The Day of the White-Out

 Writing Ghost Stories during a White-Out

The world was a ghost of itself that day. The trees were ghosts. The building across the way was ghostly through the snow. 

I spent it mostly in my chair by the window, looking out of it from time to time, wondering how much paler the world could get.

 

 

 

The stuff came down thick as cotton, like fluffy rabbit tails, getting caught on everything it happened to touch. The tree outside my window was laden with fluff. The cars out-front disappeared under it, frosted over into hibernation. It filled up the world, disguising the town around me.

 

You forget you live in a town on those days. No cars come by. No people wander out their doors. Paths and roads get lost on those days, and all the town's people go missing under the weight of snowed in rooftops. We all live under ground on those days, like happy moles, the world and the wind barely remembered. 

 

I watched as the wind pack snow onto my windows all throughout the day. It was the most literal snowing-in I could imagine, and it thrilled me. I could faintly see the tree that stands just outside, bare limbs scratching, waving lonesomely.  

 

It thrilled me because I thought my chances were higher this time than the time the streets flooded whilst I stayed home and edited my book. This time wind and sky and snow were banning together, I thought, to build a snow-fort around me. In the morning, all I'd see is the close winter, pressed against the glass of every window, refusing to let me out, letting little in besides a faint impression of light, weakly melting.

I would not complain, not about the mountain on my front steps, too much for one shovel to muster; I would not mind about the car which has gone missing somewhere in a driveway which has equally disappeared. 

We can go dig out the world later.

 

I can go anywhere on the white page. And, though the white winter world is gone and distant, the ghosts on the page are more tangible than the cold seeping through the glass, just so long as the storm lasts. 

 

Still, my windows were only partly covered when the dark settled in, as it comes in winter, somehow softly, touching everything evenly. You look away, and then the day is over, and you bring out the candles and pretend the night will last forever so that the snowday does not end.

A lifetime of snowdays should me enough for me, I think. Books depend on snowdays, after all.

    

 

 

In the meantime, I will sit here in my snowfort through the school days and the times when cafes close. They will start to wonder where I went. They will forget where the front door is.

 

But sometimes in the dark a wanderer will dare the winter, and if they come by the snowfort which has a house under it, and maybe a lonely tree, they might see a light glowing faintly from somewhere under the snow and they will know someone is still in there and that they have not run out of candles. They will know someone inside is still awake, writing in secret.

 

For now, I would like the time to edit. I would like the days to fill themselves with winter, so I can stay snowed in. I would like to stay in my snowfort, safely forgetting that I live in a town, and not inside a book. 

 

A New Friendship

The image of Lucy and Mr. Tumnus walking through the snow was Narnia's beginning, and so it is rightfully its most famous illustration. 

It depicts the start of a wonderful friendship. But this discovery marks more than just the first meeting of two friends. It was also the onset of the Pevensie's adventures in Narnia, just as it marks the start for all those countless readers who have fallen in love with Narnia since. 

 

 

For Professor Lewis, Narnia began with a glimpse of a faun carrying parcels through the snow. Though he himself did not know what it meant or where the faun was going until Lucy came across him. Everything else, great and small and wonderful, came after that walk in the snow. In this way, one might say Narnia began with the meeting of a girl and a faun in a wintry forest. In the story of stories and how they come to be, Narnia begins with friendship, and to me, nothing could be better.

"And so Lucy found herself walking through the wood arm in arm with this strange creature as if they had known one another all their lives" 

~ C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe 

 

Barrie Never Stopped Pretending

J.M. Barrie's works are full of contradictions. 

They are burdened with the dilemma between remembering and forgetting, the discrepancies of childhood and adulthood, the disparity between the change and the changelessness, the distinction between love and indifference. 

Still, within the plays of Barrie these distinctions meet one another; they meet perfectly and simply. They get to know one another in which time they connect in a wondrous kinship. Then when the adventure is over and the story thru, they show just how far one lies from the other and how impossible it is for them to be the same. 

