Tom stared at what was now the flat canvas of the branches' stump and tried to imagine words ever appearing there .
Those years of his life had begun to blur anyway, and his memories of the obvious delusions he had experienced had begun to fog over. Tom was surprised he even remembered to come here. Had he not seen a particularly beautiful picture his brother Kevin had taken of a large oak tree that hung in the living room, he would have never even thought of it.
Tom had always looked at that part of his life, his time spent in the forest, as some television show or vivid dream. That wasn't reality. He looked at it all as some bizarre alternate existence, as though one day his mother and father would sit him down and let him in on the secret.
"Son from the time you were twelve to fourteen you were in a coma. We never told you because you never asked".
What else could it have been? There was no way that what he had experienced was real.
He was even more convinced as he stood here staring at the stump. Nothing was ever there. No writing had ever appeared. He'd never gone to that place and time.
He knelt down by the foot of the tree, for what he told himself would be the last time. He didn't even want to dig. It would only serve as a reminder of how foolish he had been. Finally he told himself there was no harm in proving it once and for all, and he pulled at the grass that had grown in the spot where the roots met the dirt; a place where he had once imagined a kind of treasure, and a series of adventures. He plunged into the dirt. Tom went a good seven inches and nothing. Surely it couldn't be deeper than he remembered. He dug another half a foot, but nothing. He stopped digging and brushed the cold wet dirt from his hands.
Maybe someone had taken it. Maybe it had never existed. Tom stood up and leaned against the tree. "No" he told himself finally. "There's no way I made this up. I'm not that clever." Tom turned and walked away from the tree.
As Tom walked through the woods and the 'Old Man' disappeared around the bend, he thought about his life now.
In high school Tom had been an odd duck. Always wanting to talk to people, and tell them his stories, always wanting to find a group of friends, but somehow never crossing the border from completely withdrawn and shy. It was in his dark college dorm room one winter night in Boston, as far away from the tree as he could be, that he had told himself it would all have to change. He couldn't carry on in college the same way that he had in high school. He couldn't hide in the places he had become so adept at hiding in. No matter how amazing they had been.
He took a step. He tried out for a play, and he got a good part. The play gave him confidence, even if it was a tad superficial. Tom had been lost as to what major he should study until he had taken a communications class as a general study course and become obsessed. Soon he found that listening was his strong point. In high school, all those years of wanting to talk to people, he had never known that all it would take was to ask a person a question about themselves, and then really listen to the response.
It became a type of experiment. He listened for hours. He got to know almost everyone he came in contact with deeply, and they loved him for it. Even those he wouldn't have ventured a second glance toward; those especially. Soon he was elected student body president, riding on the wave of adoration from the quiet, shy or odd members of the campus. He had finally experienced the world he should have known years earlier, and it changed him for the better. Not that he needed to change or improve who he was. Tom had proven his worth at the age of twelve, when he'd first met 'Old Man Giver', and he'd ventured into the parallel worlds where anything was possible. It was a time in his life that was now slipping from memory. But the tree, and the forest would soon find a way of reminding him. It would find a way of reminding him of what he had done for all those people, even if they had never known that he was there.
