Creepypasta: Nightmare Fuel

133: Me, Tree

Me, Tree

Sentience is something you don't think about very much. You have it or you do not. People have it, trees do not. But I am (how curious that I can even consider the concept of "I am!") a tree, and I feel. I perceive. I am aware. As a tree standing on damp earth, with my roots ever seeking more water, more nourishment, I became aware that if the water dried up, I could not go somewhere else to find more. Animals and birds constantly moved around me, seeking the things they needed to keep them alive, but I had to stand in one place and wait. And hope. That, I realized, was not an enviable situation. I did not enjoy it.

What? Oh, yes, I am capable of enjoyment. That is how I first learned I was aware. All my life I had responded with pleasure to the sun as it summoned my sap to rise and triggered the photosynthesis making my existence possible. Light reacted upon me in ways I enjoyed without thinking, for thought did not seem necessary. Then a new pleasure came to me. A human female began sitting beneath me almost every day when the sun was highest. Often she leaned against my trunk and read poetry, sometimes aloud.

I cannot say when I discovered I was actually listening to her and trying to make sense of the patterns of sound she made. But I looked forward to her arrival each day. Something about the vibrations of her voice sank through my bark and set up answering vibrations within my core. In time, I understood her language.

From things she said, I perceived she was unhappy because she was lonely. The nature of humans, it seems, is to want to be in pairs, and this human female did not have another of her own kind to pair with.

Neither did I, I realized. So I must have been lonely—until the human female came to be, like sun or rain, and began providing something I had needed without knowing it.

In time, she talked to me as her kind talk to one another. She spoke of what she called her troubles. She was not pretty, she said. She was only clever. The young males copied her papers in class but took other girls to dances. I did not understand what pretty and clever meant, or what classes and dances were, but by listening I learned. I learned that I stood upon a college campus at the far end of an athletic field, and the female who came to me every day at her lunch hour was studying science.

How she perceived I was interested I cannot tell, but she began reading aloud from her textbooks. Perhaps she did it to clarify her thought processes, but in this way I learned about sentience, photosynthesis, and a galaxy of concepts I had never concerned myself with before.

The school year passed. I lost my leaves and should have slept, but as long as the weather was not too cold my human female still came to me, so I forced myself to stay at least partially awake, listening to her. Her presence rescued me from the loneliness I had not known I was suffering. She became very precious to me, like sun and rain.

How could I communicate with her and tell her these things? My whole existence was changed by her, yet she did not know. She began a new class, one on something called theosophy. I listened to her muse aloud on questions of divinity, seeking spiritual insight rather than empirical knowledge. She spoke of souls, destiny, heaven and hell, and I stretched myself like a young sapling in an effort to keep up with her leaping thoughts.

Then her mood turned darker. In her class was a young man more passionate about spirituality than she and from her words I learned he was a devotee of an organized religion. His was a sect obsessed with sin and his zealotry was beginning to have an influence on her. She began to worry aloud about the condition of her own soul.