Through the forest, slowly

The Sernox

I do not remember the action of my feet that first day, the way they propelled my body from the station with such unconscious ease. We made our way toward the forest, the looming pines accepting our passage, their many needles like downcast lashes. As a world of brilliance crystallised, born from the one who moved by my side, I realised something: when Emmi walked, the land knew her presence. Every leaf and blade, each snap of twig, all the gusts of wind that touched her skin as shadows crept across her surface … it felt predestined, as though she placed herself before events and, incapable of knowing, intersected her being with a thousand lines of fate.

Through the entire journey, we talked. She asked me of the plants and trees, wishing to know their names (I knew none, knowing only the birds that sang their hidden trills). She wondered on the scattered light and how I would describe each hue of green. She made me listen to the forest breathe, asking who it touched the most. She asked of home, the sea, and moonless nights; whether I, with her, would wait and watch as shells became sand on a beach unknown. And with an ease I would soon recognise as frequent, she turned her mind to the land and its singular myth: that creature, the one I did not know but soon would know, the one that would in time encroach within to lace my mind and all it held. The one to haunt my memories of her. Of Emmi.

*

“It meets you in dreams,” she said, stopping to cradle a flower, the pink baubles drooping eagerly into her palm. I watched the manner in which she paused, her eyes studying each petal as though an entire universe was hidden within. She remained like that for some time, then turned and smiled before continuing her way.

“It?” I asked, shrugging her backpack into a more comfortable position. I caught the distant sound of a train. The line that ran south, I knew. By now, the old man would be standing, lifting the suitcase with his aged hands, the worn leather enjoying its separation from the surface of the platform.

Emmi tilted back her head, mouth to the sky like a chick awaiting food. “The Sernox,” she whispered, and for a moment the forest seemed to whisper in return, a thousand rustling leaves that spoke in words I had not yet learned.

“What is it?” I asked, catching up to her, aware of proximity’s curse, of the insufficient molecules that danced between our skin.

She laughed, the sound enough to melt the ores beneath my feet. “The reason,” she said. “The reason I am here.” She span, a twirl with arms outstretched, her eyes alive, seeking what lay unseen.

I could do nothing but smile, my mind drifting as I watched the eager air receive her movement. In the minutes before, she told me of her desire, how she had travelled to find the world’s myths, to see and catalogue and believe them all. All I have seen are upon my back, she said. I will show you, if you want. And I did. I longed to see and understand, to know what must be there, etched upon her skin.

She was facing me, I realised. Her hands were touching mine, speaking to me through fingertips.

“Were you elsewhere?” she asked, letting go. “Shall I wait for you?” And she winked, a brief lid enclosing that orb of liquid jade from which she drank the world.

“No,” I heard myself say. “I’m here,” and as I righted my mind I found I had smiled, my fingers still tracing the ghosts of hers. “Let's continue,” I said, and we did, the moss-lined path silent as we moved.

“Do you dream?” she soon asked.

I thought to say the truth, that each night there came with it a hell, a terror that swept through my mind, and how, until the morning light could burn away its haze, I wept with fear at all I had seen.

“Only sometimes,” I lied.

“Oh. You will need to dream,” she said. “We will need to dream.”

We continued, and like the memory of my steps I recall little other details of that walk. Time ceased, though I doubt time had ever done anything else in her presence. My own world—what barest fragment I had clung to in the years until that moment—began its slow orbital path as we moved along the trail, back to the village with the lake.

*

There is some distant, outer part of me that holds to a belief we still meander along that path from the station, that nothing happened thereafter, that, with Emmi, I am sustained beneath an endless and repeating wave, time’s meaningless advance uncaring of our imposition.

But as I look at these walls—the stark and chipped surface as indifferent to my presence as with all those who have come before, a slender view of clouds my only solace—I know that cannot be true.

Credit: Substack image generator.

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This was Part 3 of The Sernox.

Part 1 > Part 2 > Part 4 > Part 5 > Part 6 > Part 7.

I … cannot quite articulate what this story is. Not yet. It is something that came unbidden, a series of wafting threads that one day last month I happened to snag upon, like spiderwebs you cannot see but feel across your forehead when walking along a tree-lined alley. Though the words are bundled up inside, the extraction and placement of each has come with considerable effort.

As always, I adore your comments and thoughts.