Soldier of the Mist

 

At some point it occurred to me that the things that we use the symbols of faeries, dryads, nymphs, and mythical sea monsters to describe were still real. I don't know if those symbols are literal, but they are indicative of a reality that is still in existence. And we can't seem to interact with it. There's this moment when I'm talking to someone and I can feel this moment of both of us being cut off. Over the months this horrific knowledge has possessed my mind: we can only interact with a tiny amount of reality at this point, as moderns.

This started when I went to the Gulf of Mexico. I was playing on the shore with my firstborn, which was awesome. He enjoyed the water, I enjoyed the water and got to enjoy him enjoying the water, it was amazing! What people don't say about parenthood is that the joy of your child is your joy, at the same time. You basically double-load on joy, and it sometimes is so much that you wonder if you'll crack open and the light will spill out. This was one of those times. I was just overcome with joy at watching my son interact with the ocean. But children burn out very quickly at times, and this was one of them. He went to play on the beach and I stood, up to my waist in the surf.

The water you are in has been in the Marianna Trench.

A Flow rushed through my mind, and I reeled a second. This water had been everywhere: the Bermuda Triangle, the Beaches of Normandy, the Galapagos Isles, the list could just go on. And here I was, standing in the world itself. Basking in the water simply because it felt good. I don't know why, but that struck me as wrong. Something about what I was doing was superficial, cheap. I was a tiny little dot in a freaking infinity, and as I looked right and left I was struck that no one else was feeling what I was feeling, as I was feeling it. The arrogance we were all displaying collapsed on me. This wasn't something to just feel good about, it was an event, and how short we were in actually enjoying it!

You'll notice I said we, not they. 

When I left the water ten minutes later it felt like I was closing a door, and behind it waited... something. Something old, frigid, chthonic. I've no real words beyond that. I'm not sure one could make words for what I felt, but I've been wrong before.

Whatever that feeling was stuck with me. And it grew. At one point on this blog I wrote about standing beneath a tree and wondering if the dryad within it needed other trees to wake up and be fully functional. And I started to ask why we, as a race, could no longer intuit this reality. 

I am not claiming as to the literalness of the symbol dryad, let's not get that confused. I am asking why we cannot seem to intuit that the tree is aware of us and what we do.

And then I stumbled acrost Wolfe's anthology of his Latro novels. Latro was a man who had sustained a head injury and had lost his short memory and was forced to write his thoughts down on a scroll taht he'd have to read every day. In exchange he gained the ability to see the gods.

I tried to resist getting it. My house is overfull of books.

But every time I've read something of Wolfe's I've learned. Most people who read Wolfe seem to have a "I must pick this apart and understand it" reaction. And I get that. But my response to every Wolfe work I've ever read has been "How. The hell. Did he know. About that." Reading Wolfe for me is like realizing that I've been on the edge of the Marianna Trench and that I've been too chicken shit to go in. 

I had to know. I had to go back in.

And at first it was everything I really wanted it to be. I started to devour the first book, Soldier of the Mist. Like I'd said before, this was like what I had experienced in my life... but more. A lot more. Not since Clannad had I found such a powerful commiseration, but this time it wasn't with a character, but a writer. Latro was honorable, good, strong. And he was loved. And he saw none of it. He just wanted his memory back. The gods and other creatures he ran into, the marvels he encountered... Latro didn't want those things. He just wanted his friends.

As I continued to read my family went to southern Oklahoma, to a tourist site where there are freshwater springs. It's an incredibly beautiful place, filled with water that is totally clean from our.. interference. I put my feet in the cold water with my sons and wife.

I come from places you cannot imagine, under the earth. Nightmares and beauty are what I flow through.

You are a blip.

You are not welcome.

I looked at the beauty surrounding me and felt a chill. I had the feeling that we were being watched, and resented. We hadn't come to sit with nature, we'd just come to feel the water on our bodies. That feeling of cheapness overwhelmed me. The place was crawling with people, who had no intent to do anything more than... well... what they were doing. And the same went for us.

I shrugged. Nothing I could do about it, and I wasn't going to let the resentment of the land get in the way of enjoying it, however limited and cheap it was. It was what I had.

We made our way down to where two creeks intersected. I looked out at the trees, and felt we were not alone. And for a second I found myself asking, in my mind: Why don't you come out? So we can see you? I felt an immense longing to see, to understand, something.

Do townies hang out with the tourists? Came the reply.

What if I seek to understand? What if I want to understand things as a "townie"?

