There is a small bright room in the tall stone that swallows the walking creatures and then, a breath later, they are gone, gone straight up into the trunk of the building where I cannot follow, and I have never once understood why they seem so happy about it.
I have watched them line up at its mouth for as long as this tower has stood beside me, which is not so very long, only forty of my rings, a sapling's worth of years. They press a small lit circle. They wait, staring at the seam in the wall the way a squirrel stares at a knot it means to enter.
When the room opens they hurry inside, and the ones already within shuffle back and pull their arms close, and nobody looks at anybody, and then the doors draw shut like bark closing over a wound.
I grow the other way. I have never risen faster than the light asks me to. It takes me a whole warm season to lift a single new hand of leaves toward the sun, and I have lifted them slowly enough to feel each one open. These creatures buy their height in seconds and feel nothing of the climbing, and I think that is the saddest part: they reach the top having never touched the middle.
One of them used to rest against my trunk before the tower was built, a small one who grew tall and stooped and stopped coming. The bright room did not take her up. Something else did.
The doors will open and close through this winter and the next, carrying quick warm lives past my branches. I will still be here, holding the same patch of ground to the light, when the tower learns, as all things do, to lie back down in the grass.