I still remember your face

Once upon a time when I was a peculiar little girl in a dull town, I had a friend.

He was real enough. My firmest memory of him was when somehow we stumbled into a place that I can best describe as a fairy garden. And like all things fairy, it is impossible to describe, you can only know it when you are there.

I got a detail of the story wrong though; we didn't stumble on it, he took me there. Today we spoke and he reminded me of that; I still remember your face he said. And he reminded me of another trip to the woods too. There was none of that strange sexual thing that might turn all this into a coming of age screenplay, we were children and we were magical and the place and the day was more magical than we were.

We had to scarper though, because big dogs approached, barking and running.

We fled but we weren't scared.

That's a memory straight from his heart and mine. But it feels eternal. Maybe in some timeloop (after all they do play with time, those fair folk) there are forever two children scrambling through trees and undergrowth and falling into the garden. But in the true version the dogs are playfellows not guards. And if that's hokey then I can't apologise for it; maybe it's the right time to remember that sometimes life is really that extraordinary and beautiful.