Then come back at night, and keep going. And going. And going. Until you are lost. Then you will find us.

I knew that to be a trap. Crazy as this conversation sounds, understand that as I heard these words in my mind it was on the point of overloading. I knew it could not be happening but it was. And I almost did it. I looked into the forest, longingly. I wanted to understand. The whole world has felt wrong for years and years and years and I needed to know why. 

I'm not bringing my wife and children near any of you. Came the reply from the depths of my soul.

A shame, we love children. There was a dry chuckle that rumbled through my mind, shook me with a casual cruelty that I've only encountered once or twice in my life. 

I kept playing in the water, laughing and enjoying my family. We were watched. And I didn't care. What could they do to us? If they were going to do it they would have already. But that was the day I learned they weren't my friends. Whatever they were.

But still that yearning persisted. I wanted to escape a reality that continued to prove itself to be more and more artificial, more and more just a construction of people desperate to close themselves in. And I found the closing in so destructive that I am practically allergic to it at this point. Whenever everyone is saying something in the same tone of voice with the same words and their eyes go just the right shade of glassy something is wrong. And when I look in the mirror I see it there as well. 

Understand this isn't me standing around and throwing shade on others. When I look in the mirror my eyes are so glassy I can barely recognize them.

Last night I finished Soldier of the Mists. I did not like what I found, but in the same way someone doesn't like having cold water dropped on them when it's time to wake up. See, Latro gets what he wants, but not what he needs. He's duped. Ignorant of those around him that love him, Latro keeps reaching for the impossible, keeps begging to have something that he can't have back (his memory) restored.

And it ends so badly.

Because the gods are not to be trusted. They are liars. They do not share. They do not care for us. "How strange the ways of the gods. How cruel they are!"

The gods, dryads, nymphs, and somesuch were not forgotten. Our race didn't forget.

We banished them.

And what if that wasn't a bad thing?

What if I don't want the dryad in that tree down the street from me to be anywhere near me?

But to know they're there is part of opening the container. Is it close-minded to not want them? So much misery is the result. 

The world is fallen. I've never understood that like I do now. The world itself is fallen. We are living in something that should be wonderful and beautiful, and it is filled with horrors.

And yet I can't look away. I feel the pull of my mind, complaining about the strain. How is any of this relevant? Can't we just stop?

What the hell is wrong with me?? That's probably not the right question, but it is the question I have in my mind, as I look at the world around me.

The Black Swan

 

There was a 5e game my buddy Andy was in that he told me about with great amusement. One of the other players was interested in telling a deep and complex story; everyone else was playing 5e. They got into a situation where actual morality and thinking was required. Andy watched as this new player tried to apply just those two things... in a 5e game. 

Of course it didn't work! Rules are setting; you are defined in large part by the system you operate in. And 5e does not reward thinking; it rewards killing things and turning your brain off. There is utility in this type of game, although I find it less useful the older I get.

Rules. Are. Setting.

What is Setting?

Setting, as I define it for this article, are the unconscious rules you take in. These are the things you just take for granted, like gravity, death, taxes, the slot machine that is social media, etc. You just accept these things and work within those assumptions. And make no mistake, you are molded by these unconscious rules. The folks in that 5e example had internalized these unconscious rules, much to the chagrin of the player who wanted to do something different, which the the world itself would never reward. 5e's rules create a world where killing was normative.

So what is a Black Swan? And why did I just spend all that time trash-talking 5e? And telling you that a lot of social media is intentionally designed like a slot machine?

I'll answer the last two questions first. I'm cantankerous, think 5e is hot garbage and still bitter about the fact that the most famous RPG in the world is now a shell of its former self. And frankly the thought that social media, particularly Facebook, is designed with slot machine mechanics in mind is terrifying to me, as I have almost no impulse control to speak of. My environment is something I find I must constantly tinker with in order to remain someone I recognize.

That aside aside, what the hell is a Black Swan?

The Black Swan is what's outside your expectations, which were molded by your setting.

A Black Swan, as defined by Nassim Taleb, is a highly improbably event that, while not random, was not expected and thus appears random. Black Swans are entirely a matter of perspective: you cannot entirely know what you do not know. There is a gap between what you know you don't know and what you don't know you don't know. And that gap is where Black Swans come from. 

It is of note that, in the entirety of Taleb's book, he never once, not once, shortens Black Swan. Given Taleb's temperament it is not accidental.

For those of you who caught it don't tell. Just chuckle.

