Cellphones tore themselves apart upon entering the forest. People’s pockets set alight, and there was a gathering at the trailhead where people patted out the fires before they were drawn further into the trees, each with a thigh blackened from the small electrical fires, each feeling lighter and a little hesitant, as though there were a sea in their gut and it was just getting going. But the light! They smiled as they pressed further, falling deeper into the folds of the forest as the valley snaked inland. One turn was marked by a deep, red pool. Fish lived boldly there in plain sight, daring a line, a hook, or any set of pale hands to try and take them. Another turn wound under the belly of a stone marked a thousand times over in a language no one knew how to read. Maybe it was ancient. Maybe not. The people walked on, drawn still by the light. There were noises now, calls of mother lions and the flapping of raptors coming in from the coast. The people whispered to one another. Wood turned to cheese in that deep forest. Grubs and ticks and ants held great feasts in great halls and there were kings amongst them and scoundrels too. The people followed further, and the light grew dim. They were greeted by soft forest floors and huts lit with fires. They were greeted by other people, some as short as their knee, with clothes stitched by hand and rabbit furs over their shoulders. There were taller folk too, and taller still, and even a few giants who made no noise beyond the fall of their heavy feet, which were wrapped in leather because no shoe company on the planet had ever made sneakers in men’s size 42. The villages were beautiful and the people were in awe, but evil was not far off, and it set in by nightfall. Torches lit the night, their smoke vanishing a few feet above in the darkness. Lies swarmed in. The mother lions hid the cubs in their dens. The people tried to stay out of it, argued they had nothing to do with it, but, one by one, they took sides. Some joined the madness, feeling free, finally, free as they never had before, back to, back, where was it they had come from? It didn’t matter anymore. It didn’t matter that it was wrong to burn, to wrest, to tear. It was easy to ignore what they had known in the light. They formed committees and passed judgements. They suddenly knew, it seemed, why everything had been created and which creatures deserved to live. As though they owned life somehow. And the others, those who hid the children and passed their bread wondered at madness. And though everything seemed to be falling as the orchards rotted away, those others—those who had snuck and hid and stared down the frothing hate and stopped it with questions—knew they loved the light and that even at night it poured through the trees from the stars. 

He did not remember the old table or the shape of the chairs. He knew he had smiled under those beams when the queen was still alive and wonder still lit the corners of his life. He knew better the bends in the trails and the way the old plants grew. Those were memories he fed on as though he were still sitting at that table. He preferred them, just as he preferred the memories of the castle when it was just a skeleton, with his father painting in the way he knew how, standing there in that scattered sunlight with a tool belt wrapped around his waist, his hammer handle hanging low behind his knees, staring upward into the rafters, a pencil resting on the ridge of his ear. The young man carried wood and drank from cans while his feet dangled on the edge of the balcony before the rails arrived. They watched sunsets and said little. He came back years later, grown different. The young man was happy and fat for himself. His young bride sat in a parlor window in town before they met at the edge of the forests to rejoice with their people. They drank champagne in a bathtub in the middle of the village. When they returned to those highlands, they came with two screaming babies. The babies sat in the sand and blinked at the sea. The young man and his wife bathed their little bodies in the sink with the sea swelling beyond the windows. For years, the young man searched for truth there in the fern gullies under moonlight. He and a knight braved lion and loved the stars. And a bit of what he was looking for came, some years later, when the young man finally saw the flowers down the hill. A great host was drinking in the light of the main hall his father had built while he wandered under the trees and listened to them laughing. He was glad for all things.

He found your arms waiting and settled his face in your shoulder. And you held the purest little soul you’d ever found in this world as you looked out the windows at a calm sea and a quiet highway. He sighed and looked out while you stood there, swaying and feeling his breaths against you. You wondered how long you could protect him. And you marveled how holding him in your arms shook off all the myths you’d made about yourself for what seemed so long. For you’d only been alive for your lifetime and it was, so far, the longest span of time you knew. And in that time you felt like you’d seen trouble and felt pain and grown hard and dealt some but oh how his little soul seemed to pick yours up, as though his was something light, a little sandpiper bird skimming the surface of some far-off sea that you knew, and you, you were deep underwater, looking up, when he drew you out, drawing you back to the surface where there was sunlight and birdsong. And he looked at you even as he pulled you from all that darkness you’d made of life and he smiled and told you, come on, as though he were grace itself and you wanted to cry and he told you it was alright and held your hand even as you held him in the cool morning air.

Then before you were ready, he grew tall, and the two of you grew apart.

It had to be.

And at some forgotten point, you came to be alone. You were walking back to your building when you meshed with the crowd, and there you saw him.

He led parades of all the free peoples where he rode an elephant and wore red minerals that ran up his cheeks. A headband of woven reed held his hair. Voices in the crowd whispered about him, about the girl next to him, the one with the brown eyes. It was said they were leaving. It was said they weren’t coming back. And it was said in awe. 

Right as you saw them, the girl leapt from the elephant and disappeared in the throngs of people, dancing in such a way that made you picture an albatross.

And then you saw him. Saw him laugh.

Saw him smile and in all that noise, you saw, he could still make out the quiet of some wild place on the horizon, something you could never do.

And you watched them pass, he and all his people and you wanted to go with him, to embrace him and cheer him on, but he had already been born. He was already separate from you. So you cried and felt the hollowness that comes with loving something that is gone. 

You could only watch him, and you didn’t understand what held your feet in place.

Then you noticed a stillness beside you. Someone in the parade had stopped—the girl from the elephant. You saw now her eyes as she stepped forward. She smiled and brought her thumb across your forehead, leaving behind a blue streak of earthy mineral before she danced off.

You decided you’d go back to a diner, maybe stop at the post office after, but you ended up wandering the town with your hands in your pockets thinking of him and wondering at the sight of them all, the girl and the animals and the color and the horizon you knew he had seen.

If I’d only just seen you, walking by on the wooden plank sidewalks

I’d wonder what you were doing here

Whether you were some foreign model

Here at a cosmic intersection

Or some rich man’s wife

In which case I hope you’d be bored

Or some ray of light

A brand far and apart your own

Well I might even stuff all my conditioning and programming and follow you awhile,

Walk the beach some ways off smilin’

Eat breakfast alone across the patio

All the while inventing stories about you

And while you go on shining, I dream of all the lengths I’d go to be worthy of you, as misguided as the knights in arthurian legend. Flying spaceships into black holes and charging down vicious man monsters and I think of how calm I’d be if I got to think of you for a second before those tasks, how a little photo of you on my spaceship dash could remind me of all I would need to know. And after all the adventures and hardship, I might see how I missed the point, because all those planets kept swirling around me and time ran on and before I knew you, our time passed.

And I wonder how I’d feel looking at your picture then when I realized what I should have done.

How I should have said hello. How we should have laughed. How I should have paid attention to the lines in your face. 

And I see the me who might be a better man alone in space, and I reject him.

For there are breakfasts to be eaten 

Beds to lie in together

Cold mornings in covers

Dirty playroom floors to sit on; to talk

To talk

To talk

And talk some more

Not to mention,

 the sex.