The Strange Tree

The tree feels strange today.

Today, the tree feels strange.

It plucks an overripe ray of sunlight from sky and lets the afternoon melt on its leafy tongues.

The tree is neither young nor old. Its trunk is scarred with storms and soft with moss and bends ever so slightly at the knee and up the knobs of its spine. Its branches are crooked and calloused and reach up to the sky with a strong, sturdy palm.

The tree has been alive for a hundred years. It will be alive for a thousand years more.

But today it feels strange. The ants crawl up peskily, scouring for syrup under its bark. The wind moves thick and slow, settling in droplets of dew atop its foliage. The rustle of the teaks, too, is particularly noisy today. They are whispering in the soil about me. Of this, the tree is sure. It can feel it down to the tips of its roots. Yes, I know it. They must not like me at all.

After a thousand years, trees begin to learn how to accept their lives for what they are. They learn not to bow and they learn not to bend, and they learn how to reach high and how to dig deeper than deep.

But today, the tree is only a hundred years old. Its body is barely as wide as a river is deep. It could be fell by the sharp edge of an axe, or by a tyranny of termites, or by a group of teaks that lean away subtly, suspiciously, turning to face the charismatic molave on their right.

The tree is neither young nor old. It only is… Is strange, perhaps, it sighs as it swallows another leafful of sky.

The afternoon sweetness thaws and thins into a sorbet of starlight. The tree stands and stands, and it wonders and wonders, why as it grows older, the days never feel as long as the nights. Surely, it could have grown somewhere better. With richer earth and sweeter rivers and longer, everlasting buffets of day. It could have furry, flowering epiphytes nuzzled into the crooks of its branches. It could have a hundred branches that reach for its own, that intertwine, that share stories and laughter with every brush of leaf to root and root to leaf. Instead, it is here. It can only is, it can only be.

It only grows ever older, and ever stranger, this strange tree.

All because before a hundred years ago, a small seed travelled for a thousand years. It swam through creeks and trudged through brackish swamps and sat dormant in a barren, merciless place, until it flew in the beak of a chubby maya bird to fall from the heavens to the soft, damp undergrowth of the earth.

From within a stubborn, impenetrable shell, it dipped its toe into the dirt and it knew. Not strangeness, no. Not yet. Not matter.

It felt the kindness of the light and it heard the whispers of the water. It ran its fingers through the decay of the life that once was and the life that would be, and the life that was its to have. The dried leaves melting into the earth. The soft flesh of fuzzy fungi tucked into moist shadow. The swollen bellies of the worms in the depths. The soft smell of jasmine in the breeze.

All at once, a seed cracked open.

All at once, it knew

This is where I will live, said the strange sprout a hundred years ago. Thank you.

And this is where I will die, smiled the strange tree a thousand years later. Thank you, thank you, thank you.