When the rain finally fell, it didn’t roll around me like they way I’d hoped it would be doing by this point. The wind too felt disconnected. How it butted with the strong oaks or the persistent evergreens. I was among them, yet I felt folded away from it. Like where I was touched and where the contact was happening where disparate concepts. Out was out of sync with my flesh.

During the ninth season this become more clear to me as I grew sensitive to the falling of my leaves. They thrummed like paper oysters above my roots and that thrumming, by my calculations, was too soon. It wasn’t the silence then crescendo of a leaf diving from great heights. This was the pitiful collapse of dried grass under its own weight.

This confirmed my suspicion. It wasn’t that the sun had had a change of face a decided to shoot away from us. No. I wasn’t up there, up where the photons are plump and fresh from their battle through the stratosphere.

It took me a few more seasons to trim my hypothesis down to from ten to one. Poor genetics? Unlikely, I was the child of two great pines. Poor soil? I had never had to stretch for water, it always seemed to be at hand. Obstruction? I wriggled my ends and detected nothing (unless I had lost my capacity for touch, but I ruled that unlikely). Perhaps squirrels? I wasn’t sure what to make of this or what this would mean. The other trees had squirrel infestations all year round and still produced the finest golden sap. No, none of these felt like suitable excuses or directions. The only one lead I had now was the lady.

The lady came by every week. Always dressed in a soft fabric that flowed around her arms and legs. I know this because It rolls against my body like a river of cloth. Or what I imagine being in a river would feel like. She is gentle and trims me here and there, taking off rotten leaves, adjusting soil, and reorganizing any tangles. Sometimes she introduces small bracelets around different parts of me that stabilize my growth. That’s what she tells me. I use these like a crutch to shoot new saplings in different directions. She deals with the ones that aren’t shooting in the right direction.

But what I am witnessing today is that she trimming them all! Every direction I had decided – shooting up, down, in, and out – she has taken them down with her cleavers one by one. A few months ago I made a rather impressive cove of leaves which I was momentarily pleased with. Today she has reduced that tenfold display to a few straggling veins.

How had I not noticed this torture before? For years I had been blind to my captor. In this moment of discovery I decided that I would plot against her. Tomorrow I would begin my escape. She left me this evening and she gave me some delicious minerals in my soil which make me feel wonderful, but I will not be bribed away from her heinous deeds. Sleep overcomes me.

This morning I awake deep into the twentieth season. Still I’m scouring for evidence as to why our sun has abandoned me and my fellow arboreal brethren. I have a few hypothesis which I will begin to whittle down.