What a sad place to be in. Bark collapses as a masochistic tree rejects it, wanting messages of love and joy written in its sacrificial sap. It accepts the wounds the children give it, hoping their superficial means will give its undervalued existence recognition and a feeling of meaning. The dead look at this tree and treat it with no more respect than any other. It can’t move unless it is moved. It cannot say hello or goodbye, nor can it express how it feels by its own free will, nor can it argue or educate or improve or exacerbate. So it hopes that as the living feed off it, and it feeds off the dead in the ground beneath it, that it will receive a message of love and joy to scar it for life. Because it cannot speak on its own but if the right message is written on it, this sacrificial tree can pretend to have a voice. What a sad place to be in, when that is all you’ve got.

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