of forests and fantasies
Tho Nguyen
If there’s one thing I remember, she never once took off her sunglasses. Black, laughing cat-eyes that twinkled like diamonds in the Barcelona sun.
The eyes are the windows to the soul. I always fall in love with people who don’t let me in theirs.
She slipped past ferns and yucca like a phantom, unfazed by their whispers: she glided with the grace of an oracle. My legs stumbled on the chipped terracotta steps, an unspoken reminder of my tourist status.
“Wait for me!” I wondered if she was too far away to hear me by now; if the plants already had her in their leafy grasp, shielding her like a mother. Holding her back. She walked through the forest like a waterfall of green, a dwindling speck of white. At the last moment, though, she turned back.
“Come on! Even the ants are faster than you.” So I ran to catch up with her, the way you do when you get a second chance.
-
It was like entering another world. The summer wind hushed the cacophony of car honks and street bustle into a distant lull, filled with the sound of water trickling and the flurry of birds’ wings. Here, trees dethroned skyscrapers, lofty aspens spreading their arms in warm welcome.
There was no path save for a scatter of rocks and fallen branches, and my feet hesitated. I had grown up following wood-plank bridges and painted trail signs. Now, there was nothing, just miles and miles of sprawling forest.
“There’s no path.”
The words stumbled out of my mouth before I could stop them, and I realized too late how childish, how petulant I sounded. My guess was right, because she turned around with the most puzzled look on her face. Then, she started laughing–the too-loud, too-long kind that has you clutching your stomach and gasping for air. The kind of laughter you share with a friend.
Afterwards, breathless: “Darling, there is no path. A path is made by walking.”
She surged forward, already anticipating the next question. “Look at this wilderness. How it stretches, on and on, in every direction. There is no right path. The only right path is the one that makes us keep searching for more.”
-
At this point, I realized something that would have mattered to a sane person, and a hopeless romantic (but in all the wrong ways).
“May I know the name of my forest abductor?” I imagined her rolling her eyes under the sunglasses.
“Anita. And if I was your forest abductor, you’d be long gone by now.”
She rolled her Rs like cigarettes, and I craved the sound of her voice like smoke. Anita was smiling now, pointing out the hordes of pink bougainvillea, golden daturas, sun-speckled mushrooms. When she named a lily, I slipped one in my knapsack. Anita was the kind of person who glowed like the sun, even at nighttime. Even in the middle of a searing afternoon. And now, she looked like a dream: flushed face, ruby lips, white dress twirling in the breeze. She was prettier than any flower, but the one I was holding surely couldn’t hurt.
-
I want to learn more about you. The thought rung in my head like a bell. We had barely started walking, but for some reason I felt as if I’d known her for years, with every laugh, every smirk, every smile. What would it be like to be her childhood friend? Sneaking off into town to buy lunch, passing notes in class. But my imagination betrayed me, and I startled when she stopped.
I had blurted my thoughts out loud. She looked pensive, lips drawn pencil-thin. I grimaced, expecting the worst.
When she spoke, I felt something close. “I will tell you, if you do the same.”
Unreadable, yet unpredictable, like the forest that surrounded us.
So we spilled bits and pieces of ourselves to each other, whispering stories that would stay hidden under the green. I learned that she grew up in wealth, the daughter of a banker and a schoolteacher, but that her favorite days were spent loitering with friends near the fountain and staining her tongue with a penny-pop. She could see the ocean from her window and spent days capturing the world in colored charcoal, nights sneaking out for a midnight swim.
I learned that unlike her sketchbook, her list of suitors was “an absolute waste of paper”. And I learned of the day she came home to find her sketchbook ripped: her mother holding a piece of paper with two women intertwined and her father nowhere to be seen. She grabbed her charcoals and closed the door for the last time.
-
A long silence passed between us as I felt the full weight of her words, how they slumped her shoulders with every quiet sigh. How, at times, it pierced her to say them; the same way water erodes rock.
How do you help someone past hurting, past tears?
Slowly, silently, I reached out and hugged her, this simple act conveying everything words could not. I felt her trembling, felt her tired breaths dragging through her frame.
This was what had been done to us, for centuries, by the people we loved. To turn our trust into a commodity, to turn our lack of it into a weapon. We were strangers to our own bodies. We were broken vessels racked with pain, anger, guilt, left to pick up the pieces without anyone telling us how.
So I held her. She didn’t have to bear it alone, not anymore. She wouldn’t bear it alone.
“I’m here for you.”
She nodded and started up the path.
-
The harsh swimming-pool sky had cooled to a hazy tangerine, and the once-bright forest had begun to darken. As the sun sank to its horizon, I told her about my life: of growing up in sunny California before the drought clutched our land in its cracked palms, before the wildfires that stained the sky ferrous red, like a sunset that seemed to last forever. I told her of the kids that christened me ching-chong and stretched their eyes to slits with their fingers.
But I told her about the good parts, too: grabbing boba with my friends after school, the iced tea sweating in August heat; waking up to Lunar New Year celebrations full of red money envelopes and sticky bánh chưng; playing Honeysuckle Rose to an empty theater and hearing the notes sing back to me, pure and bright.
-
Again, a silence that suffocates me, even in the cool of the setting sun. I want to be inside her head, to know her thoughts, to know her dreams. It stretches on for miles and miles, the only sound in my head her distant breathing.
But then she grabs my hand and we start running, clumsy and drunk and fearless, and there’s a grove bursting with lilies and hyacinths and the sky is red and purple and orange all at once. I braid the lily in her hair and the light hits just right so I see her eyes staring straight into me, and before I know it we’re kissing like we’re on fire. I burn the crook of her mouth, nose, chin into my memory and fall deeper into the flames, and we’re so indescribably close but not in the way friends are, so much more than the way friends are. I am tangent to her and this is the one point where we meet, the only point where we meet, and I want it to last forever. We laugh and kiss and laugh again until we collapse, exhausted, on the forest floor.
-
She whispers the three words that ignite and devastate and destroy all at once: I love you. And because I know how this will end, I don’t whisper it back. Instead I cradle her face in my hand, press my forehead against hers so she will know how this feels and remember how it once felt. And because I am a child, I nestle into the crook of her collarbone because I am too afraid of what lies outside.
“What will happen after we leave this forest?” We’ll part and go back to the world on our own. But right here, right now, is the only world I want to know.
Then, hoarsely: “What if I never see you again?”
Anita pauses. Presses her lips into that pencil-thin line.
Then, inexplicably, smiles. “Darling, there will never be a path made for people like us. We make our path by walking.”
