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The Girl Who Talked to Trees
By Nikki Little
After years of being tortured by my classmates at school, I celebrated my sixteenth birthday with a bottle of seconal tablets. I had had enough of the insults, taunts, exclusions, teasings, and even beatings I had suffered at the hands of my classmates. Life was suffering, and I wanted no more of it. One hundred tablets of seconal. I took every one as I didn't want to do it again. I was lying on my bed at home alone with no one else in the house and my door locked. I sensed I was falling from celestial skies. I was far above the earth and I fell without sensing the wind. Falling, falling, ever falling with not a sound in my ear. Blessed peace. As I fell I sensed my form changing until finally I was not a person, but a seed. I fell into the ground in a park and took root. I grew a stalk, then branches, then leaves. As time passed, I grew into a tree. All around me I could hear people talking of mundane, empty things. After years, it seemed, of listening, I came to the conclusion that life was a pointless, empty competition for everything. All of life revolved around money and competing for it and all of its accompaniments. I was so happy to have escaped all of that. Life as a tree was peaceful by comparison to human life. Then I awoke. What had seemed years had actually been three minutes. I had been "dead" for a period of three minutes and had been brought back to life by a defibrillator. I remember that the first word out of my mouth upon realizing that I was alive was a four-letter obscenity. I wanted to go back to being a tree.
Of course since I was alive and sixteen years old, life meant having to go back to school. I kept to myself and talked to no one, not even teachers. I never uttered a word. I developed the habit of sitting on park benches, and sometimes, remembering my near-death hallucination, I talked to the trees around me. I never really expected a reply, but, one day, I got one of sorts. I "heard" that reply only in my head. I talked to the tree next to the bench I was sitting on and received a reply in the form of a flood of images that passed through my brain. I realized that what was different this time was that I was actually touching the tree, holding the end of a branch, as I talked to it. The stream of images that passed through my brain were the life of a middle-aged man who had lost first his job, then his home, and then his family. His wife divorced him when it became apparent that they would lose their home. She took his children, moved back with her affluent retired parents, and sued him for child support. The betrayal was too much for him. He drove his car into a tree at a curve notorious for fatal accidents. This accident, however, was not an accident. I wondered how many so-called "accidents" were actually disguised suicides. After that, I began to sit at many different park benches and talked to many trees.
Most of the time I did not get a reply, so I assumed that not every tree was a suicide. Most of the trees really were trees. However, every so often, I found a tree that once was human. The replies I got were always in the same form: a flood of images in my mind. I had to be touching the tree to get this response. There was a mind-numbing sameness to the stories that I heard from trees. Nearly every story of a tree that was once human related to a sense of exclusion. Exclusion from family, exclusion from social circles, exclusion from social events, exclusion from economic necessities. The same image played over and over from one tree after another: the image of a door slamming in a face. Over time I had gathered from trees images of hundreds of doors slamming in hundreds of faces. As I "listened" to these outpourings of visual pain, I learned what not to do in my own life. At my school I became the girl who dated the boys that no one else would date. I was friends with the girls that everyone else shunned. I went to the junior prom with a geek. I promised myself that I would not exclude people in my life. I would not be responsible for any more human trees.
I'm middle-aged now. Many of the boys I dated in school and many of the girls I befriended are now dead. I suspect that many of those deaths, reported as "accidents," were disguised suicides. I make my rounds at the parks every week-end, and catch up with my old friends. I hold their branches and "talk." And they answer.
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This short story is entirely original and is entirely mine. --Nikki Little
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