On The Religion of the Trees

The tree gazed at the sun, reaching, as her mother before, had reached. 

Days,

to weeks,

to decades.

Lives spent trying so hard to touch. To grow tall enough to be warmed.

One day, a boy sat beneath her branches. Her gaze broke downward. So strange. This boy sat still, soaking in the sun.

But unlike her, he moved.

He smiled.

People approached him and he laughed.

The sunlight poured itself upon him, graciously, endlessly, and he needn't stretch to be welcomed by it. When he was warmed, he left.

She watched around her more from then on. Her friends around her lengthened. Their arms, ached. But they were ceaseless in their need of light and warmth.

Around them an entire world moved, and breathed. They could not see.

Her eyes, unused to a such variance, began to learn. The earth seemed closer now. Her friends looked only upward. She began to seem a mirage to them.

More days she spent observing the ground beneath her, while her friends and sisters grew up. They grew upwards, and eventually lost all sight of her.

But the world saw her. The people and animals began to recognize the glint in her eyes.

Her knowledge.

Her roots began to move in their dirt blankets. More loose by the day. She could see eye to eye with the boy when he came to sit beside her. Until one day, she lifted he legs from the dark, and sat herself.

Warm in the ever giving sun's embrace.

Standing at the edge of a cliff, she gasped for breath. Her lungs gripped for air in a frantic way as she looked over the edge at the source of her panic. The ground seemed to grow, the grass feet below calling up to her; the trees were it's open arms. She closed her eyes and turned away, hot fear racing through her veins. A voice in the back of her head dimly whispered "You shouldn't be here." She nodded her head and stepped back a few feet, breathing deeper with the increased distance.
She felt a sickness in her stomach, didn't she promise that she would face this? Her paralyzing fear of heights had been smothering her for years. Beginning with a nasty fall off a horse when she was seven and getting so intense, so potent that walking upstairs was a tear-jerking nightmare. Her therapist had suggested this, trying to face an extremely high place. He told her that it would help her face smaller, everyday things so she had hesitantly agreed. If only it were that easy.
She crouched down, curling into a tight ball on the ground and allowed herself to shake for a moment. It had sounded so much easier a task when he had said it. Down the edge of the cliff she heard a soft coo, and the fluttering of feathers. Forgetting herself for a moment, she stood and took a few shaky steps toward the noise. The fluttering continued and sounded more like a thousand wings now, all pulling at the air in a relentless angry rhythm. She stopped to listen and the sound ceased. She began walking again and the feathered swishing resumed. The closer she got to the edge, the louder it became until she could no longer hear her own mind, her own panic. The thoughts that now consumed her poor, befuddled mind were of birds in flight, flapping desperately to gain altitude without ever achieving an inch.
She looked from the edge for a minute, knowing full well that she had to face this or die from curiosty. She took a deep breath and looked out over the cliff...
There was nothing. No sound, no birds, just... nothing. She looked up and around her, at all the nearby trees searching for the sound that she knew had to have been there. She had heard it. It was there, it had to be. Her foot inched forward a little more, moving bit by bit. She strained her ears hoping that the sound would come back, if only to prove that she's not crazy. If only t- Her foot slipped nd she came tumbling down, her body cracking sickly against the rocks on the way down.
The headlines the next day were colorful, detailing how the fall was a tragic accident, how someone had pushed her, how she had been sleepwalking, abusing drugs. How it was a fantastic successful suicide. Out of all the articles, there was only one common theme. She had began on an empty cliff alone, and after she jumped a thousand doves flew into the sky from nowhere.