In English, we learned about writing college personal essays, as it’s an important skill for many High School Seniors. As I don’t need a college essay for assorted personal reasons, I instead got more leeway with my prompt and chose a past University of Chicago prompt: “In 2015, the city of Melbourne, Australia created a “tree-mail” service, in which all of the trees in the city received an email address so that residents could report any tree-related issues. As an unexpected result, people began to email their favorite trees sweet and occasionally humorous letters. Imagine this has been expanded to any object (tree or otherwise) in the world, and share with us the letter you’d send to your favorite.” My essay is as follows.
My dearest Ms. Eucalyptus Haemastoma,
When I was little, my mum read me the book Snugglepot and Cuddlepie, and she told me that the raised, brown scribbles all over your trunk are newspapers for all of the bush animals, carved right under the bark by little journalist moth larvae. I used to stare at you and try to decipher your news stories, your editorials, your comic strips, your crossword puzzles, as I imagined myself as one of the creatures reading you, as a small, but loud and colorful rainbow lorikeet, perching on your smooth, silvery branches, keeping myself informed on all of the local goings on.
I had always found it majorly unfortunate that I was, in fact, a little kid, instead of a bird, anxious, with trouble making friends, trying my very hardest to keep myself busy. I would sneak out of the front door of my family’s apartment first thing every morning to see if the free local newspaper had arrived yet, and was somehow always disappointed at the lack of interesting things happening in my tacky, touristy beach town. Sometimes I was a moth larvae in my own right, writing stories about whatever I was most interested in at the time, wizards, fairies, mermaids, cruise ships. I was a weirdly entrepreneurial child, too, starting my own businesses on the campus of my elementary school. A shop where I sold rocks that I found on the ground, a spa, a soap company, and an idea for a school newspaper that never quite came to fruition. But I always came back to you, to sit miserably against your trunk in my ten year old angst, to shimmy up your branches as high as I possibly could, but never to the top like the bird I imagined I was. I would wrap my arms around your soft, smooth, skin, and sit in silence, at school lunch, while plotting my next endeavour, always either thinking about the past with a mildly unhealthy air of self-pity, or making detailed and unrealistic plans for the future. That, at least hasn’t changed about me since then. I’ve never been very good at mindfulness, at living in the moment.The months before I moved away from you I would spontaneously break into tears every day. I had previously thought I was stuck to you like a bug in your sap, eternally encased, to one day be kept in a museum as a corpse inside amber. I relied on your stability with all of my heart, back then, my roots dug deep into the soil, intertwined with yours, but right before we packed up our apartment there was a storm that lasted for days, or maybe weeks, knocking down the awnings of the shops in town, drenching the pathways next to the ocean in gross, polluted, garbage water, and also, uprooting you. In all of my childhood view on the world, I think I never considered that even the strongest can be uprooted in a storm. Torn out of the soil, screaming, but leaving your heart behind.
Even in all of my meticulous plans for the future back then, I don’t think I ever used to be able to imagine living past the ripe age of twelve, which was simultaneously terrifying and somehow comforting to my social anxiety—I would convince myself that by the next week I would one hundred percent be dead, hit by a car, murdered, died of cancer which had developed from a mole on my arm, but hey, at least I wouldn’t have to worry about making friends at summer camp! That is now an absolutely horrifying ranking of priorities to me, of course, but maybe that’s just because at some point along the way I figured out how to make friends. But I did live past the age of twelve, my roots have started to get accustomed to this new, drier, soil, after many years of struggling to dig my toes into the ground. I wonder if you also healed? I’ll be coming back to visit you soon, I think. I hope I can find you again.All the love in the world,
Your friend, Izzi.