I walk up a path. The path I always walk when I feel like being alone. It raises onto a hill, in the middle of a forest. It loops and crosses to avoid the biggest rocks sticking up from the ground, to not run too steep up the slope. I walk slowly. I'm not in a hurry. Through the meadow. Past the two white-barked birches that have fallen in some long-ago storm but still kept growing, their branches forming new trunks and continuing their growth towards the sky. When I first came here during a summer I thought someone had come and planted the birches in rows. It was only after the leaves fell that year I realised they grew in a line because they shared a trunk. This close to the end of the year it looked nothing like someone having planted them in a row. But it had kept me wondering for a few months. This is an old forest. Nothing else looked even remotely like human hands had changed the way it looks. It only occurred to me later I could have gone off the path to see the birches a little closer and figured it out much earlier. But this is an old forest. It doesn't feel right to stray from a path here. I don't want to disturb the forest.
On the top of the hill is the only place I ever step off the path. On the left side of the path there is a cliff. Between the cliff and the path is a boulder. The boulder blocks the view off the cliff from the path. So I step the couple of steps off the path and climb onto the boulder. I've never quite figured out why I feel okay leaving the path here but not anywhere else in the forest. This boulder simply feels like a place where you're supposed to go.
I sit down on the cold stone and frozen moss. Clouds hang heavy in the sky, making the world dark even though it's barely after midday. Below the cliff there's more forest. Behind the forest there's the sea. It's gray under the blanket of clouds. So is the forest. The evergreens are dark green. Anything with leaves dropped them ages ago. So now the world is mostly gray.
It starts snowing. It isn't even the kind of snowing that is beautiful, with heavy huge flakes floating to the ground. No. It's the kind of snowing when you feel like you're being hit in the face with a thousand tiny knives if it's windy. Which it isn't today. So at least there's that. And despite not being the beautiful kind of snowing, it is snow, and white is significantly better than gray when it comes to the color of the world.
I shiver from the cold in the air around me and the stone beneath me. I should be heading back anyway. I just felt like I had to get out of the house for at least a moment today, to stretch my legs. So I get up. I almost slip on my way down from the boulder, but catch myself on the last moment. It might be this is my last time up here until spring. The ice makes it impossible to get up the side of the boulder during the cold months. I start down the path, in the opposite direction from where I came. I can get back home also down the other side of the hill.
I have walked barely a half a minute before I see something ahead of me on the path. It looks like a door. Or rather a frame of a door.
Don't be stupid, Charlie, I tell myself. There's never been a door or a frame in the middle of the path here, and door frames aren't things that appear out of nowhere. But there it is. The closer I get the more certain I am it's there. I stop in front of it before walking through. It arcs above the path, slightly higher than a normal door, and a little bit wider so it's embedded on either side of the path instead of on it. It's gray wood. It looks old, but it's never been here before, and despite looking old it feels new. I stare at it for a moment, intently. There is a small engraving of an ellipse in the top right corner.
I pull off my mitten and reach out. Just as my hand would touch a door if it was there, I think I feel... something. I don't know what it is. Shimmering? Glittering? Can you even feel glittering? But my hand passes through the empty space under the frame as if it was empty space. Because it's empty space. I'm imagining the feeling, because a part of me is expecting to feel something.
"Don't be stupid, Charlie," I tell myself again, this time out loud. It's just a few pieces of wood someone put up in the middle of the path for some reason. But there's something about it that makes me nervous either way. I pull my hand back and put the mitten back on. Then I step around the door frame, pulling on it to avoid stepping off the path.
I hurry home before I get too cold.
______________________________________________________________
Yes, it's that time of the year again.
One part a day, until Christmas eve. 24 parts total.
(I hope.)
So here we go.
The topic for tomorrow is Sock(s).
~matu
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