When I first moved in this hotel, there was no ashtray on that table. The manager put it there because of me. I’ve been smoking at that table for almost eight months now. Every day I was sitting there and looking at that tree. Every single day, at least for an hour.
I know you won’t laugh, because you feel the same connection with your loving plants, when I say that I am sure that the tree is aware of my presence too. And I think that it hated me in the beginning. I told you that there was always something falling off the tree. When I came in February, the whole dry branches were falling down. And almost always – right on my head. It actually hurt a bit, as the tree were trowing them at that rude foreigner who had come there without its permission.
One day I was sitting there and talking to my Thai friend, when a branch hit her in the head. I looked up and said to the tree, pretending to be serious: – Stop doing that! – She must have told her friends about it, because in the next days the Thais I had never met used to stop, point at the tree and smile: – Stop doing that!
I don’t know if the tree had finally realized that I was not such a bad guy, but the branches were replaced by the leaves. Every month something else was falling down off it, but its crown still remained green and rich. And every month the different animals were on or around it. The big flying insects I had never seen before disappeared and the birds came to its crown in April. They were singing all they long, but doing some other things too. Sometimes I had to change my shirt a few times a day.
Then I got a new neighbour in May. At first I was afraid of it, but then I got used to it and its unique beauty. A big lizard with a blue-blue head was standing there every morning, keeping me company while I was drinking my coffee. Then a big yellow cat, the master of the hotel yard, started coming every evening. I can’t prove it, but I think that it had something to do with the lizard’s sudden disappearance.
Then the caterpillars came there. For some time, there were so many of them that the tree trunk looked green. A few weeks later, the beautiful butterflies were flying all around it, some of them landing on my table or even on me. I wouldn’t move my hand, and they would stay there until I would finish smoking.
The animals were replacing each others, and it was the same with the tree parts falling down off it. The dry branches, the dry leaves, some sort of buds, the green leaves, the seeds, the short green branches… But there had been no those jasmine-like flowers until recently. They started falling down maybe a week or two ago. And there have never been so many of them as there have been today… So… I was just thinking… Maybe they were falling down because of you. Saying hello to their sister, a beautiful desert rose from another continent.
04/10/2017