In many ways, his plays mimic the man, for Barrie himself was a great contradiction, both a man and a husband, but also a child manifested perfectly in his role as a great pretender. Barrie loved to play pretend, hence the long hours spent playing at piracy with the Davies boys and the many days on which they set out to be "wrecked" on an island. The Davies boys out grew pretending before Barrie did. One by one they all fell away. But even then Barrie did not stop pretending.

 

Barrie's pretending says more about him than anything real or realistic he ever did, such as his insistence that he had no memory of writing the play Peter Pan. Barrie did not wish to own Peter. He did not wish to be Peter Pan's creator, and so he pretended that he wasn't. He would rather have stuck to the story of how he and Davies caught Peter in Kensington Gardens, something at which they had played at in the early days when the Davies still had a mother. According to Barrie, Peter was "caught and written down" rather than created. Catching Peter at the park was an adventure. But putting him into being by writing a play about him was too grown-up, both for Barrie and for Peter Pan.

Still, it would be easy to assume that Barrie's insistence that he did not remember writing Peter Pan was also part of his pretend, some part of a game he played with himself and no one else. For some reason, Barrie did not wish to remember the writing of Peter.

 

 

 

 

 

Barrie himself struggled to differentiate between the child in him and the adult playwright that gained fame through Peter. When Barrie dedicated the published edition of Peter Pan to the Davies he wrote to his boys that he struggled "in vain to remember whether (writing Peter Pan) was a last desperate throw to retain the five of you for a little longer or merely a cold decision to turn you into bread and butter". Barrie did not know whether the writing of Peter was an attempt to preserve their childishness and retain the pretend they had lost or an adult choice to make money from their imaginative games. Perhaps this is in part the reason Barrie gave the rights to the theatrical production of Peter to a children's hospital, so that he did not have to think about it. He did not want to be burdened by the money Peter was making and thus question his motives for the writing of it. 

Barrie did remember acting out the origins of what would later become parts of the play, such as the creation of Nana and early shadows of Jay Hook before he lost his hand. He remembers the pretending of it all, and in his dedication to the Davies he writes at the length about their games. 

He says little about the times when the boys stopped playing them, thereby leaving Barrie an older and possibly lonelier man with nothing to do but to write their games down, stringing a childhood spent together into a story of pretend remembrances. 

Barrie's desire for pretend is clued at by his insistence to constantly keep editing his plays. His works were never completed for him. Many an audience would come to his plays only to discover that a scene had been added which no audience would ever see again. When Wendy Grew Up was one of these scenes once, and so its subtitle calling it an afterthought sits right on its opening page. 

Pretending never ends for Barrie, for his plays are simply manifestations of his pretending, unleashing his games into play so that he and others could watch them come about.

 

And yet, I do not think that Barrie's preference of pretend over the real and the adult is in any way a weakness. Although perhaps it might be Barrie's tragedy. Barrie, like Peter, like Crichton, like Maggie and Mary Rose, changed little throughout the course of his being. He was one of those rare creatures of consistency, like Peter Pan himself. 

Yet it is human nature to change, and thus Barrie's own consistency, while preserving his ability to pretend, also isolates him. Those rare characters who do not change, who somehow refuse to let their soul get older, are slowly left behind by those around them. Thus, Barrie's Crichton can only be loved by Lady Mary while they get to play on their island; Peter Pan is only the source of adventure till his companions feel the need for change calling and abandon Neverland; Mary Rose spends her days searching for the child that grew up without her, a child that reached old age before she herself had touched it; and, finally, J.M. Barrie loses his play mates one by one. 

For J.M. Barrie our best selves lie in our pretending. The heroes we played at as children, the kind princess, the run away child, the companion of fairies, they are our wondrous selves, the selves we thought we could be for real someday when we were no longer burdened by a mothers worry or the trivialities of naps and bedtimes. These are the selves we held on to while the pretending still sufficed. 

