set into the ground, low and discreet, where the Paper Tree once stood. No shadow remains. No leaves of metal to flutter or rust. Just this small, unspeaking plaque that reads like a tombstone for something people used to gather beneath.
And yet, it stopped me in my tracks.
There’s something quietly sacred about a place like that—a spot marked not by what is, but by what was. We are a people who crave markers. We plant flags, build monuments, carve initials into wood. And when the thing itself is gone, we settle for signs. A memory held in bronze and bolted into concrete.
Across the plaza, the clock still ticks.
It doesn’t attract the same kind of attention. It simply performs its task—measuring the afternoon in quiet mechanical certainty. It’s always been there, or at least it feels that way. Its presence is dependable, understated. If the Paper Tree was a canvas for feeling, the clock is a metronome for doing.
And together—one absent, one persistent—they offer a strange and beautiful juxtaposition.
The tree once held messages: wishes, prayers, confessions scribbled on scraps of paper, tied and tangled like leaves in a windstorm. It was personal, impermanent, profoundly human. The clock offers no such intimacy. It does not remember or reflect. It simply continues.
But here’s what struck me: we haven’t stopped needing either.
We still leave messages. We still track time. The medium has changed—pixels instead of paper, touchscreens instead of ticking hands—but the instincts remain. We drop pins instead of tying ribbons. We post status updates instead of leaving notes for strangers. We check our phones to see what time it is, where we are, who has seen us.
We are not so different from those who stood beneath the Paper Tree or waited by the clock tower.
We just carry our placards and clocks with us now.
That little plaque in the sidewalk—the one marking where the tree once was—says more than it means to. It’s a humble marker, but it calls attention to something important: that this place mattered. That for a time, people came here not just to pass through, but to express something. It wasn’t practical, but it was meaningful.
And in contrast, the clock continues to serve its purpose, unchanged and unapologetic. It doesn’t care if we notice it. It doesn’t need us to remember.
But maybe we need both:
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A place to leave part of ourselves behind, even if just for a moment.
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A structure to hold us accountable to the march of time.
The Paper Tree is gone. But someone made sure it wouldn’t be forgotten.
The clock remains. And most don’t even glance at it.
But together—one in memory, one in motion—they remind me that El Paso has always been a city of intersections. Of past and present, stillness and movement, memory and momentum.
We mark time. We leave messages. And we look for one another in the spaces between.