I am a Tree

When I was 13 years old, I was sent to a public school. My mom told me to stay strong. To be a tree. With no one to know and no one to know me, I stood alone in the forest society calls middle school.

I saw other trees wearing their standard uniform of blue shirts and kakhi pants, just like me. But it was just like in the old cartoons. Eyes pearing out from dark leaves, their gazes never ceasing.

Making valiant attempts to convers with the other trees but as I explained what suns I stood under, their hurtful words spewed out of them like pesticides, making my eyes swell with tears. I let my leaves hide my face. I am not welcome in this forest.

I was bullied, knives plunged into my bark first by the woodcutters hands, and eventually my own. I didnt understand how so many like me could be so cruel. Even the ones I let carve their initials into my trunk and surround them with a heart. Each time it broke mine. 

Its hard to undergo photosynthisis when youre the smallest tree underneath other's canopies...

But being an apparant mutant tree among the others, I took in their pesticide and turned it into Miracle Grow. I grew from a mere weeping willow dying on the forest floor, to a great sequioa.

In the face of adversity, I am a tree.