I am a sick tree. My bark is painted in moss and furled swells of rigid tissue which have liberated themselves across the trunk of my body. I live next to healthy trees. They can control their swelling. They can grow oblivious to the insects and vines tugging at their roots. But this heartsickness touches so much of me. Everything between my canopy and the very last vertebra in my starchy, wooden spine.
If I wasn't dying slowly where I was planted, I could be buried in the hum of some faraway occupation. I could serve on a great ship or maybe submit to the curvature of a barrel, housing French Bourbon. But I wish she'd just fell me already. I wish she'd don her wooliest flannel shirt, smelling like she does, of sweet summer sweat and dark fruit. I want her to drive a wedge into my trunk and fell me where she wants me. But she doesn't offer me release when she comes.
It's been nine seasons and each one cut a thin, spindley ring into my trunk to mark the passing of slow, cold time. She climbs and climbs, swinging her own branchy legs - thick and consolidated, like my own - over my swells and burls. I feel so good with her arms around me. I feel warm to my innermost rings. Like after the first bloom. So good. So warm. I don't breathe. I'm a tree, without lungs or circulation or blood. Sap is a poor substitute for the kind of constitution swirling around inside her. But she breathes into me, struggling not to fall. Her breathing is so loud. Trees live in silence, you know. I've never experienced a pulse that demanded so firmly to be heard. Then she's gone, and I wanna fall. I want her to cut me into an unfeeling stump.
Felling is better than feeling and Fall is coming soon; I can taste it on the breeze like war.
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