Stretching up, skyward, reaching for big masses of cerulean, it was a great oak tree, and its bark was gray and withered with wrinkles, its leaves half beautiful, bright, overexposed by the intensity of the sun, half brown, crinkly, dying. It seemed to cry out for a few moments, but then it lowered its branches, defeated. The great tree was dying.
It had seen many things within its years. It had seen the deaths and defeats. It had seen childhoods destroyed by one slip from its branches. It had also seen two lovers carve their names gently into its bark, and it remembered that it had tickled.
Now the oak tree felt its life fleeting away, and it thought in its final moments: "Life. A jape of ambiguous purpose, of fleeting necessity.
"A waste."