It is important to note it again: Black Swans are not random, they are inevitable, you can't see the actual event coming. Taleb, when he talks about how to deal with Black Swans, suggests that the solution is not to predict the Black Swan, which is impossible, but to shore up fragilities in your systems so that they cannot be exploited. You wouldn't predict if someone is coming to break in, you look at your house and realize it doesn't have a security system. If you're in a nice neighborhood and decide to not put the security system in your house it's a lower risk, but do not think it's not a risk. If you're in a high risk neighborhood you know what the risk is, you just can't necessarily see when and how it will happen.

And maybe the underlying problem of gang violence will result in a gang war that no one saw coming, because everyone thought that had been taken care of! How were they supposed to know that the two eldest children of the rival gangs had been in a secret relationship.... until one of them killed themselves over the other? And now all bets are off! To the vast majority of the world that is impossible to see coming, and is thus a Black Swan. Their Setting seemed stable. So they didn't look.

One only has to look at the bodies in the street to see how that turned out.

So, as I was reading this a few things jumped out at me:

1) This was a part of my worldview I'd never been able to articulate. Setting is not stable. You just want it to be.

2) I'm not aware of a story game modeling this on purpose, and yet Black Swans are incredibly important to history and people. My favorite literature could not exist without it. The OSR is filled with random tables and with a joyful acceptance of Black Swans, but from what I've seen in the story games department there is a dearth.

So I decided to put it into Crescendo.

My first model came from my worst instincts. I built a Black Swan Counter. The player could push off failures and make checks easier by hitting the counter, increasing it by 1 each time. And then the GM would roll a dice to see if a Black Swan went off.

Now, the thing was that I didn't want Black Swans to be "consult a table". The whole point of a Black Swan is that it's outside your context, which means that the twists need feel like they come from outside the game. 

Which is when I remembered the consultation of the Aeneid.

Most people think of the Bible when you bring this up: open up to a random page, put your finger down, and that's the answer to... whatever it is you have questions about. But the Aeneid did it first, because Virgil was regarded as the poet, and therefore the lens to see reality through. So I thought, "why not?"

So I decided upon a mechanic called Hitting the Books. The GM brings the Aeneid, while the players bring their favorite narrative work. Whenever Hit the Books is declared everyone opens up to a random passage and reads it aloud. The GM then takes the pieces provided and comes up with a new new plot idea, one that goes right at the PCs. The GM would determine randomly which plot element was affected by the Black Swan.

So I threw these things at James, my hapless player/test subject. And you know what? Surprise surprise, he hit the counter almost every time, because the dice rolling system I'd come up with was punishing. So I lessened up the pressure... and James hit the counter 75% of the time. Still way too much. Crescendo is not directly about Black Swans, it's about deciding what you believe in a world that changes you just as much as it changes itself. Characters get sick, they get tired, they have to rest, they can have mental breakdowns that take months and years to get over....

The Black Swan only aids that process so far.

So I decided to dial it way back. You roll to see if a Black Swan happens at the end of every session, and whenever a player advances (or tries to advance early) a Skill, Save, or Potency a Black Swan is definitely going to happen. Both of these are outside the session, giving all players the time to process. I will probably need to make a way for players to remove certain setting elements from the list, possibly even allowing them to dictate how certain setting elements improve in the face of a Black, because they saw it coming. 

Obviously I'm still tinkering. I like what this mechanic does so far: it removes the GM from mucking about from the game too much, allowing him to just focus on what's right in front of him, with the Setting itself being impossible to entirely pin down. I usually prefer it when a fantasy world is impossible to entirely pin down. 

The world is larger than all the players, especially the GM. I think it should feel like it. 

More as I have it.

Keep Going!

I have written this post because I feel that spiritual experience has to be talked about to be valued, and if people are not talking about their unexplainable times then it slips right out of their consciousness. And then they stop noticing when these things happen.

Hopefully this clears up my intentions.

I've no idea what woke me up. But it was always the same- the rush, the panic, the gasping for breath, as if I'd been running. Later on I'd discover I had sleep apnea. Whether this shortness of breath was it or not is up for conjecture, but I always felt like I'd been running somewhere, somewhere dark and lonely.

And there she was.

Black-haired.

Blank-eyed.

Staring at me.

I'd scream. She'd be gone. It's so hazy, nowadays, but that was the reality of college life in Atchison. I'd wake up in the morning, trying to find something in me that wasn't filled with hatred and exhaustion. Maybe, just maybe, today would be a day I'd find something. I'd open up my prayerbook, grasping for anything that could soothe my soul. There was a perpetual sound in my soul, of fingernails on a chalkboard, of the screaming that a woman makes as she's being gutted. Maybe today prayer would drown that out.

