Caveat: This is one of the first stories I’ve written that I haven’t been very happy with. But, I think a part of this project is staying true to the idea of the first response: when I see the picture I just let myself write, and come what may. This is what came, so here it is; unvarnished, just a response to a beautiful thing.
Once I walked through forested hills of gold, amber, scarlet, and emerald. Every tree a different shade, every leaf a scream of colour. It was only a place, but somehow I cannot separate the place from the people I knew there, or the way that I became.
People travel for so many reasons. To seek, to escape. To learn, to grow, to shed, to disappear. We reach desperately for difference, and then are comforted only by the sameness that we find across the vales and valleys of foreign climes. We go looking for everything but ourselves, and realise ourselves are the only things that we can never leave behind.
When I remember Sakura, I remember the forest where I saw her first. The smooth plane of her face and the serrated quality of the light through the leaves are one and the same to me now. Her eyes and the dark quiet earth draw in the light with the same intensity.
She mocked me for my clumsiness, for my largeness, for my childish attempts to understand her and her forest. I stumbled over roots and shrubs, make a racket as we hunted deer in the dappled light, stumbled over words and lost the thread of conversations as I stared at the strip of skin beneath her black hair.
We are all the same, here or there. The way skin feels against the rough pads of your callused fingers; the way night air cools the sweat on your back; how little we understand the mysteries of another’s self. Did I love her, or did I only love the landscape, the primality of the place, the intensity that seemed to rival every place I had been until then? Did she love me, or did she love the way she could look into my eyes and see herself reflected in my alien features?
I never knew her. Not really. I never knew the place, but I’ll never forget it. Never forget the way I changed there, the way she changed me. The forest has become one with the story I lived through, and it lives forever in my heart.
Today’s image comes to you courtesy of Rene Blais. Check out his work on His Facebook Page, and see more about him on Lucid Dreaming’s Contributors Page.