Tilly of the TangleWilde

Sudden sorrow slammed into my heart.

“Oh! Oh my!”

We…were over.

And he didn't even have the nerve to say the words. Not to my face. Not even to put them in writing on paper. Dead trees. I breathed in and shuttered out a bracing prelude to a sob of an exhale. It hurt to breathe. In breathing, my brain felt the change in pressure. It felt everything altering. Living felt too hard. Painful. Crushing.

My heart thumping out a cry for help... but there was no one near by to rush to my aid.

To drive me to my only hope.

I was alone in the Forest.

I was always alone in the Forest.

Many times I had run into them, for adventure and solitude-but NEVER had I escaped into The Trees while crying. And something must have altered, with my eyes leaking my distress. As a grown woman. Twenty- two and Heartbroken.

The trees were listening, watching. Feeling.

The Forest knew.

It knew my wrenching heart, as I watered the land under my feet. The dark ground absorbing my tears as fast as I could cry them. My deep dive into melancholy over feeling alone. Forever alone. Forlonely. All because he wouldn't love me back. Not really. Not long term. Never could, in fact.

He would not fall for my heart. Not ever. Not even when I fell so utterly quickly and brutally for him. Suddenly seeing him standing in that long hallway, a bright spot in my dark world.

Yet within the radius of trees and growing things, vines creeping up and running underfoot- I was never truly alone. They cared.

The Forest cared.

My trees, they were a curtain, a veil between being alive-thriving- and the looming alternative. Being dead. An in between type of existence. I wanted to exist there, where pain couldn't reach or survive. Or find me, burrowing deep and festering. I wanted to live there, with someone. With a man I could recognize by voice alone, if he were to call to me... the way I remember him calling to me. In my dreams. In my waking…

He called me Sweet Briar. Like I was an apple blossom fluttering to an orchard floor... to be tread underfoot...by caustic boots.

Like I was fragile...

But I didn't want to be a broken thing that needed help from outside of myself.

I wanted to be strong.

I was strong.

I. AM. STRONG.

“OOOF!” Air pushed out from my lungs as I tripped over the gnarled root which I had never failed to clear easily by the light of the sun, as I groped my way to my tree in the velvet darkness of a starless night.

My favorite, massive tree had existed as an immovable object in my path, since always. Well- since way before any expansion of neighborhoods or even paved roads. Yet this time, I crushed my right wrist and knuckles into it’s craggy bark surface. "That kind of stung." I echoed out alone into the night. Sniff. Blink. Blink. I’d never been such a health risk to myself, losing my footing in that way. In the pitch dark of a country night among sleeping giants, clinging vines and verdant ferns.

Did I leave blood? I felt sure the skin over my knuckles had broken open, my assault on my favorite tree leaving me winded and unsure. Unsure of myself. I found my seat by trembling fingertips and took shelter from my own feet there, amid the enchanted gloom of my wilding yard. Running my hand lightly over my skin, wondering if I was in fact bleeding. But it couldn't be that bad and it was probably better to stay seated for a while longer, til my eyes adjusted. Til my path became clear. Til the clouds broke, revealing Mount Rainier, the ultimate beast of a guardian of land and sky and sea to stand massive and bright through the shroud of cloud. Where the moon and stars could peak through, my night light to better guide my steps back inside. At least they usually were. Away from wild things and creeping vines and stinging bark. I just couldn't resist their lure.

Every time they called to me- I listened. I exited man made and formal stepping out into lush and forbidden wildness. Unrestrained life. And I wanted to become a part of them. The life in the forest. Maybe my urge to become a part of something outside of myself came from my heart break over well- that was the hard part. I knew I was sad and missing some one. A man. A guy. A friend. But I couldn't remember his name. Poof! Gone. Shouldn't I be able to remember his name? At least?

Yet... I could not.

Graham? Greer? Garth? Something with a G. Griffin? Gill?

None of those were quite right.

Gaffer? Gable?

I waited and breathed, caressing my wrist. My bracelets felt sticky with some sort of residue. It couldn't be blood! Not so quickly. My hand didn’t hurt enough for that. Sap?

Greg? Nooo. Wouldn’t his name sound more familiar?

"Great." To cope with the gusting wind storms and the fear of giants falling on my roof, the tree were less wild than before. Their recently trimmed lower branches left weeping sap behind, daily lengthening into strands, as though they were trying to touch the ground, to disappear into the earth, their own kind of sorrow over losing pieces of themselves. Violently. "I fell into their sap trap."

There was stickiness all over my stone bracelets, my shungite, my lapis lazuli, coating my skin. My hand. My wrist underneath. My chest, where I'd cradled my hand. I really did ram into that tree, didn't I?

Why did it block my path? The old path I thought I knew by heart and steps and feel?

Even amidst darkness. Sniffle.

Even mired in layers of sweeping night shadow.

How had I misjudged my steps so grossly? So erroneously?

Blink. Sniff.

The effects of the crush made me question my footing. My ground. The ground beneath my feet, the energetic grounding of my mind. Tripping wasn't like me at all. It was as if the ancient ground beneath me must have shifted to alter my worn path.

To offer up something new. Even if that something new stung a little. Or a lot!

But I never asked for new. I loved who was already Mine. “Had been mine.” I quietly reminded myself. “Whoever he was.” I swiped a stream of tears away.

Grim! Grimsley Quake. That was his name!

With an alarming intensity, I was suddenly standing in that long hallway, staring into it’s shadowy depth as he appeared and walked toward me. Surprise and then joy in his eyes, the sexy lift of his lips. He was the brightest spot of love and hope amid the darkness of my heart.

Grim…

But wait… he didn’t want me. A vine crept up the wall, a forest ripping up through the slate floor, destroying our moment. He was over.

We… were over. A prick at my wrist had me glancing down to cradle my arm but a vine had wrapped snugly around my skin, yanking, tightening, burrowing a thorn in deep. And the glimmer of Grim vanished. Along with my joy.

"Sweet Briar... find me!” The voice pleaded, demanding attention, sparking my spirit with glimmers of light and hope and yet-

I felt myself ripping apart, under that clear star sky, and all the while- I knew Mount Rainier watched on, cold, lonely and bold, an absolute snow monster mountain in the still of a crisp fall night. He watched me falter and feel and break apart. He watched my world tilt. He watched me nearly die. As I fell, knees dipping into the moist earth beneath me, hands clutching my chest, ferns feathering in my peripheral. Conifers towering over me, swaying in a new breeze, shifting shadows and blocking any hint of night light left to me in a wilding hush imitating a living breath.

"Find me... within the Tanglewilde."

“Too late-“