It never worked. Not once.

I'd grit my teeth, take a deep breath, and try to say the words again. Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal, have mercy on us!

Just more screaming. 

Keep going, I heard in my heart. This is going somewhere! Don't quit! This voice had never been wrong. Ever. I'd heard it before in my life, but louder since I'd come to Atchison. I was where I was supposed to be. Hell if I knew why.

So I'd grab my headphones and blast loud music over the cacophony. People could hear This Will Destroy You for well over a dozen feet away from me. I'd go, paint, hate what I'd made but keep it, try and smile through another dinner with the woman who would be my wife, and trudge wearily back to my apartment and hoped I could sleep that night. I kept waking up screaming. The little girl with black hair was still there. Night after night after night, for a year and a half.

Eventually I left. I don't think the little girl followed? It's hard to say. But I finally got married to the woman who had defined most of my life. I joined the Army; it was that or I couldn't marry. By that point I was afraid of what would happen if I didn't marry. Well, the Army broke my brain much worse. They had to ship me back, because someone else had killed themselves on that deployment and they didn't want to take chances. 

When I got back I was put on a side job, where I was left to my devices, more or less. And of course that included PT. Some mornings I'd do brisk walks by myself, headphones in. It was peaceful. Nobody bothered me. So I did what I thought was right. Which meant nice long walks in the early morning, as the sun rose.

And one day I saw him.

Well, kinda.

I felt him. Coming towards me. I don't know how to tell you how it worked, but I could see him, in my mind's eye. An older man, with a thick white beard and wild white hair, wearing a navy cassock, with a blue chotki poking out from under his sleeve. 

His eyes arrested me. They were laden with a sorrowful joy, a bright sadness, I could never tell you about, not directly. He'd seen Hell, had made it home, and had conquered it, transformed it into Heaven. Peace took sorrow and happiness and fused them together, and that man would have it no other way. He was Home, no matter where he was at. And he'd brought Home with him that day, to my street as the sun came up. He'd always bring Home with him wherever he went, even in the darkest parts of this Vale of Tears.

Why I knew it was me I was looking at I'll never know. But I stood there, in the morning light, stopped from a bone-rattling walk, staring at an empty spot where I knew he was. He looked up as he came to a stop. It looked like he had been on a walk as well.

Our eyes locked.

He smiled, silently reassuring me, filling me with his peace. My knees knocked. I almost fell over. There are times in my life when I can feel the weight of my experiences on me, when I suddenly feel far older than my short life-span, where I feel older than the earth, where my cares and joys are no longer hidden from me and I realize what I've been carrying. It is no small weight on my soul. This was one of those times. Whatever he was doing, he was holding me up, helping me experience it.

And then he was gone. 

Keep going! I heard again. I'd stopped hearing that voice when they had to ship me back from deployment. For months and months I'd experienced horrifying flashbacks of detail and sensation no one would want to know about, filled with lies, rape, sadism, outright torture, and curses coming from the actual depths of Hell.

But I could hear the voice again, even in the midst of it. And it never stopped after that.

Slowly I began to feel better, the interior landscape calmed and cooled, becoming stable. My wife and I went back to the woods of our youth. It's always been a relief to go back, to step foot into a place that, no matter how I change, it stays the same. No, I didn't see the treehouse from the previous post. That year it had snowed, so we took our son out. My wife, after awhile, wanted to go in. Our firstborn didn't, so I stayed out with him while he sledded, watching him.

My chotki seemed to appear in my hand. I don't remember reaching into my pocket to take it out. I was just... praying. And then I was looking down, through the snow, into a dark room.

The black-haired ghost sat next to me as I slept, trying to get me to wake up. She wanted to tell me something. I would never hear it. It wasn't mine to carry. I woke up, screaming, and she vanished, frightened. And I was watching, in the snow. Somehow. Like looking into a dollhouse. As I watched, I realized that this little girl's desperate plea for help was destroying me. I couldn't carry myself, nevermind whoever this little girl was. And so I prayed. And prayed. And prayed, in the falling snow of the present.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, the sinner!

Every time I prayed that prayer in those woods a bit of my memory cleared from when I was in Atchison, until I realized that the prayers were going backwards, back to me, then. I could hear them, somehow, while I was in college.

And then the words came out of my mouth in the present, while appearing in my mind in the past.

