He is a tree swaying in a snowstorm in late autumn
A not-so-evergreen, with browning-red streaks all over his limbs.
Pushed around by the winds of the storm,
gasping for air and yearning for sun to give him the strength to stand,
only receiving more stress and pressure from sharp seasonal winds that seem to exist solely to shorten his year-round life.
Lack of oxygen and too many cuts leave pink, brown and yellow leaves on his limbs,
making him look out out of place among the rest.
The rest that evidently either don't care or just forget
that he once looked like them, acted like them, felt like them, but no more.
Of course there are always those that love the different ones,
sympathize, empathize, and emphasize the fact that beauty can exist in what is not conventionally beautiful.
But even the warmth from these good souls will often be diminished and become soulless when winter comes around.
A time in which one watches, with notches for eyes,
as the red and yellow and purple blotches that the select and wonderful few once loved decay and drain away.
He looks dead.
He acts dead.
He feels dead.
So he believes he is, indeed, dead.
And consequently, so does the rest of the world;
as it is a universal truth, it seems, that the way someone looks, and acts, and feels, determines what they are.
A fallacy; one that has caused the downfall and tragedy of humans and trees alike since the first man spoke and the first plant bloomed.
If a person is gone, it is best to forget and bury them, and if a tree looks dead, it is best to cut and burn it.
Of course, most trees tend to either stay green or spring back to life
after the dark days of winter, flourishing in the dog days of summer,
but every year it is a tree's biggest fear that he will be one of the black tragic few
who do not come back, due to being overshadowed by taller, fresher, better trees
that mother nature had more meticulously pruned.
No, his fear grew that he would never bloom,
he was one of the lesser ones,
outgrown and outmatched by those evergreens and ever-okays that needed less sun and love to carry on
intentionally blocking light from him, leaving only a few sadly relatable meek rays that cut through
the sharp pines like an even sharper knife.
They would shine down on him like a spotlight, or even better, a laser beam capable of lifting him up,
severing his roots to his past and bringing him up to face the public eye,
exposed and vulnerable to the judgement of his scraggly twigs for arms and thick trunk, leafless, better yet lifeless, a thing to behold in a depressingly pathetic light in the middle of the forest,
isolated and alone among a crowd of superiors, allowing any random passerby on a hike to look down on him in pity, as they learn what it is like to see something slowly, carefully, inevitably,

die.