But by the time we get to An After Thought in Barrie's book of plays Wendy has lived a whole life, become a wife, and a mother, and woman. Yet none of that life is ever written about; it is only there to give Wendy's daughter something to slip away from so she can take her place in the little house in Neverland. The other, real life lies in wait unmentioned, only there so that she has something to return to. Returning comes almost like an afterthought, for it must be remembered that the Darling children almost forgot to return to her mother, just as Mary Rose nearly did not return to her child.

Still, in a way Wendy was already the things her adult life makes her while in Peter Pan, only there it was part of their pretending. Wendy played mother to her brothers and the lost boys, and even to Peter. She played wife when she loved Peter with a secret love too adult for Peter to understand, and she played wife when she took care of Peter as he confusedly took up the role of pretend father. Wendy becomes a woman when she makes the adult choice of choosing to grow up and stop pretending. Yet the form of these plays suggests that Wendy in her pretending and forgetting, in the play in which she participated in Neverland, is, if not more real than the Wendy we meet in An Afterthought, more pure and more true, and thus, she is worth holding on to, if only with an afterthought, or, perhaps, with a play written by someone who forgets writing it. 

 

"In those days when one by one you came out of your belief in fairies... my grandest triumph, the best thing in the play of Peter Pan... is that long after No. 4 (Michael) had ceased to believe, I brought him back to the faith for at least two minutes" 

~To the Five, Barrie

Keats' Buried Letters

John Keats always knew he would die young. I don't know how he knew, but his poems are overshadowed by that knowledge, haunted by his tragic end. Famously, Keats lies buried in a grave that doesn't even bare his name. He himself desired the words "Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water" to be engraved into his tombstone. He died at the age of 25 with the belief that he would be forgotten, tormented by the knowledge that the only legacy he left was the anguish he would bring to the lover to whom he never returned.

 

 

Keats' letters to Fanny Brawne were full of musings concerning his own death, as were his poems. The fear of an early death sits ripe in them, rich as flesh is with blood. In one of the most haunting personifications of death I have ever read, Keats wrote "I have been half in love with easeful Death, Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme, To take into the air my quiet breath". The theme of oblivion ripples deep only to be swallowed like an echo that hangs hollow in the air. Reading his works, one constantly feels like the shadow of a spectator watching as Keats stands alone, contemplating "on the shore of the wide world...till love and fame to nothingness do sink".

Keats knew he did not have long, and so, love for him was painful, impatient, and urgent. He was so haunted by the fact that he would have to leave her that at times he fled from her even when he did not have to. It was like he did not want to allow himself to live, to relish in things that belong to a full-lived life, with its experience, and its aging, its soft winding down. But death showed itself with that first drop of blood on his own pillow. Death fueled his exigency every night when he wrote to her desperately only to tame himself by morning. Thus, when his poor health drove him to the warmer climates of Italy, he knew already that he would not return. 

 

 

I recently read the letters that he wrote to her before his flight, when life still held some taste for Keats. 

He did not write to her after he fled to Italy. 

I read in the book's introduction that the letters she sent to him throughout those weeks were buried with him unopened. I also read that based on his friend's accounts Keats was tormented by visions of her on his death bed, visions fueled by the fear of what his death would do to her. She was so young, so new, and he had died a thousand times. 

 

Strangely, these horrid deathbed visions also seem prophesied in Keats' own writing. He wrote to her once that she should "suppose (him) in Rome", saying that he would see her there. "I should there see you as in a magic glass going to and from town at all the hours". Yet Keats never saw Fanny again. The Fanny he described in this early letter sounds like a ghost. Even the magic glass, at first described so lovely and innocently, turns out to be something ghastly and agonizing. 

Towards the end, Keats was haunted by her. 

As I read the works he wrote for her I tracked the lines with etchings, skimming his love letters as they slowly unraveled into tragedy. I could see my own lines even as I turned the pages, like half-healed scars shown through skin-thin paper. 

