Not long ago, a little boy stood before my glass, tears streaming down his smooth red cheeks. “He must be the loneliest gorilla in the world,” he said, clutching his mother’s hand. At times like that, I wish humans could understand me the way I can understand them. It’s not so bad, I wanted to tell the little boy. With enough time, you can get used to almost anything.
I like not knowing everything. It makes things more interesting.
I soon learned that humans can screech even louder than monkeys.
Life changes, so you must hope.
Trees can’t tell jokes. But we can certainly tell stories. And if all you hear is the whisper of leaves, don’t worry. Most trees are introverts at heart.
My mom told me once that money problems sort of sneak up on you. She said it’s like catching a cold. At first you just have a tickle in your throat, and then you have a headache, and then maybe you’re coughing a little. The next thing you know, you have a pile of Kleenexes around your bed and you’re hacking your lungs up.
Old age,” she says, “is a powerful disguise.
Okay,” I said. “I’ll be there, but I promise to complain the entire time.
Here’s the thing, Jackson. Life is messy. It’s complicated. It would be nice if life were always like this.” He drew an imaginary line that kept going up and up. “But life is actually a lot more like this.” He made a jiggly line that went up and down like a mountain range. “You just have to keep trying.
And right then I knew, the way you know that it’s going to rain long before the first drop splatters on your nose, that something was about to change.
I try to understand, but all I hear is a river of words, rushing and thundering and pushing me beneath the surface. Now and then a word I know darts up like a sparkling fish, but then it’s all dark moving water again.
They pass their green paper, dry as old leaves and smelling of a thousand hands, back and forth and back again. They hunt frantically, stalking, pushing, grumbling. Then they leave, clutching bags filled with things – bright things, soft things, big things – but no matter how full the bags, they always come back for more.
You needed love to win at the game of music... I played of sadness. I played of loneliness. Despair. Love found and lost. I played of tragic misunderstanding and weary cynicism and defeat. I played of perseverance, endurance beyond all suffering. Endurance in the face of hopelessness, hope when even hope was a betrayal... And yet, though I played so much sadness, the music at the same time denied despair. How could anyone despair while music was being played?
I’m not sure you understand. That box might be taking you to a place where there are other elephants,” I say. “A place with more room, and humans who care about you.” But even as I say these words, I remember with a shudder the last box I was in. “I don’t want a zoo,” Ruby says. “I want you and Bob and Julia. This is my home.” “No, Ruby,” I say. “This is your prison.
What bothered me most, though, was that I couldn’t fix anything. I couldn’t control anything. It was like driving a bumper car without a steering wheel. I kept getting slammed, and I just had to sit there and hold on tight.
I have been in my domain for nine thousand eight hundred and fifty-five days. Alone. For.
She said she sometimes wondered if maybe bats are better human beings than human beings are.
Trees have a rather complicated relationship with people, after all. One minute you’re hugging us. The next minute you’re turning us into tables and tongue depressors.
Our stories don’t make their homes in heavy books. We hold our stories in our songs.
A hole can be as real and solid as a boulder or a tree.