She watched the last, lonely petal float away on the warm breeze. “He loves me not” was all she said before lifting herself up off the grass and leaving the meadow.



She seemed sad today, or at least, sadder than usual, if that was possible. “Man if I ever get my vines on the kid who made her like this I swear I'd pull him down to my roots and leave him there!” I swore to myself as I watched her move through my grass and flowers then down the steep hillside that surrounded me until she was completely out of sight.

That girl had come to sit in my grass and flowers almost everyday since she discovered me when she first moved here nine years ago.

She had found me, dry and wilting with what seemed to be no chance of surviving. She walked right up to my roots, tilted her head to see to the top of my branches, and gave me water straight out of her own sippy cup.

I liked her right away.

But now she comes less and less and when she does come she has that pained, worried expression on her face and a distant look in her eyes that makes me feel like she's 1,000 miles away.

She stopped staring at the clouds too. She used to lay back in the grass and watch the clouds roll by for hours. Content to just lay there and soak up the atmosphere, the breeze, the rustling grass, even the faint scent of flowers that flowed down my hillside. But not anymore, not since she met that boy.

She had told me about him, one warm autumn day. She told me about how handsome and gracious he was all the time and how much she wished she had the courage to go talk to him.

But merely a week after she told me about him, she came to me again, in tears. She cried into my rough bark and my soft leaves and told me about what she had seen. The boy she had been in love with just a week before was with someone else. She told me that she didn't know why she was crying, that she knew that there was no chance they could be together, and that she should really just get over her self. That's when she started picking the petals off my flowers one by one and muttering something to her self that sounded like “He loves me. He loves me not.” She repeated it over and over until there were no more petals on the flower, than she would get up and walk away.

The next day, I expected to see my girl walking up my hill, but instead I saw a tall rather handsome boy climb the steep slope. I knew who it was instantly by his short brown hair and deep hazel eyes, he was exactly like how she had described him.

I started preparing myself to drag him down to my roots like I had promised. But he surprised me, he walked up to my rigid body and stared up to the very tips of my branches. Then he did something I could have never expected, he spoke to me, not like a tree but like a friend, like how the girl used to speak to me. He asked me about his troubles and what I thought he should do. He spoke to me for a long time and then he lowered himself to the ground, leaned against my trunk and drifted off to sleep.

I just stared at him, this strange, strange boy who had broken my girls heart, and seemed strangely sorry for doing so, considering she had said that the boy didn't even know her name. I had guessed that one of his problems had something to do with my girl because it was about being with someone everyone else thought was right, but wanting someone completely different. A mother's intuition I guess you'd call it.

Suddenly, I heard footsteps, apparently so did the boy because he woke from his sleep and stared in the direction the noise was coming from.

I saw her first, my girl, my beautiful, heart broken girl, stepping up through my grassy vines. She stopped dead when she saw the boy though, and I could tell the boy had done the same because I couldn't feel him breathing against my bark anymore. He stood up, walked over to her, and took her hands in his. He said something to her that I could not hear, she nodded and followed him down the hillside. As he lead her down the hill she looked over her shoulder at me and sent me the smile I had missed for so long.