Free In the Body of the World by Eve Ensler

mattered to her.
    I was quite sick in the morning, unable to eat, nauseous, completely fatigued. I seriously doubted this infection was ever leaving. Toast came early with Coco and Shiva. Coco immediately climbed into my bed and wrapped herself around me. I think she just wanted to make sure I was breathing. Lu had heard about a new section of the hospital, and Coco went with her to check it out. They came back excited. My birthday was in a few days and this was a place where I could be quiet and celebrate. I would get better there. And the nurses seemed really kind. At first I balked at the private room, but my sister insisted, saying that my mother wanted to pay for it. I am sure she made this up, but the idea that my mother wanted to take care of me in any way was so miraculous, I accepted.
    So here’s my confession: My whole life I dreamed of hospitals. I wanted a washcloth on my head, my bedpan changed, and a kind, doting face worrying over me. Hospitals were the set location for many of my daydreams and sexual fantasies: doctors who were tending me, suddenly seducing me, their care leading to their attraction and inability to contain themselves, or nurses who while taking my temperature had no choice but to start making out with me. I know there arepeople who hate hospitals. I am not one of them. When everything gets exhausting in my brain and I cannot imagine going on, I put myself in this pristine, fresh room with sunlight and loving people in starched uniforms. And now out of nowhere, my dream was coming true.
    The room was the room of my dreams. It was clean and pretty. All the machinery was there, but it was human. There was a couch that pulled out for sleeping and a small kitchen and a window right in front of the bed. What I hadn’t anticipated was the tree. I was too weak to think or write or call or even watch a movie. All I could do was stare at the tree, which was the only thing in my view. At first it annoyed me and I thought I would go mad from boredom. But after the first days and many hours, I began to see the tree.
    On Tuesday I meditated on bark; on Friday, the green leaves shimmering in late afternoon light. For hours I lost myself, my body, my being dissolving into tree.
    I was raised in America. All value lies in the future, in the dream, in production. There is no present tense. There is no value in what is, only in what might be made or exploited from what already exists. Of course the same was true for me. I had no inherent value. Without work or effort, without making myself intosomething significant, without proving my worth, I had no right or reason to be here. Life itself was inconsequential unless it led to something. Unless the tree would be wood, would be house, would be table, what value was there to tree? So to actually lie in my hospital bed and see tree, enter the tree, to find the green life inherent in tree, this was the awakening. Each morning I opened my eyes. I could not wait to focus on tree. I would let the tree take me. Each day it was different, based on the light or wind or rain. The tree was a tonic and a cure, a guru and a teaching.
    “I never want to see another tree,” I said with bravado at twenty-two as I was speeding down a turnpike away from the green hills of Vermont toward Manhattan. I think I said “fucking tree.” I never want to see another fucking tree. It was a joke, but it wasn’t a joke. I hated trees. They had come to mean small towns and small minds, isolation and gossip, long, freezing winters and endless, green, swallowing landscapes, skiing coeds and empty chatter, families and babies, marriage and life. Trees had everything to do with life. I drove that day out of the forests and hills and blue skies and nights of falling stars into concrete, after-hours joints, Mafia hit men, anonymous sex, anonymous despair, gin and bourbon, and an end to morning, let alone trees. I see now how much I wanted to die, or how much I did not want to live with the