Listen Up!

If you take a right off of Newberry Street, just past 7th, there's a tiny dirt path you can get to if you squint your eyes at the bushes.  You can park your car there and continue down by bike or by walking, if that’s your style.  Anyways - and make sure to write this down - take a right after the old barn, and continue until you see a worn down diamond sign that I think used to be yellow.  What… scared it might have said something important?  Life’s too short to worry about things that have passed their time of relevance. Okay, where was I?  Oh right, past this sign, take a left at the rundown truck that’s been there probably since the dinosaurs, and you’ll see it.

A tree!  A tree so expansive that you'll wonder if the earth sprouted from its roots, rather than the other way around.  A tree with a trunk so large I bet a whole house could fit in it.  A tree with roots running so far it’ll make you wonder whether the tips have any memory of where they came from.  It is at this tree where I have buried my treasures.  No, put your shovel away, they aren’t literally buried.  Show some respect to the earth man!  

Mama used to have a tire swing up on the biggest branch when I was little - hey, I’m 9 and ¾, I am NOT still little.  Anyways - and this story would go by a lot faster if you quit being so rude - I would spend my afternoons swinging into space, except my space was filled with leaves and birds as I got lost in the vast canopy.  Imagine!  Me flying through the branches, the wind whistling in my ear, the feeling of weightlessness in my stomach.  I used to say hi to the squirrels skittering on the branches every time I swung and they would get so confused.  You must think it’s silly right?  You’re old enough to do much more exciting things, like drive a car or buy a whole cake and eat it by yourself.  But to me?  Breathing in the earthy scent of the air, admiring the changing colors of the leaves, knowing exactly which ways to lean to dodge the most troublesome branches: that’s when I felt most alive.

I was so happy to be tethered to that swing.  Better than this hospital bed, am I right?

No! No!  That wasn’t supposed to be sad.  I’m fine.  You don’t have to figure out the right words to say, I can see from your face that you’re trying to.  I don’t need the pity you feel obligated to give.  This is what happens when the sick girl tries to be funny.

I’m just - I’m going to get back to my story so we don’t feel suffocated in awkward laughter.  

I always wanted to carve my initials into that tree, to you know, make my mark on something so special to me.  But Mama always told me not to.  She’d tell me that the tree had been alive for HUNDREDS of years.  Hundreds!  And we can’t do that to a tree without its permission.  How would we like it if a bug who came into our lives for 5 minutes gave us a tattoo?  I told her I wouldn’t like it very much.

I listen to my mama.  She’s a very smart lady.  Plus tattoos hurt like heck apparently.

But I’ve been given a lot of time to think lately, because of well, all this, and it made me a little sad!  That there might be hundreds of stories linked to this tree that I don’t know about.  I like to think that a nice lady proposed to her wife under that tree.  Or maybe a group of kids ran along the roots like trains on train tracks.  Or maybe a scientist came up with their award winning epiphany while tracing their fingers along the bark!  I like to think of all the stories that are now vague memories, just a tint of warmth in strangers heads.  And when I think of them, I get jealous that the tree gets to see all of them.  I get jealous that I only have mine.

I mean think about it.  All of these stories, unknowingly intertwined, have been and will continue to exist through time in the same space.  Don’t look at me like that, I’ve read A Wrinkle in Time at least 10 times, so I am an expert when it comes to the space-time continuum.  We’re all connected in ways we can’t even understand (even for me, and I’m almost a pre teen), which at the same time is comforting and frightening.  I guess lately I’ve been thinking about what I know for certain, and I have realized it doesn’t amount to very much.  I think in my next life I’d much rather be a tree, seeing all these stories unfold in front of me, knowing for certain that I am the link that connects all of them.  Then I wouldn’t be sitting here wondering if my story could possibly be isolated, a tiny blip in space. 

So here’s where you come in!  Maybe I won’t ever get to see that tree again, but you definitely can - I assume you have spare time if you’re putzing around here instead of doing your job.  I have made the decision to trust you Mister, so don’t mess it up.  I don’t need my story to be told or even thought of for hundreds of years, but maybe in just one other person’s story would be good enough for me.  So go to that tree - you wrote down the directions I gave you right?  Go there and make your own memories.  And when you do, think of a little girl on a tire swing flying through her foliage space, and I’ll think of a man who was kind of enough to listen to the story of a sick girl in a hospital bed.