Sometimes a compulsion takes you in a thought; other times you have scarce the time to think before you find yourself plunging headlong into... what? It is a wild thrill and yet feral, perhaps dangerous.
But others would not see it so.
There are words on the pages, and they are an invitation: a gathering in the forest, they see now, for friends they have not met and have met, a long time ago. The signature is an unfamiliar one, but it is definitely a signature; a scribbled word with greater significance for its attribution to a mind and a being.
"One of us?" the bluebird questions the boy, but in the lonely silence it sounds more like a statement.
So they went: backwards and through - through the rain in the forest, typical and yet atypical in its persistence through the canopy, bringing both fresh respite and bitter wet. The other animals along the way helped show them a path the scribbling in the book could not: a pastiche of past experiences that brought both reminiscence and understanding.
There is no fanfare, no amazing welcome, but an immediate induction which assimilates them beautifully into the crowd. It is a particular disinterest that just borders on being unfriendly or overbearing, but avoids being either at the same time. There is food and games and just the insouciant chitchat and warm chitterchatter of acquaintances and soon-to-be-friends. There is, however, no direction but the time of the day, and the wetness of the brewing storm which finally breaks the party.
"For whom was the gathering held?" the boy inquired to the multitudes of creatures from all walks of life, all strangely beautiful in the light of night.
"For you, and ourselves, and for everyone who was," was the reply from one and many, or perhaps none, which was no simpler than the question, yet satiating in a self-fulfilling way. There was to be nothing else to be said: a finality which emphasized its emphasis.
A flash of light, sudden, and then nothing. Lightning came, and tore the land in two divides; even those who could fly could go no further across the gulf of darkness that was night and what it stood for: lethargy, solitude and the unfamiliar. As the calls sounded, those few retreated to the sanctity of their homes: those left, unable to find a compromise between the divides, went on their separate ways: the ones who had moved on thus finding themselves at rather a loss at what to do.
"Whom is this gathering now for?" the blue bird asked the boy, for no one else would respond.
But he who had no reply could find no other recourse against such a doubt, either. He saw it in the moods of those around them as they progressed through the desolate wetness for want of something to take shelter under until the light came: when they felt themselves fulfilled enough to return.
But what they did they did together, even then; uncertainties and misgivings plagued their route, through which sinuous bends through moonlit paths and across undefined shapes which lay underfoot, and yet there was humour, and some strange understanding which came to grow between them so that when they finally found themselves afterwards, it was to realize that they were already fulfilling what each of them had come out to find.
"I know," he breathed.
And for all the vastness and darkness and dampness and loneliness of the forest, it seemed for a time that it was not so empty after all.
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