i am big tree

i am big tree. my roots live in craters of the past. when i was sapling, i thought i’d grow to be the parent of the world. i longed to nurture my many friends in my safe, sunscreen shadows. i wanted my root-memories to thread with other memory-roots. we would knit an earth beneath the asphalt ground and make new memories! so i thought, the sapling. i stretched myself towards my solar foodstuffs like icebergs i grew rolling in the deep. thin but elastic, engineered to sway, bend, spring in my coniferous climates. roots yawned and stretched, seeking company. I’d latch onto soils and push towards the woods where i could settle, harden and lacquer my bark, blossom the risked branches. oh how fat my trunk could grow! the sapling dreamt. twigs cracked into comfort, coddled in the snow. but as the growth resumed i got distracted from the woods, pursuing patchwork plots and sickly flowers. i was a weed! dug out, composted aside. pitchforks and shovels and gardening tools made me small again. i hurt and i retreated to pre sapling form. i wished i never wished to find the woods. how stupid to grow big to be cut down. i am not lumber. i don’t want to surrender my cellulose. i am not refilling your refill pad. i will not make clearings for your hungry animals. i will not defend and fall at the frontier. i will never grow big, i shall never be parent-tree or taiga-dwarves or fossil sycamore. the future of fat trees is terrible but i will not grow fat, and they will not notice me. and then i found you. you pulled me by a shrivelroot and tied it to your own. we grew thick as thieves. we put down like potatoes. we now grow back towards the forest. fuck the orchards, the pastures, the safari parks. fuck the beaches that fuck the locals, the zoos that burn the animals. we grow tumbleweeding towards the woodlands and if they say it never existed we will say pah! how silly. two trees that don’t fall is more than enough to start a forest.