Bonsai - Gabriel Burrow
Long-listed written pieces of 250 words or under submitted to the 2021 Urban Tree Festival writing competition on the theme of “trees close to you”
Bonsai
My eyes scan the pavement below, glum chin resting on the palm of my hand. When the street is lined with nothing but cars—fat metal slugs that jostle with one another—your inside has to become a kind of outside. You welcome nature in.
For me, that means this clutch of wood that stretches across the desk beside me, its leaves cut into a delicate canopy. Everything’s scaled down to fit the box we inhabit. We face the window, watching fingers of sun stretch out from behind clouds.
Sunlight and water, that’s what we both need. Every break, every breathless pomodoro, I make a tea and it gets a spray of water vapour. Tea, spray; tea, spray. I’ve seen an aunt do it with houseplants and figure this tree will want the same. I hope I’m right. If it chokes on the mist, roots clogged with the dizzy drip-feed of moisture, then I’ll be left alone.
No. The bonsai’s going to thrive. No more cutting back its branches. I’ll open the window so it can wind its way out of the room, resolute like a weather vane, like a satellite aerial receiving Netflix and an overabundance of chill.
Following its possible path, something catches my eye—another window and another well-watered pot with something green in it. And another, peering out from behind cigarette stained curtains. Another. Hundreds of windows with hundreds of tiny trees, Chinese money plants, monkey mask monsteras, and boat lilies. Between us, we have an entire garden.
Gabriel Burrow is a writer and editor based in London. He spends his time thinking about the future, which is exciting and terrifying all at once. @gabrielburrow
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