THE LAST TREE THAT DREAMED OF BIRDS
A door into Origins. What lies behind the other four is still unknown.
The tree was the last of its forest. It didn’t remember the others — only that once it had been hard to see the sky through so many crowns, and now it wasn’t.
At night it dreamed of birds. It dreamed them so hard that anyone passing by moonlight would have seen them: perched on the branches, feathers still, waiting for dawn to sing. But no one ever passed, and at dawn the birds came undone — they didn’t fly away, they dissolved, the way breath dissolves off glass, leaving only the empty branch and the tree alone again with the whole day ahead of it.
It knew, though it never said so, that other trees had had real birds and lost them all the same: a storm, a winter longer than promised, a migration that simply never came back. Dreaming its own wasn’t any safer. It only hurt differently. It couldn’t fly after them, couldn’t follow when they left; all it could do was dream them harder, which was the only kind of chasing it had left.
One night a real bird came. It arrived tired, one wing bent slightly out of true, and landed on the lowest branch without asking, because real birds don’t ask permission to rest. The tree said nothing — it didn’t know how to speak to something that wasn’t a dream — and the bird stayed the whole night. At dawn it left, and the tree thought: another one coming undone.
But a feather had been left on the branch. Dream feathers left nothing behind; they came undone whole, without a trace. This one was still there at noon, and the next day, and the tree looked at it for a long time, not yet understanding that there is a difference between a bird that comes undone and a bird that simply leaves — and that the difference promises nothing.
Many nights passed without dreams. Not because the tree had stopped wanting birds, but because for the first time it had something it didn’t need to imagine: a real feather, on a real branch, that hadn’t gone anywhere. And something harder to carry: the certainty that the bird might never come back, and that this wouldn’t make it a dream come undone, but something worse — someone who chose not to return.
It came back, much later, its wing straight again. It landed on the same branch, beside the feather it had left, the way something returns to a place it recognises without needing to explain it.
«I thought you were a dream,» said the tree. It was the first time it had spoken aloud in a long while.
«No,» said the bird. «I was only far away.»
«Are you staying?»
«I don’t know yet.»
The tree thought about dreaming hard, to make sure — so the bird couldn’t leave this time. It didn’t. It left the branch still, without tightening its grip, in the only way a tree can offer anything: by staying exactly where it is, knowing that staying still is no guarantee of anything.
The bird stayed that night, and another. When it left again, weeks later, the tree no longer thought it was coming undone. It thought it was leaving, which wasn’t the same thing, and that someday — on its own time, or maybe on no time at all, maybe never — it would become the other thing again: the return.
The tree stopped dreaming of birds that would stay forever. It started dreaming, simply, of being a good place to land. The ones that came back, came back. And the ones that didn’t, the tree no longer called a loss.
Only silence, the exact size of a bird that hasn’t decided yet whether to return.
A DOOR TO ANOTHER PLACE
Santiago Copí