I did not think there was any particular purpose to the order in which the poems appear, until I read the final one. Not until, at the end, Keats wrote about drawing out her blood with his once live inky grasp into his now cold dead fingers. Like an image wrought straight from Shelley's Frankenstein, love and loss becomes a monstrous thing, vampiric in its ability to draw the heart out of you. 

It was there that Keats reached out to me completely, desperately, from death itself. "See" he says, reaching out his pale dead hand. "Here it is – I hold it towards you."

 

 

At the start of the book, an illustration of Keats slept in shadows, nestled between the pages, a silhouette of man of whom no photographs exist. By the end, the only thing the book leaves you with is the imaginary image of his cold corpse, sweat still drying, blood spots on his sheets from his coughing, fingers unmoving, laying where he last reached out. 

As I contemplated the collection I was left with an image of Keats on his death bed, surrounded by haunted mirrors reflecting the image of the woman he loved but could never marry. 

 

But the is truth, this is not how the story of Keats and his love ends. 

 

It ends with a twenty year old girl cutting off her own hair and spending three years dressed in black, dwelling in the Heath where she had once walked with him. It ends with Fanny's unnamed husband who came thirteen years later and a life lived into old age with no account of the passion with which it began. Finally, it ends with a woman remembered by time only for the greatness of her grief and the love she never got to hold. 

 

After all, it is Keats' anguish that we read about. We never get to hear about her suffering from her own mouth. Her own letters were never read, not by Keats, not by anyone. 

Instead, they lie unread and entombed, withered with her first loves corpse before the woman herself even breathed her last. 

Still, she must have had the gift of a poet within, for one can feel her agony when she asks by Keats' account: "Is there another life?... There must be, we cannot be created for this kind of suffering".

Two Cups of Tea and One Book

What strange and mysterious things ensue, I do not know. But I found that one cup of tea quickly led to two as I read this afternoon.

 

Meanwhile, the day changed its course countless times, drizzling onto my window just to let the sun slip out for a while not long after. Then, later that evening, it started to snow sparsely. 

The day sure was eventful, and I found, though I am a quite a few chapters in, I still don't know what to think of it. 

 

As one test led to another, and I watched quietly while each of the three very resourceful children passed each obstacle differently, brilliantly, strangely.  

 

I half expect Lemony Snicket to come slinking out from some corner where he has been silently watching and admit, as if to make a point, that not even he knows what is going on and what all this could mean. 

 

 

The book begins like most of this nature do, with something strange stemming from some adult thing, like business trips, or moves to new homes due to financial struggle. More often than not, it is an uncertainty in an issue of child custody. This one begins with something even more adult and mundane, an ad in the paper with these inquiring words: "Are you a gifted child looking for special opportunities?"

The words are also printed on the back cover in red letters. 

One should note two things about this statement: first, it is addressed directly to a child, not the child's parents; and second, it slips in the words gifted, and special, which every child wishes to be.

 

 

These words are less strange on the back of a book than they would be printed in the paper. 

But I imagine any child (or adult) would be reading this book for the same reason they would note the ad in the paper with keen interest.

 

I am, of course, not a child. But I was unfairly not allowed enough time to be one, and so, I often like to read as if I still am one.  

The world is far more mysterious and whimsical when you are young and unfamiliar with issues of custody or financial struggles. A child is less likely to question the premise of a book, no matter how mysterious, just so long as it intrigues them or allows them the chance to be gifted and special, which admittedly, not only children wish to be.  

 

Perhaps by the third cup of tea the part of me that still reads in the voice of Lemony Snicket (or rather, Jude Law) will have a better sense of what is going on.

She Always Took her Time About Things

She took her time about things: like reading, finishing her tea (she liked the last sip cold), like thinking carefully between her sentences when she spoke. 

She took her time about things: like trees, and talking to them, and watching out for birds, and long walks in the snow.  

 

They said she was strange and old, older even than the trees. The children regarded her as wonder. Some saw her as a timeworn crone. 

