I have flowered like all the rest. I have had to break through the dirt, and race for the sunlight, as every other being in this house has done. Sometimes, while reading, or going through the mail, I’ll stop, and look outside my window and watch the great pine sway in the wind, and I think, How long did it take for her to grow that far?

My friends talk of things like they’re the first, with big beaming eyes they spill their wisdom out like a broken facet, so excited and eager and awed and overflowing with all the time that has filled them and sent them high.

But they are not the pine.

When the gale is volatile, I hear her creak. Moan like an organ, in the chapel of the storm. Once I wondered, Will you fall? But the next day I awoke and still she was there. Seeming taller than ever. Seeming the wiser.

How long did it take for her to learn the ways of her roots, her rings, her budding? Her life is spent on nothing else; no thoughts of entertainment nor boredom exists inside the pine, just growing. Just reaching higher, the higher, so preoccupied with the sky. So devout to her own form, disinterested in me perhaps; but, I am captured by her stoic stance, her gaze. The one eye that is her top, striving up, thickening herself, bettering.

I have flowered like all the rest. I have had to break the dirt, and race for sunlight, as every other being in this house has done.

My friend boils over in her power, her completions, and now she oozes in determination to show the universe her finished form. Who I am will change things, her eyes tell me.

I look over across the street, and see a pine. All I can think is:

I am not finished.