Once upon a time there was a girl who
had a disease called fear that stopped her from doing anything. One
day she realised that the person she used to be had vanished into
thin air together with her lost love and decided to change her name
to square root of S for two reasons:
1. because ‘s’ was the initial of
her former name.
2. because her old self had shrank to
minimum proportions.
One morning, tired of wandering
aimlessly around town, √S decided to become a tree. Yes, a tree.
Why a tree? Because Trees don’t move but grow effortlessly,
stretching their branchy arms from the ground to the sky. Trees are
solid, consistent and full of life and like an immense city give
refuge to millions of ants, birds, beetles, moths, caterpillars,
worms, aphids.
When √S felt ready to change her
appearance she dyed her hair green and invited a couple of sparrows
to build a nest there. With a sharp knife she carved her body with
lines and grooves and let lovers write their names on her back while
promising to each other eternal love. When the cold seasons arrived
√S covered herself with a coat made of dry leaves she had picked up
during her walks around town. With the light touch of her delicate
hands she stitched every single leaf on an old beige rain coat. When
the coat was finished up to the last leaf, she went out and sat
outside cafés and bars where she became known to people as the
Tree-girl. There she made a few friends and showed them the names of
the lovers written on her back.
Now that she had become the living and
talking symbol of a tree she felt she represented them all, and not a
day went by without her talking to the trees in need. One day it was
the poplar whose brunches had been chopped off by an electric
discharge from a neon sign, the next day, it was the pine tree that
had been threatened with arson by a bunch of teenagers on a Saturday
night rampage. √S caressed the bark, whispered inside the tree
holes and cleaned the roots from the picnic leftovers.
Her new friends wanted to know for how
long she had been dressed up as a tree but no one ever asked her the
reason why. From the very beginning she had made clear to everybody
that she wasn’t an eccentric-at-all-cost or an aspiring actress
looking for publicity. But one evening a journalist took a snapshot
of her seated outside a café called the ‘Tunnel of Love’. The
photo was later published by a local paper.
“The tree-girl” - as the
journalist wrote in his article - “was most certainly an
environmentalist who, with her way of dressing, wanted to raise
awareness on environmental issues among local people and even the
whole world.” While an agony aunt from a glossy magazine swiftly
replied that that couldn’t have possibly been the case as no
environmentalist would sit a the Tunnel of Love café.
“It was evident” - she said - ”both
to her, and anyone who read her very popular column, that the
Tree-girl was a symbol of love as it could be easily demonstrated by
the names of lovers carved on her back.” The agony aunt proposed to
put the girl’s picture on the front page of her magazine in the
next week’s issue and invited all lovers to gather together at
Wastepaper Square, where the magazine head office was located, to
inscribe their names on a gigantic papier-mâché tree that was going
to be erected in the square for the special occasion.
The environmental journalist replied
with a fiery article in which he condemned the initiative as
exploitation and misinterpretation of such an invaluable message. He
also added that instead of destroying trees to build a papier-mâché
one, we should: “save them, not waste them!”
But although he had been the first to
give a name to the strange girl who moved from one place to the next
without leaving any trace, except for a handful of leaves here and
there, his voice was lost with the wind never to be heard again.
‘Find me the girl, find me the girl
shouted the agony aunt’ puffing and spitting like a dragon.
Little Lucy, her secretary, shivered
like a blade of grass under a strong wind. She opened her mouth,
moved her lips but the words didn’t come out, instead little
letters rolled down onto the keyboards and hit the keys one at a
time, turning red and round like rubies and making a noise like hails
falling on a windscreen.
‘Take the car,’ said the most
famous agony aunt among all agony aunties, throwing a big bunch of
keys that reached Lucy’s forehead in slow motion and stopped in
front of her for a fraction of a second, giving her enough time to
catch it with her left hand.
‘Go to the Tunnel of Love and find
her, bring her here, you have one hour, now go, go!’ shouted the
agony aunt.
Meanwhile at the Tunnel of Love café
√S was drinking her daily dose of chlorophyll, it tasted bitter but
it kept her hair greener or at least so she thought. A group of
people who had never seen her before were looking at that
strange creature in total disbelief pretending she wasn’t there.
She didn’t seem to mind. She had grown accustomed to her unwanted
popularity which had become second nature to her.
Drops of hail were falling all around
√S and whenever the little round pearly drops hit her turned into
emerald green stones. In a very short time her chlorophyll drink was
topped up with a frothy head of shiny green bubbles. √S fished one
up with her spoon and put it into her mouth, it tasted of mint and
aniseed. She took a spoonful and swallowed it. Immediately a strange
sense of warmth invaded her from the top of her head to the tip of
her toes, the sky turned purple and the next thing she knew she was
floating above her table looking down on herself calmly. From there
she saw the whole town with its parks, football grounds, stations,
airports and every single tree waving at her.
‘Excuse me’ said a girl with a soft
voice, touching her arm delicately with her fingers.
‘Are you the Tree-girl?’ And there
she was again, sucked back into her body in an instant.
‘Who?’ replied √S
‘The tree-girl. It must be you. I’ve
seen your picture on the paper. You see, we are, she is...my boss, we
are looking for you.'
‘I don’t know what you mean’
replied √S
‘You don’t know?' said Lucy ‘You
are on the papers, and everybody is looking for you!’
‘Who is looking for me?’ said √S
‘Us’ answered Lucy ‘you know...me
and my boss, the environmentalist, the readers, the lovers, and the
bloggers who have joined in the debate.’
√S looked puzzled, she was aware of
the interest and curiosity she aroused in people, and now and then
she had seen a few lights flashing from a camera but that was all. No
one had ever bothered her, if anything the majority of people seemed
more inclined to avoid her altogether than confront her or ask any
questions. It was true that the habitué at the café who had
befriended her, had been very nice and very appreciative of her
unusual looks, but that was partly because having √S in their café
had somehow made the place and themselves more important, almost
unique. Setting them apart from the rest of the cafés-goers who had
nothing else better to do than chat while sipping their drinks. But
the Tunnel of Love crowd was different, they were special because the
tree-girl had chosen their refuge.
√S turned around and said to Lucy
who was now sitting on one of the comfy chairs.
‘What do they want from me?’
‘Well, first of all there is the open
debate: are you or are you not an environmentalist? Are you or are
you not the symbol of love? Then there is the agony aunt’s
celebration with a giant papier-mâché’ tree and name carving of
all lovers, broken hearted included. Do you know that people are
queuing up? And that the line is half a mile long already?
√S looked at Lucy, she liked this
girl and although she wasn’t sure what she wanted from her, a
familiar thought crossed her mind: Einstein’s theory of relativity
and time travel. If it is theoretically possible to travel back in
time and forward into the future, she thought, then there must be a
future already laid out in front of us. All we have to do is follow
it. And if Einstein believed in destiny then there was no reason why
she shouldn’t believed in it herself!
√S stood up, picked her bag from the
floor and followed Lucy into her car.
The night had fallen over the city
covering the buildings with its gloomy light like a ghostly sheet.
Lucy and the Tree-girl closed the doors
and fastened their belts. It was raining. Lucy switched on the
windscreen and drove off turning at the roundabouts. The wipers moved
quickly—right and left,
right and left—while the
green rain stained the city.
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