I talked to the trees about you.
They giggled, not from what I said but because whenever humans speak to them it sounds like a sped-up record. We have little mouse voices to them, except they’re little human voices and we’re the ones who sound funny.
I’m glad all they do is listen, from what I can tell. Because hearing the things I tell them in a silly helium voice I imagine makes it hard to take anything I say seriously. It would be hard to hear their response translated into human language because it would make what right now seems so big to me, seem so much smaller.
They hear our voices but as far as communication goes they don’t listen or talk in any way we have words for. Instead, their gentle sighs and subtle applause to the atmosphere offer oxygen for our blood and air for our lungs so I can keep speaking to them. They like to hear me, like to breathe my breath, inspire the air painted by my larynx. And so I talk to them.
They turn my words into leaves and more tree. They don’t speak with language; they never had any need and they knew where that deal would take them if they went along with the humans as the humans learned to talk. But still, they breathe for us, and when they rustle breezes they add not just oxygen but other subtle things, and this is how they talk.
And we detect these subtle things in ways science hasn’t figured out yet, and they make you feel, and influence your thoughts, and inspire you at the right time to finish your discourse and go back into the kitchen and see the clock on the stove mark 2:22, which translates from Tree to mean “you ended it when it was over.”