"Keep going! This is going somewhere! Don't quit!" I said, over and over again, as I held my face in my hands and shook as the cacophony of noise that I'd heard while I was  in college appeared in my head. But what came out of me wasn't the cry of a man overwhelmed, but of someone who wished his brother would stop hurting. It was true empathy for myself, something I promise you I do not feel often. Yes, I hate myself so much that God has to break time to get me to feel any sort of genuine pity for myself.

I watched as I attempted to pray in the past, and I prayed for me instead, in the woods of the present, with the snow intermingling with the happy shouts of my firstborn. The prayers of the past were held up by the prayers of the future and fused; a bright grief. An acceptance of all experiences I could fold in, put together with tears. A soul-shaking agony that was also joy in the fact that I could feel that grief, joy in my ability to feel, gratitude I could feel grief, washed over me. Grief somehow became a gift. And I rejoiced in my tears. And then I saw those last two and a half years at college, all at once. And then the entirety of my life, in a whirl. The prayers coming out of my mouth went to every last second and covered them, somehow. 

Again, I'm not going to pretend to know how this works. I keep getting my head examined and people keep telling me I'm sane, whatever the hell that means. I ran out of options to explain a lot of this a long time ago. 

But it was happening; my prayers were being applied where they needed to be. The world was balanced, even if I couldn't see it all the time. The bright sadness enveloped the whole experience. And I shook. I thought I was going to break, that my body would crack open and light would just flash out like a firework on a moonless night. I began to wonder if time would break in myself, and thus all over the world. I became afraid.

All of a sudden I was simply in the woods. Whatever was going on, it had stopped. I found myself looking at the son I'd always needed, standing in a woods that I don't leave voluntarily, with the woman who I love more than life itself, waiting inside a house that has defined my existence, for close to going on thirty years.

I had made it. Somehow. I was here. I was just here. A part of me yearned to go back to the perspective I had, to keep going, to break. A part of me still does. Maybe that's why it stopped? Maybe that's why it hasn't happened again?

My wife was calling my son and I, telling us that the temperature was dropping and we needed to go in. I turned, looked at the lights in that house, and smiled through hot tears I'd only just noticed. I knew past me could somehow feel what I was feeling, could feel my peace and joy in the midst of Hell.

I called out that we were coming in.

And somehow, deep in the recesses of my memory, I saw myself, sitting by the river in college. I remember that night. I'd gone to the river and looked at it with a longing I didn't understand. I wanted whatever Hell I was in to be over, I wanted to move on. Maybe, just maybe, The River would carry me away from it all if I jumped in. But, as usual when I was alone, my headphones in, trying to block out thoughts that I never heard anywhere else but in the haunted town of Atchison, Kansas. Those headphones were the only form of hope I had at the time. I wasn't just trying to block out the continuous screams. I was listening to for something. Something capable of talking over This Will Destroy You.

"Keep going! It's worth it!" I said, as I walked into the house. I didn't try to overpower the song; I knew that would never work. I just said it, simply, letting it drown me out. I knew I would hear myself, back then.

And I was right.

The River flowed on, uninterrupted.

I walked back to the house(s), alone and with my son, who held my hand in one of those times.

It is of note that my firstborn will reach out and take my right hand, randomly. He has a thing for holding my right hand at the oddest of times. He'll reach out, take my hand, and just say randomly "C'mon Daddy". I am always surprised when he does it, but he does it with a firmness I will not deny. It is also of note that sometimes, over the entirety of my life when I walk, I feel a soft warmth in my right hand.

I felt it that night, walking back from The River. It was comforting. 

Songbirds: First Impressions

There are some books that, when you read them, change everything for you. You stare at the work, trying to make sense of the impact that it just had on you. And then you sit with it. You twist it about in your mind, trying to make sense of what just happened in your head. 2020 was a year full of these works, thanks to the discovery of Gene Wolfe. Before that point Burning Wheel had been the first game I'd ever read to have this form of an impact on me. I've since run that game principally, drinking deep from the stories that it generated for me. I am always wanting to play it.

I did not anticipate Songbirds to be just as impactful. It's taken me aback.

I still won't run it.

I'm starting to think I'm afraid. 

When you've got Carl Jung (who I am deeply impacted by, even if I've not read much of him directly), Evangelion (a show that I initially hated but has begun to call to me in the same way a creak on the stairs at midnight heralds the return of a ghost), Coraline, Samurai Champloo, and Cowboy Bebop in your Appendix N you are going for a mood. A mood I am entirely about.

