The Tree
Recently I was going through some old papers because I’m moving houses, and I found a notebook from high school. I think I was around 15. There were random notes, some drawings, and in between them, I found a story.
I don’t remember writing it, and I definitely didn’t finish it but it made me laugh.
I’m just going to leave it here the way it is.
—
There was a place where everyone had a tree.
It wasn’t like a rule, it was just something that happened. At some point, you would plant one, and it would stay there for the rest of your life.
People liked their trees.
Some of them would check on them every day, some of them didn’t really care but still kept them around. If you visited someone, you would probably end up sitting next to their tree at some point, even if nobody said anything about it.
Some trees were really big and looked impressive. Some were small but still nice. Some looked a bit strange, but people would still act like they were normal.
There was also a girl.
She had a tree too.
But hers didn’t really grow.
It wasn’t dead or anything. It just stayed almost the same size no matter what she did.
At first she thought she just needed to wait.
Then she thought maybe she was doing something wrong, so she tried different things. She watered it more, then less. She moved it a little. She even tried not touching it at all for a while, just in case that was the problem.
Nothing changed.
People would say things like “maybe it’s just a late one” or “it’ll grow eventually,” but they didn’t really sound like they cared that much.
She didn’t get upset about it.
It just felt…annoying.
One day she asked someone older, just casually, like it wasn’t a big deal.
“Why is mine not growing?”
The woman looked at it for a bit and then said, “Maybe it doesn’t need to.”
The girl didn’t really understand what that meant.
So she just said “okay” and didn’t ask anything else.
—
That’s where it ends.
I guess I didn’t know what to do with it after that or maybe I was just annoyed cuz I was shorther then hahaha.