She tried to smile at them whenever she noticed them noticing her, but sometimes her thoughts got the better of her and she didn't notice them at all. 

She knew these things still, because she was a well practiced listener, even when she never talked once.

Indeed, some said she never talked at all. They said that she had lost her voice to excessive smoking (she didn't smoke), or traded it away in exchange for a husband that she had lost. 

If she had given her voice to anything it was the forest behind her house. 

It was then that she took time about her more than ever, like the blue coat she wore, wrapped close around her timeworn body. She remembered when there was forest around every side of the street on which she lived. Now the small patch in the north was all that was left, and even those trees were slowly dying. 

 

She walked there often. In fact, she walked there most days. And not just now that she was old and slow. She had walked here as a young girl once. 

She sometimes thought she recognized some of the trees from her youth, though she knew that in reality those had been lost long ago. 

But sometimes she liked to think the trees she once knew had wandered here late one night so that they could grow old near her. 

Now she could see them perfectly from her kitchen window. She could see them when they beckoned at her in the dark. She knows their shapes as she knows the veins in her wrists and the wrinkles around her eyes. She cannot remember any particular time in which she climbed them, but she feels it in her bones that she once did. Sometimes she almost convinces herself she still could.

Some well meaning folk worry about her long exertions. She knew that too. She was a very good watcher. She'd come back after hours of meandering through her small patch of forest, and she'd see the neighbor glancing anxiously from behind the curtains.

Secretly, she thought dying in that forest wouldn't be such a bad way to go. She'd lie down in the snow, and it would cover her like a blanket, and then she'd fall asleep, like a spell come to take her.

 

She had been a summer child once. Then, as a young woman, she had loved the spring. 

But now, in old age, winter was her lover. She cared little that it made her bones ache and froze her ancient joints. She knew the trees suffered the same way. She could hear it when the wind made them groan.

But she liked to think she had aged like the winter; she liked to think she had walked through this white world so long and so often that it had taken her once blonde hair and turned it the color of the snow; turned her skin to a white so fine and crystalline that you could see her veins course blue beneath, glowing like a winter evening. 

 

 

They said she was old and strange.

But that wasn't true. 

 

She was merely under an enchantment. She was convinced of it because, sometimes, in the space between wakefulness and sleeping, she was sure she was still young. She could feel it in her toes and the tips of her fingers as she wiggled them to wakefulness.

As for the strange part, she knew well that all silent things are regarded strange, and so, she tried not to blame them.

 

They also said she was lonely. She never heard them say it, but she knew that they did. She could see it in their eyes when they looked at her. 

But, that wasn't true either; not so long as the trees were older and wiser than she; not so long as she could still share the silence with them; not while there were birds to feed, and deer that knew her; so long as there were rabbits and owls that no one knew still lived there in that little patch of forest.

 

She was slow though. That much she admitted. 

But that, that was her choice. 

 

 

The Milk and Blood of Marriage

:And its Icky and Intimate Parts ad Portrayed in"The Time Traveler's Wife"

The time and place in which we read a book is hardly inconsequential to our perception of it. 

I first read The Time Traveler's Wife when I was a young girl. In many ways, I was too young to understand the novel. 

 

There is some perfect irony in this, I think. As I reread the novel for the second time, I realized things I had not before. I saw and understood the novel on a level that was far more personal. It was both more familiar and more disturbing than it was to the mind of my younger self. 

 

 

The novel's protagonist Clare experiences this same sensation within her own story. She meets her husband at the young age of 6 when he appears naked in the front yard of her house. Her husband Henry, a man who suffers from a disorder that helplessly displaces him in time (also causing him to leave anything material and otherwise behind, including his clothes), will not meet her until he is 28 and she is 20. 

 

Naturally, there are some things that Clare at the age of 6 did not understand about the strange time traveler who appeared for fragments in the meadow near her home. He is in many ways a perfect stranger with whom she slowly becomes perfectly familiar, first from the perspective of a child with an innocent crush, and then from that of a teenager who has other more sensational things on her mind. 

