I wake with the delicate ache of everything I have seen and heard and felt gripping tightly on my heart. I am sitting on a gentle slope of soft green grass; the organic beauty of the red tree’s bark is rough against my back as I lean against its trunk.

But the dream never went like this.

I am not myself.

It is then that I glance down the hill and survey the scene in front of me. The sheer weight of the situation hits me in the stomach like a sack of bricks.

I see a solomn procession. They surround a grave, heaped with a colorful medly of flowers. My family is standing there, tears coursing down their cheeks.

I want so badly to comfort them, but all at once I know that I cannot. I suddenly have the absolute knowledge that the body inside the polished coffin is my own.

My mother’s face is turned to the sky. “Send me some sort of sign…,” she wails.

And at that moment a leaf from the red tree falls into her outstretched hand, and a look of peace crosses over her tormented face.