I am from

My body is filled with sunlight, boiling beneath my skin (because I’ve been trapped indoors for too long). Soon I must return to where I am from.

 I am happiest in the dark early mornings, when I am blind and finally focused on what’s going on around me, inside me. There is no hum of machinery slowly, constantly fraying my soul. There is no concrete, only snapping twigs when I venture off course carelessly. When I am so lucky, I can lean against my family, against their bark, and watch the horizon as new color marks another day. They support me as I see pink, the flushed cheek of a friend whose face I can no longer touch; the orange of the pressed flower I sent my grandmother in the last letter. I wonder where it is now, that flower, broken in the bottom of a storage box? Pressed into her bible? Does it matter? Soon all is the shade of blue, of white, and there are flowers growing beside me.

And it is today. Here in my home, lessons are easier and much more complex than the foreign language of classroom conversation. I am growing as an elm, my mistakes turning into mushrooms at my feet. I can be as a fiery red thorn bush, aggressive and angry, ripping at anything that comes too close. Tomorrow I will be an apple tree. You can bury your favorite dog under me. My home is my body, my soul. I am the woods and it is me. I breathe because it lets me, I breathe because it tells me that life should be so simple. And I breathe because of the wind, because when it blows I am inspired to finally exhale. I cry because even the clouds need release.

I am a tree replanted in front of a house. My feet are buried in cement. I try to hear the birds and I try to blink and be happy but my limbs are being bent to allow for power lines.