I don’t like the tree outside my window. The tree outside my window doesn’t like me either.
We have lived in this house for ten years. That is a long time to live next to a tree that hates me. When we first moved here I was very young, still in Kindergarten, and I knew right away that I did not like the tree. I didn’t like the way it watched me through my windows at night. I would ask Mama to pull the curtains and she would but I knew the tree could see me anyway.
It’s weird to be hated by something that can’t speak and has no face. How do I know it hates me? I can feel its hatred like steam rising off of the bark. When I am under it it drops sticks on my head. Sometimes I worry that it will fall over one day and crash into my room and kill me. The tree will die too, but it will take me out with it, and I think that the tree will see this as a worthy sacrifice. I would ask to have a different bedroom but there isn’t one for me to move into. Just the one for my mom and dad, and the one for me, by the tree.
Sometimes I dream of the tree. Usually the dreams don’t make sense but sometimes they do, and they’re about the tree growing and growing. I am trapped inside the branches and the tree grows around me. It swallows me into it as it gets bigger and bigger until it’s the size of two or three or even four houses. And then the wood closes up around me, and I am completely inside the trunk. Then I die inside the tree, and I wake up, and I feel as though the tree is laughing.
I think the tree is getting angrier. It can see me growing and getting older and it doesn’t want that. The anger is getting hotter, and sometimes it makes me sweat at night. One day I went outside and there was a swing dangling from the tree. It looked old, like it had always been there. I never go anywhere near it and it never moves, even when it’s really windy outside. That was two months ago.
Every day I get more and more afraid of the tree. The branches have gotten so close to my window that they scrape against the glass at night, like they’re trying to break in. I can’t tell anyone that I’m afraid. I haven’t spoken to anyone else about the tree in years.
Because when I was little I asked Mama about the tree outside. I asked if it would ever be cut down. I tried not to seem too eager about it. And Mama looked at me funny and said what everyone else has said to me since: that there is no tree outside my window. That there never, ever has been.