树

I liken friendship to a tree. The roots representing inception. There are those friends who have always been by your side since our early years. Together they have matured with you as the main branch. Throughout every year, friends materialize and dissipate like the seasons. The most superficial and common acquaintances represented by the twigs and small branches that are furthest from us, the main trunk. Temporal and shortlived as they are. Then there are those close friends who are represented by the small boughs of the main trunk.

However, there are the branches which through some accident or catastrophe were severed off the trunk, perhaps under the saw of a gardener or by one ravaging midnight thunder storm. The bond between the trunk and the branch were not sufficiently steadfast to hold out the wind. This represents friendships that were abruptly ended and destroyed due to disagreement, rivalry, conflict, money, petty friction and all the other ugly faces of friendship. Analogous to a tree that bleeds when a branch is torn, friendships torn apart are usually painful and traumatic.

However there still remain those handful of friends that remain true to us and close to our hearts that stays with us the trunk of the tree. Gracefully maturing into a tree that would live throughout the ages.