Arborea

Once upon a time, there was a man who imagined himself a tree. Every morning for two hours he stood in his garden, arms stretched out, bare toes buried in the ground, trying to feel like his skin was bark, his hair leaves, his veins transporting water from the ground instead of blood. Sometimes he would practice on the bus or in the queue to the restroom as well, but without doing the motions. He used to dream about being a tree at night, but he didn’t think that it would count.

And so he became a tree in his mind long before he did in body; one morning he didn’t come in from the garden, he just kept standing there arms outstretched, halfway between the geraniums and the small wooden table. His relatives got used to him fairly quickly. “Oh, that’s Henry,” they would say to curious visitors. “He’s a tree.”