I will admit without shame that I immediately stole many ideas from this game. Characters feel Stress and begin to break down, gaining Conditions, requiring you to stop and just sit, to recover, to feel. The campaign arc is tracked on a calendar and is meant to be more episodic, being about helping a specific client or unfortunate in a series of self-contained stories. Characters have four stats: Mind, Body, Soul, and Luck, which are assigned dice (d4 through d20). You always roll opposed, with the GM choosing a dice to represent difficulty (d4 through d20). Margin of failure goes into Stress. It's deceptive system. It's simple, but it's possible be put into very challenging play situations, where you need to do sit down and take a break but can't, and trying to get away from that situation may get you in worse trouble.

The book's rules feel like reading a dream: they talk about concepts that I've always wanted a game to explore: time, how stress breaks you down, the importance of relationships, and the bittersweet nature of travel. The instant I leafed through it I knew I needed to run it.

I've barely spoken a word of it to anyone. This is my first attempt to do so. I'm not even sure who I would run this with, and I've absolutely no idea why. For me, this opened something up.

And for the first time in my life I almost don't want to have those experiences with someone else.

Let's change that.

In the Trees

 I have written this post because I feel that spiritual experience has to be talked about to be valued, and if people are not talking about their unexplainable times then it slips right out of their consciousness. And then they stop noticing when these things happen.

Hopefully this clears up my intentions.

It had been years since I'd last talked to the girl who would eventually become my wife. But, six years into my eight year long exile, I found that I couldn't stop thinking about her. I'd wake up and be wracked with guilt. I'd go to sleep and hear it, in my head, over and over: "You failed her". Despite my tendencies to drama it's hard to fake continuous guilt. For whatever reason I couldn't get over it. And it was wreaking havoc with my life. I had started dating a girl but had no peace. I couldn't forget. God, I wanted to forget so badly. Nothing stopped the pain.

One night I went to bed, almost totally overwhelmed by this feeling of futility, of failure, of total nihilistic existence.  I had failed in the only way that really mattered to me.  I laid down, asking myself why I even bothered to sleep. I lay there for hours, as was normal, knowing I wouldn't sleep. Couldn't.

I woke up. I still don't quite know how to describe this to people, but I wasn't dreaming. I've had lucid dreams, I know what those are like. This was different. I was awake. But I wasn't at college anymore. I was in a tree. A tree that I knew to be on her property. I recognized the smell, the feel, of the air. The light. It was evening, and I was sitting in a treehouse that I knew wasn't on the property. But yet, here I was! I was back on their land. And I was relieved. I could hear her and her siblings, talking and laughing below me. And a great longing came over me, to go down there. To return. To be in the one spot that I had regarded as home for most of my life. But I couldn't bring myself to go down and see her, to see the family she would later give me. I just sat in the treehouse I knew they couldn't see, listening to the laughter and becoming miserable to the point of suicide.

"What the fuck are you doing here, Hicks?" I looked up. Next to me sat a friend from college. He'd never been here. It has slowly dawned on me since that this wasn't really my friend, but someone who had assumed his shape. But he had my friend's rough but gentle demeanor.

"She's down there, and I can't go down. I hurt her. And I can't... I don't know. What's the point?" I found myself asking.

"Oh shut the fuck up and stop whining! Fucking hell, you piss me off! That was years ago and you think she's still hurt by some stupid little petty dog shit you did? What a whiner, man up!"

Yes, he talked like that. I told you, he was a good man. Probably a better one now. Probably still talks like that though, God bless him.

I protested. "But I-"

"Shut. The fuck. UP. You're not that special. And even if you were, you'll both be fine."

And I knew it to be true, either way. And my friend and I talked in the soft light of the evening, listening to the woman who would eventually marry me talk with the family she'd give me. Few things are more beautiful than her laughter; those other things all have to do with her.

She laughed a lot that evening.

And I could barely take it. 

So many of my best memories of my life involve hearing her laugh, but I still couldn't listen to that joy without pure grief. My friend stayed with me, chatting with me in a low voice so I could hear her and keep my composure. He kept me there all through the Gentle Light of the Evening. And we listened to her laugh together, in a treehouse that shouldn't have been there.

Darkness began to gather, and I knew it was time to go. I closed my eyes.

I opened my eyes in my dorm room and felt peace for the first time in years. That peace was real. A part of it is with me, even now. Regardless of what that incident was, what it means, I know it to be real. True.

Years later, when I did return, I did not bother looking for the treehouse. I knew I couldn't see it. But sometimes, when I'm in solitude in those woods, I'll feel as if I'm watched. And I smile.