 

Rereading The Time Traveler's Wife now I realized that in reading this as a young imaginative girl I had dubbed it a mere romance. Thus, it lost both its strangeness and its ordinariness. Now I realize that this is not the story of two people who come together, bound by destiny and love. Neither is this a story of science fiction, the tale of a time traveler with a disorder made real in its fictional limits. 

This is the narrative of Henry and Clare who find themselves together from the start of the story, and though their lives are bound ever since that day when Clare was young and pink and innocent, they are constantly being separated, by time and space, and by each other. 

 

The imagery bestowed to the second part of the novel, titled a drop of blood in a bowl of milk, paints the perfect picture of how this novel makes one feel. There is both an ickyness and an intimacy to the image; for marriage, while beautiful and intimate, has its icky parts too. The bowl of milk in this portrait is something soft and pale and usually untouched, though nonetheless it is spoiled by a small drop of blood. In the same way, Henry and Clare's marriage is stained over time by grief, by frustration, and resentment, by an irritation with the things that keep them apart, and so an irritation with one-another. 

Love stories often forget how ugly marriage can be. It is lovely to dream of first kisses, of wedding days, and white dresses, and the perfect romance of two people finding each other in a chaotic world. But when stubbornness and dissatisfaction sears and scars a once white and perfect thing, it is easy to forget the purity it once held. 

In the end it is those images that linger; these are the details that make the novel memorable: the seared gaze of a grief stricken widower, eye whites shot and yellowed by excessive drinking; the red smudged lips of a woman discarded by love committing suicide alone in her apartment; glimpses of white bloodied sheets stained by miscarriage; blurry pictures of white crystal snow sullied with the blood of a deceased lover; all reinterpretations of that spoiled bowl of milk painted into its type-scripted pages.

The Time Traveler's Wife is a portrait of marriage, as raw and unflattering as it is idealized and filtered by fiction; and it is painted in milk and old spilled blood. It leaves neither out. Beginning with a perfect meadow and Clare in white knee socks, it shy's not from love's icky, messy, and gruesome parts by continually staining perfect white things with red and yellow blotches. 

 

 

It is a strange way to depict a marriage. Despite its elements of science fiction and literally disordered timeline, their marriage feels doggedly raw, at times as passionate as it is tedious and frustrating. But that is not the strange part: the strange part is that it is its un-ordinary details, its time travel and thus its disjointed and dislocated lives, that makes this marriage feel at all true and real.

 

After all, it is not only Henry's strange genetic disorder that keeps them apart. At times, it is their stubbornness. Sometimes, it is their own grief or personal lack, an internal dissatisfaction not even their supposedly perfect love can fulfill. 

Instead of locking himself in his study or going for a drive, Henry simply disappears entirely, escaping to some other time and space. Time travel is simply the medium, the perpetrator that makes an emotional separation literal in their marriage. In reality, such things are not necessary.

Clare, like myself, once thought that getting to Henry would be the end of it; the happily ever after, not in the sense that this is the end of their story, but in the sense that, in everything that comes after, they could be happy. 

This, of course, is not the case. Clare's deepest hurts and hardest times come after. She wept once about how lonely it was to wait for Henry. But this was before, when she still knew he would come and she still had the list he gave her telling her exactly when he would return. Later, she has only the unfilled clothing he leaves behind, and the empty time spent waiting and not knowing when he will return to her.

I myself used to think that being married meant that one never had to be lonely again. It wasn't that I actively believed this, but it was a coming disillusionment I sometimes faced snippets of. I remember a friend once telling me how lonely she was finding marriage to be. I tried not to think about it. Who wants to believe there is no perfect cure for loneliness, after all.

In this way, Clare doesn't learn what it is to be lonely until she is separated from he who is closest to her, not just by time and space, but by personal stubbornness, by internal struggles, and often trivial frustrations. 

