Single Photo Stories: The Oak Forest

It’s starting to get dark. All of a sudden, an evening breeze breaks the almost perfect silence of the forest. It moves millions of leaves and brings them to life. There’s a cosmic sigh carried by millions of voices. A long outbreath. A muffled voice trying hard to pronounce something.

I cannot understand what it says but somehow I know it’s something that concerns me. And you. And anybody.

Nearby there’s an old forgotten cemetery. The patients of a mental hospital that was closed decades ago lie beneath simple wooden crosses. Their names have been almost erased by time.

Tonight, the troubled patients are hanging on to the roots of these tall oaks. The reverberations of their agitation go all the way up through the trunks and the branches. They end up rattling each leaf. There’s somebody or something there, trying to make itself heard through all the background noise.

I’m not sure I want to understand what it’s saying. It’s getting dark.