Tree of Wishes

Her Future Diary: A Juniper Perspective

"What do you want to be when you grow up?"

It's a common question that adults ask kids who barely have idea how the outside world works. Most kids start off big with stuff like astronaut or doctor, but once they find out how hard it is to actually do those things, they settle for smaller, mundane jobs that'll pay the bills. As for the kids who stay blindly optimistic, they'll go to school and get a degree that'll turn out to be totally useless and find themselves in massive debt. Only the lucky and talented manage to reach their dreams in the end.

Meanwhile, I had no clue what I wanted to do with my life, and my mom kept pestering me since I was about to graduate soon.

"You can't keep putting it off, June!" she'd say while her short, curly hair bounced with the stomp of her foot. "This is your future we're talking about!"

I knew that, but there really wasn't anything I was interested in. Not anything I wanted to make a career out of anyway. My doodles were amateurish at best, testing buggy video games sounded like hell, and my guitar was sitting in the corner collecting dust after my middle school band broke up. At this rate, I was going to either waste the next few years of college as 'undecided', and/or let my parents down by taking the first minimum wage job handed to me. Oh well, they can learn from their failure with me and start over with another kid.

Right when I was about to accept my fate, I literally started having dreams about my future. I was dressed up in olive green robes, standing by a golden, magical tree at the top of a mountain. I would open up a gate and let people come in to see the tree, then write something down in a notebook after they were done. I recognized all of this from the stories my grandma would tell me about her father and his duty to Lagdrygis, and everything felt natural as if I was meant to be here. At the end of each dream, I thought I heard a voice call out to me, beckoning me to seek out this mysterious tree. It was so oddly specific, and after weeks of dreaming it over and over again, I decided to look into it.

I found out that finding the tree was as easy as asking around, particularly those who had powers. I always thought it was weird how some people had powers and some didn't, but no one else was questioning it, so I accepted it as the norm. I remembered my grandma explaining that the tree used magic to make people that way, but I never believed her until now. Since my school had a handful of kids with powers, all I had to do was find one that'd tell me where it was. Based on how so few people knew about it, it seemed to be a well-kept secret. Not even my grandma's diary was any help, and she wrote down just about everything in that dingy thing.

The first few kids didn't want anything to do with me, skeptical of a random girl coming up to them and prying them for information, but then I ran into a couple who were more than happy to talk about everything they knew. Apparently, the tree helped them with family problems or whatever, so they figured everyone should have a chance to visit it. After I learned where it was, I thanked the two and went over to see it for myself. The mountain hike had to be the hardest part of the experience. While there was a paved road for cars to drive up it, so I didn't have to worry about dealing with the wilderness, it was long as hell.

Even so, I managed to suck it up and make it all the way up to the top, and I was rewarded with the sight of the tree in all its glory and magnificence. It was even better than how I'd seen it in my dreams, and its magnetic presence only drew me in closer. I wanted to play it cool and not make it a big deal, especially since I'm sure tons of people gawk at this tree all the time, but that wasn't going to stop this feeling that this was where I was meant to be. As cliché as it sounds, it was my destiny.

I also met the man running the place, which I knew since he was dressed exactly like in my dreams. We had a brief chat and I explained to him why I stopped by, yet I noticed throughout the conversation he seemed nervous. He tried to hide it by acting all chill, but I've done it myself enough times to know when someone else is doing it. Since I didn't want to make things awkward for him, I decided to head out now that I had seen the tree for myself, promising him that I'd stop by again sometime.