Charles De Lint: The Ivory and the Horn

I guess one day I'll go and I won't come back. I'll become a raggedy wild girl like Nim with twigs and burrs in my hair. Maybe we'll both end up as forever trees. Maybe that's where they came from. Maybe we're both dryads and we just haven't matured from tree spirits into proper trees yet.

The idea of it makes me smile. If we were forever trees, we'd have really slow conversations, wouldn't we?

10

Joe is not a bad guy. Like Tasha said, even friends make mistakes. He never wore a mask around her, and that was part of the problem that night when he told her he thought they should be lovers and friends. Maybe he should have waited, kept it to himself a little longer until he'd really worked it out in his own head, dealt with it in a way that wouldn't have hurt Tasha before sharing his feelings with her. But maybe it took his sharing those feelings for him to work it out.

He knew it hadn't been fair to her, but he hadn't meant to hurt her. Not that night. Not when he fled the next morning. He'd just gotten confused, couldn't think straight, but he meant to make it right. He meant to call her and apologize for screwing up the way he had, screwing up big time, and he hoped she'd forgive him because maybe they weren't supposed to be lovers, but nothing in his life meant more to him than Tasha's friendship.

So he phones her, Sunday night, lets the phone ring and ring, but there's no answer. He keeps trying up until midnight, then he finally goes over to her apartment, lets himself in with the key she gave him so long ago, but she really isn't there, she wasn't just ignoring the phone, she really isn't home. But she isn't anywhere else either.

Days go by and she's never home, never at her studio, nobody has seen her, nobody ever sees her again.

Joe's sitting in his apartment, cradling one of Tasha's paintings on his lap, and he's remembering holding her one night when she's having a stress attack, when all the words turned into too many colors and everything inside her just shut down for a while so that she didn't even know who or where she was; he's remembering what she told him that night, about a ghost place she can visit, a hundred-acre wood of forever trees. He believed she could go there, didn't ask for proof. That's what friends do— they accept each other's secrets and marvels and hold them in trust.

So Joe knows where Tasha has gone, running up a long meadowed slope with a wild girl and a puppy, vanishing into the embrace of a forest of forever trees, and he misses her, more than anything, he misses her, and what he regrets, what he regrets the most, is that he never asked her how to get there himself, so that he could see her again.