His head lifts from a pillow green. Dew wells and dances two in beads across the hemisphere of his forehead - one departs the other for the bridge of his nose, the other swept up into the cracks of a passing finger.

All the rehearsal and still the novelty of it all! All the talk and he still feels it. His stomach lifts. Anticipation.

I'm here.

He raises to his knees, hands pressed to the clay beneath him. He's to his feet, though his eyes remain looking downwards - he's staring at the outlined furrow he's left on the earth from the night. It is as if she'd swallowed him into her skin, into a single pore - where he was a follicle, perhaps? Some cause for mutuality? An attempt at negotiation?

His eyes turn. The swelling feeling restores itself. He feels an eyebrow (just one) raise in question of the seeming contradictory nature of what he stands before him - this natural engineering been engineered!

It's a tree----that's all. But it's more, really. Her leaves rest on the ground (some having been his bed.) She is asleep. She is unaware.

Though, she has forgotten her own existence, it is apparent that some have not. Still they come to her - they adorn her out of their need for individualism (or perhaps just boredom.) She is trimmed in bulbs by the hundred - floursecently fogged. No electricity here - they inspire by modestly catching passing strands of sunlight that penetrate casually from the canopy above. Even the smallest beam catches the white skin of the glass bulb enough to make its surface glow entirely - they seem to delight in fulfilling this role. Others strands pass through uncaring, and heedless to their participation in this event.

The bulbs flicker - they are persistent. It's as if they wish to announce their own presence in this disregarded wood.

It's just as they said.

The bulbs hang on beaded chain, some showing age in coats of rust - others seem to gleam with youthful boasting. Time is present - that's clear now.

He walks to the tree, smelling the aroma of her damp, decaying leaves below him. One might imagine their scent rising skyward on tendrils of their own mode - much like those stems that supported them in life.

Again, his eyes return to the ground. He hopes for a chance to mark the tree. A true pilgrimage must manifest in a sacrifice? a rite? a symbol? His experience must orbit the others, a filament in this arboreal-mechanical symphony. He cannot explain this rustic need for collaboration. Assuming innocence, one hopes its a boyish longing for the natural. The bond of beaded chain on knobbed branch. That bond is all he cares for.

But, alas, there are no such supplies to fulfill his desire. No box there. This is no grotto in which to make addition upon discovery.

No - this is a tree in some forest - decored once, and, until recently, forgotten.

He walks on.