Sometimes the space across one's bed feels further than time and space. Sometimes one feels as separated from their spouse as if they were a perfect stranger. 

But that is what marriage is about, is it not? Not that I've been married all too long, so perhaps simply take this as an insight about a book I recently reread. 

Marriage, according to this particular novel, is about time; about finding time; making time; losing time; savoring time; and yearning for more of it. It is about washing the blood out of your sheets; it is about not minding the yellowed time-stains on a once clean and perfect dress; marriage is about the messy bits more than the pretty ones, because, after the mess has been made, we only cling to each other that much harder.

 

At the end of the day, marriage is a constant losing of the other, for spaces and fragments, one or the other is gone for a day, sometimes for a week; not literally gone like Henry, but emotionally, mentally missing. 

 

Marriage is about finding your way to each other, again, and again, and again. 

Sometimes it feels like there is never enough time, like there is always something in the way, keeping you from one another; always another red drop in each new bowl you pour.

 

But the world is never as still and perfect as when you find your way back; when the space between two people suddenly falls away and all the worries melt from your mind. 

 

 

 

 

I suppose the real truth is that I, like Clare, did not think that once I had him I would still spend so much time trying to find my way back to him again. I did not think that so many date nights would be canceled; that we would agree to do our own thing most nights. I did not think I would spend so much time waiting for him to come to bed. For us, neither of us needed to be a time traveler for time to keep us apart.

My, oh my, marriage can be complicated. But sometimes, every once in a while, it is the most simple thing in the world. 

It just takes a little washing and a little time.

But that's why you promise a lifetime, I guess. And him and I, we still have it all ahead of us. 

I for one will make the time to get back to him every day for the rest of my life.

What We Found in the Woods

2019: We went for a walk in the woods, you, me, and your family. The sun was out, and the snow was glistening. The trees were bare, though I could feel that in the warm winter air they were beginning to awaken. As we whisked through the forest, waltzing amongst trees that stood like sculpted pillars around us, something mystical occurred. 

Maybe it was the way the sun was shining, like a romantic sort of photograph in which the sun ignites the world with a flare, with sun-specks or sun-spirals or sunny-streaks that shimmer in your hair. Maybe it was the way the forest floor was frosted over with snow, like a ballroom floor glimmers below crystal chandeliers. Something about the way the trees whispered of spring and the way the earth smelled of change gave me a breath of something that felt like certainty. 

We came to a river, frozen at the foot of a gorge. Your mom told me about your childhood, about picnics and the way the trees had since changed. You told me that a lot of your stories took place here. Maybe that is what made the place feel so nostalgic; even though I’d never been here before, there was memory here. There were little versions of you running through the trees. 

I too grew up in the woods, running through trees with dirty feet and feathers in my hair, searching for adventure like Peter Pan’s Lost Boys; storing secrets in tree-trunks and looking for the entrance to Narnia or other lost realms.   

Forests have a weird way of appearing timeless even as they change. We both grew up in forests of our own, forests that we mapped and memorized, forests filled with the trees we climbed and memories of us as bare footed summer children, our noses sprinkled with freckles and our heads crowned by the sun, fancying ourselves the kings and queens of our forest kingdom.

It wasn’t then, but at some point in time my forest and your forest aligned. It occurred to me then, that, as I prepare to leave my forest behind, I wouldn’t so much mind moving into yours.

 2021: We went for a walk through a different wood this rather warm winter day and I was reminded of this piece I wrote almost two years ago. Me and my husband were only just dating, and I went to visit him over the break. It was the first time I met his family, the first time we started talking about what our future would look like. 

I decided almost on a whim that I would move to his province that summer. Sometimes I wonder if we would still be married now if I hadn't.

But that is the way adventures go, is it not? Occasionally a whim strikes us, almost like a childish desire to run away to live in the woods, but much more serious. 

All I knew then was that I was restless without him, and that home was where he was.