I felt blank. Ever feel that way? Like all I could think about was HIM and the accident and nothing much else. I had fixed what I could and now I sat on the hand me down couch night after night and just felt blank. I wished desperately that I could think of something else, but it was close to impossible. I couldn’t find many other words to talk about and I know I wasn’t great company to anyone. It was heading into October now and the leaves were changing colors and my therapist taught me more and more about bringing abundance into my life. Changing my perspective on things and trying to get me to notice things around me instead of being in my own head all the time. So we started a grateful chart. Every morning I would write down nine things in the chart that looked much like a tic tac toe board. What I wanted to be grateful for that day, what I was already grateful for that day and anything that I wanted to attract towards me.

It helped me begin to notice things around me more. I started to notice this tree on my way to work. I had to park in a lot across the street from my job and every morning I would walk past this tree. It was not a very large tree, but it felt like it was watching me. I know, it sounds paranoid, but that’s how it felt. Every day I would smile up at the tree. It was on my chart every day. I watched that tree with its bright green leaves shining brightly in the sun every day. Then I noticed that the leaves ha now begun to turn yellow. Bright yellow like the sun and they were beautiful. I took a picture of that tree with its yellow leaves. That tree was changing at a much higher rate that I was, but we were both morphing into something else. As I noticed it’s leaves starting to turn orange, then to brown I began to get sad for the tree.

Kind of like I was sad for me. I used to be that bright shining tree with strong branches and big green leaves. I was tough and beautiful like the tree and then I began to change into something else. I thought for a while that with my blonde hair with the roots growing out I too was bright yellow, but not shining like the tree was. The tree was silent in its transformation. It was happening, but you didn’t notice it all at once. It was little by litter, all day, every day. Kinda like what I felt like was happening to me. One morning I walked past the tree and the very first leaf fell from its branch. It swayed beautifully in the wind as it hovered a bit in the air. Ever so softly falling to the ground. It didn’t fall all at once, they didn’t start coming off the tree one by one, but day by day there were fewer leaves on the tree. I felt like for me every day there was less and less of who I was inside of me and I was becoming more and more bare. Shedding my old skin leaf by leaf.

One afternoon I had left for lunch and it was a windy day. I was walking to my car and it felt as if the wind gust right where I was standing. I was right in front of the tree and hundreds of leaves began to swarm off the tree and around me. It stopped me in my tracks as if to tell me something, but I didn’t know what. The leaves swirled around me in the wind gust and I stood enveloped in them. When I looked up at the tree it was half bare. Leaves pooled around its trunk on the street corner and me standing in the middle of them all. I couldn’t help but think that soon the tree would be barren and it would turn the color of harsh grey. It would stand there through the winter, alone, cold, bare, but knowing that the spring would come and it’s leaves would be back in full bloom soon. I had to get to the bare bones of myself, standing in my own skin in the harsh grey color, hoping I was as strong as the tree to know that one day, I would stand tall again in the shining sun, full of life, full of color. But for now, I felt the pain of each leaf falling to he ground. Like pieces of me.