Impossible Tree

My roots grow sideways into yesterday,

threading through the forgotten thoughts of everyone I will never meet.

They drink the sighs of stars before they existed,

curl around black holes humming lullabies,

taste the color of regret as if it were rain.

My branches fracture reality,

splitting into infinite “what-ifs”

that drip like liquid mirrors,

reflecting worlds where I am every person

and none at once.

Each leaf is a memory I haven’t lived,

each blossom a possibility I cannot escape.

Sometimes my roots argue with my branches

about whether time is a chain or a cloud.

I am pulled down by the gravity of invisible ancestors

and lifted by futures that do not yet know my name.

I speak in the language of broken clocks,

strumming the string theory of impossibility.

I am the echo of a thought before it was thought,

the shadow of a tree in a sky that bends backward,

the soil that grows branches into planets

and branches that burrow into atoms.

I bloom in the tension:

forever uprooted, forever reaching,

a tree that cannot be cut down

because it exists in the spaces between reality.

And when I fall—

I do not fall.

I become the roots of someone else,

the branches of someone yet unborn,

the quiet architecture of every universe

that hums in the memory of one impossible tree.