Earthbound.
Then one restless evening,
she felt a tremor beneath her ribs.
She could feel it building,
a lure toward something new,
a need to rise, to shift, to step out of the familiar.
Her phone slipped from her hand, almost unnoticed,
and she stepped outside,
guided by a pull she couldn’t name.
She wandered down unfamiliar streets,
past neon signs and shuttered cafes,
until she found herself at the edge of a park
bathed in silver moonlight.
Above her, the stars spilled out in wild constellations,
and her soul remembered the shape of the sky before the city stole it.
There, in the centre of the green,
stood an old gum tree.
It’s bark gnarled like ancient scripture,
branches reaching upward as if in worship,
Playground swings lay silent,
a soccer field hummed beneath distant lights,
but the tree held its’ own immutable presence.
She knew, without knowing,
that it had grown up with the land itself.
And when she pressed her palm to its’ bones,
she could feel it.
It’s pulse, it’s breath, it’s soul.
Night after night, she returned.
She whispered secrets into his bones,
letting tears soak into its’ roots.
She told it her fears,
her worries for the world,
loneliness born from scrolling “feeds”,
of dreams she’d buried under deadlines and to-do lists.
By day, she carried the tree’s stillness within her,
an anchor inside her vessel.
The city’s pulse no longer drowned out the beat of her own heart.
Then one morning,
her world fractured,
the tree was gone.
She never realised she was nature starved
until she heard birds outside her apartment window
sharp, insistent,
somewhere just out of reach
but when she looked,
there was nothing there.
Only concrete and sky
and that hollow feeling in her chest
spreading fast,
like floodwater.
She remembered the time before screens,
before her parents gave in and let her have a mobile phone.
Her childhood lived outside
wading through the creek,
running barefoot under moonlight in games of spotlight,
gathering flowers for her fairy garden.
Now,
she moved through the city like a ghost,
eyes drawn to glowing screens,
heart tethered to endless notifications.
Scanning the sky for anything green,
searching for the flash of a magpie’s wing,
the tremble of a gum leaf,
in a too-small square of park.
Everything here feels stripped bare.
Glass, metal, fumes,
a world that forgot it once had roots.
A stump remained, flat and wounded.
She was Icarus,
wings melted by the sun’s betrayal,
fallen and charred upon this broken earth.
Her fingers wandered over the rough circle of wood,
and grief unspooled from her chest in a single sob.
She stormed into the councils’ office,
voice trembling,
tears streaking down her cheeks.
’Why did you take my friend?’
They spoke to benches and pathways,
of “progress” and community plans,
as if her comrade were nothing but an obstacle.
They told her the stump would be removed tomorrow.
She wondered if this was what Achilles had felt,
his dearest friend ripped from this world,
never to rise again.
That night, she crept under the sky.
A shovel in hand, she knelt before her alter of loss.
She dug into the heart of what remained,
earth and wood yielding under her grief.
Hour by hour, she hollowed the stump,
carving a perfect space,
big enough to envelop her empty soul.
And when the hole was deep enough,
she climbed inside,
burying herself in the echo of it's core.
Cold roots pressed against her back,
and she felt the slow hum of life beneath the surface.
As she sat there,
feeling the city fade away,
replaced by the vast, ancient heartbeat of the Earth,
she wondered, if this is what it felt like to be truly grounded.
