Dead oak trees

She walks slowly through the streets of her neighborhood, stepping on dry leaves that cover the yards with no respect for the brown grass underneath.

Trees raising their desperate naked limbs to sky, crying for old oak trees that were put down, their remains blocking the sidewalk.

The oak trees were dead, was she told. What do they know about the ones that are still standing after death? No one can tell of the pain of the oak tree to keep itself standing way past its time, when there was no reason to remain. She knows about that.

The oak trees put down. They say that as if trees were like terminally will pets, that are put down "to be freed from their misery". Why do we humans want to give this type of lethal freedom to animals and trees?

Why can't we free ourselves from misery? What kind of freedom is that that we distribute effusively to some, to the silenced, to the defenseless,  the ones that insist in stand even after death?

She embraces the large chunk of trunk still exuding the memory of the saw.  She tries to measure how has to be one's misery so they have to remove the being from one's misery? Why remove the being from the misery, if the misery is what remains?

Her friend was in misery. Unbearable pain, no hope, no dreams, being haunted by his past. Had he suffered from a headache, any doctor would do everything to "remove him of his misery" with medications, treatment, follow-ups. We learned to measure pain in a scale from 1 to 10. from the :-) to :-( and we can price the pills that take this pain away. Physical pain is smashed into pieces on the side of the road blocking her walk.

Actual misery cannot be measured. She calls the police for help. She describes the depth of her friend's misery. She gives them his name, address, phone number. She tells them how she find out that he was still alive, but all they want to know is his race. Maybe that's the way to measure human misery, by gradients of skin color. She pauses wandering which shade will warranty him to be freed from his misery.