Truth

Tree {Short Story}

I saw a tree last night, with its branches swaying and the green of the leaves faded in the moonlight. The wind howled as it blew-so inconsiderately- right between the branches of that tree, forcing it this way and that. I remember thinking how that tree seemed to almost be shivering, and I truly couldn’t blame it: it was winter, and even if it was summer, it would still be cold. Night air just has a way of being so.

I sat down, right on top of the mud blanketed by scraggly grass and weeds and this bug and that. I watched that tree, I watched its branches hang there, suspended by its mighty trunk. It must have been a hundred years old or more. Still, it gave way to rough, crisp night air, just as it had since it was a sapling. It’s almost as if those branches wanted to sway, to dance along in that bitter cold. Suddenly, I no longer viewed that tree as a helpless puppet, but as something that had realized the goodness in just standing still, taking it all in and doing nothing.

I imagined that one day, it would fall or be cut so horribly down, but it would not scream or cry or beg. No one else, not even a nearby tree, would tell of its sorrows. That tree would do a very simple thing: die, just as it had lived, and it would not have a funeral, because it simply didn’t need one. That tree made me smile, because I looked at that mighty oak and realized that it was so very, very vulnerable; to time, to humans, to life and death. Yet, even on that cold, harsh winter’s night, it danced.