blue wallflower

by Mica

Task 7: Singing Tree Fantasy

In the morning, go and talk to your crush.

Do not look her in the eye. Meet her in the bathroom. Stand at the sink to the left of her, and look at her through the sink mirror next to you. Ask her what she did last night. When she asks you what you did last night, talk to her about singing trees, with no context. Speak as incoherently as possible. Do not respond when she laughs and jokingly calls you weird. Do not retreat into the cocoon of the shadows when you see her walk away giggling and chatting away with her friends.

Exchange phone numbers with your crush, on a pretext of your choice. Save it under the letter “S”, or whatever letter the name of your crush starts with.

Go back to the locker of your crush. Undo the combination lock, and search for the love poem that you wrote her. You will not find it. Either you will not find it, or it will be sitting torn and faded next to a moldy banana.

Resign from the yearbook committee, so that you will never see your crush again.

Return to the forest, and stand inside the big tree’s shadow. By now you should have been visiting the tree many times. You should be visiting the big tree at least daily, if I have not mentioned this before. Each time, listen to the tree as it speaks to its shadow. Make a note of any patterns in the sound, or any unusual sounds, such as an acorn falling and bouncing on an exposed root on the ground.

By now, you should be familiar enough with the tree’s talking that you’ll be able to make a reasonable approximation of the melody that the tree is trying to sing to you. Write down your approximation on a piece of paper, take a picture of it, and send it to me.

Now, on the back of the paper, draw a picture of you and your crush standing under the beautiful singing tree. The both of you are standing under the shadow of a single tree, so you will have to stand very close to one another. Draw your best guess of what your crush looks like. Once again, it doesn’t have to be an art project.

You do not have to send me this drawing. Keep it in your treasure chest, get it printed on a pendant, or put it up on your bedroom wall, so every morning you can imagine the possibility of the two of you being together. If you are a talented artist with “X-ray vision”, you may masturbate to this picture if you wish.

But not yet. Now, press against the bark of the tree, so hard, until a bruise forms at the bone of your spine. Listen to the tree. Listen hard. It will not sing anymore. It will scold you. It will scold you for ruining everything. You had your chance to impress your crush. And you ruined it with your stupid, dorky self.

In another reality, you wouldn’t have ruined it. And by 4 o’clock today, you would have going out together on your first date. Walking through the woods to the parking lot, hand in hand, pausing under the shadow of the big tree. Gazing skyward, listening to the choir of leaves serenade the happy couple. Can you hear it? Can you feel it? Close your eyes. Gently march in place, grab your left hand with your right hand.

Yes. You can feel it. You can feel it all.

That is what would have happened, in that reality that you drew on the paper.

The “Singing Tree Reality.”

The “Singing Tr—

Open your eyes and wipe that stupid grin off your face and cut yourself with the edge of the paper.

Now, you will sob for 6 hours straight. Sob so loudly, you cannot hear the tree scolding you. You, the shadow of the tree. Continue sobbing for 6 hours, even though all you were doing was fantasizing, you did nothing illegal, you did nothing immoral, you did nothing harmful, you did nothing—

—you did nothing.

Sob about nothing for 6 hours.

Author's Note:

Comments

[Pete100]

Wow, that’s depressing.

[Bicyclette]

the unwinding as Wallflower holds on even tighter to her crush and fantasy, along the mental patterns she'd laid down before, oof. the cycles of blissful imagination and self-hatred and self-harm are tightening and it's hard to watch. the "nothing" coming back from the first chapter at the end was a great touch. simpler times, almost