Was it possible to feel worse that I was feeling at this moment? Sitting here, in a cold house, my back against the chimney. It had gained more warmth from my body heat than from the fire in the stove downstairs. Was was the point of the spirit of the wine, or the plant fairies if those could not alter my current mood in any way? How long can a person stay awake anyway? 2 days? Three? Longer? When does the sense of time start disappearing to where everything else goes? I cannot tell that.

You are still gone. An unknowable amount of time later from the moment I had finally managed to gather enough courage to leave our secret realm to get some food. And you had taken the chance to leave the homely and familiar walls towards an unknown direction. I am still looking for you and I am sure you know that. I have been looking for you ever since that day. Constantly, without rest or sleep. And I found you. Or perhaps you found me. I do not know which would be correct. It is funny really. I found you, and yet you are gone. Or perhaps it was not you that I found. Maybe it was another lonely signal, condemned to forever wander the air waves and reminds you only for god knows why.

Do you want to know how I found you? Alright, I will tell you. Do you remember the time you were still here? In the old home of your grandparents? A placed which they had built together and which also became their final resting place. How you had sat just a few meters away from where I am sitting right now, between all those radios and antennae, in your long green dress. How you had spent sleepless nights flying between different wavelengths, from civilian channels to military stations. Jumping between numbers stations and long distance transmitters, trying to find an immortal signal, something that would remind you a piece of a human soul.

I know you found it one night. The signal. A snippet of a phone call which was forever burnt into the air waves for unknown reasons. A signal which no longer had a source or a transmitter. A signal ever-changing, jumping from one channel to the next, from one frequency to another. But always circling a corner only reserved for radio amateurs and military personnel.

I started from the same place. Sleepless nights, darkness and thunderstorms. Trying to find a familiar signal. I did not which one it was. Was it the signal you had found or something entirely different? But I knew that there had to be something. Night by night I moved across the frequency field, trying to find the smallest discrepancy, listening how different lives rose from the noise floor and then then once again fell into it, as I moved onward on the spectrum.

I cannot tell how many nights or days passed, but finally, I found it. A foreign signal which could not be part of the usual airwaves. It was not a phone call. It was laughter. Your laughter, as I had always remembered it. A gentle womanly laughter. Barely reaching out from the general hallucinatory stream of noise. Initially, I thought your laughter to also be a hallucinations. I am still not sure, in fact. And the hiss and noise of the airwaves still fills my rears.

I managed to record it for several minutes. As it disappeared and then again surfaced and then disappeared once again. This magical unearthly laughter. Eventually I managed to fall asleep listening to this laughter. In the morning I woke up before the radio, listening again to the same noise i recorded, but in the morning sun it was more akin to a rain falling on a roof than a laughter. To my sadness, there was no laughter anywhere, and yet it had been so clear. Forever burnt into my mind as well as the airwaves.

Still did I not lose hope. Just like you when you had found a suspicious signal. You recorded it, you scrutinized it, every foot, every second of the tape. Endlessly rewinding it backwards and forwards, trying to find new signs in either your senses or on the oscilloscope that your theory had merit.

Some shard of info, which would differentiate the noise from a like, an emotion or a figment of the mind. I too continued on the same path the next night, again and again listening to the recording, meter by meter, faster and slower, in every direction.

Finally, moving the tape at a snail's pace, a wonderful world opened up before me. The world I had been trying to access. Not a real world though, just a fabric onto which a door had been painted. I found another sign. At a slow pace, it still sounded like noise, but a noise recorded at normal speed. And out of that rose a laughter. Your laughter, which I had heard last night. And also something else, a faint guitar music.

Despite me recording the signal and listening to it for hours, I could not learn anything more. What did it mean? How could it lead to you? It could have remained just another source of noise between the waves on the aether, which nobody could have found. But something had led me to it. Was it some inner feeling, some external force or you, my love, I cannot answer that.

But I do know that the same chance or force which had helped me thus far, was still helping me. It told me to go downstairs and look around in the darkness for the car keys. Yes, since the day your grandmother had died and was buried.

As of that moment nobody was ever alone in here. One could always hear how somebody was walking around on the empty lower floor. The staircase creaking, how even with all windows and doors closed, there was still a small wind to find the napes of people's necks. Something you had christened as Breath of Granma. And of course the reason that one could never find things from where they were initially placed. Was it because the house foundations were built of the same stones which had been a part of an old chapel destroyed in the War of Independence? Was it because both grandfather and grandmother had both died in that corner bed downstairs? Or because both of them were buried on a small patch in the back yard, which has long since overgrown with nettles and thistles? Nobody could tell. If the house did not want anything found, then nothing would be found.

And like that I went to the neighbor. Who happened to be at home on that weird and lonely day. This happened to be one of the few days on which he came from the North to look over and do some maintenance on his parents' old homestead. I wanted to borrow his car or some other means of transport. I wanted to go to the village at get me another bottle of vodka. I was completely lost. I had given up and was hoping that alcohol would help me repress both my feelings and my longing, and would also allow me some sober thought.

The neighbor was not in a good mood. Before I could ask anything about a car, he started telling me about the latest village news, which seemed so much more important to him, than to me. Repeating again and again that the youth was doomed.

When I asked him to elaborate, he looked surprised and explained that the youth of the town had a curious pastime. They go to the Forbidden Forest and enjoy themselves with some music, alcohol and leaf right on the Border. And how in recent months, at least three young people have wandered to the other side of the Border on the base and stepped on an old land mine, plenty of which were scattered around on the outer perimeter. And those of them that lived will have to get around in wheelchairs for the rest of their lives.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

I came back home. The car was no longer relevant. I knew what I had to do. I had to go to the Forbidden Forest. At night. I had to find the place that the youth had been at. Because somewhere near that you had been as well, or at least somebody, whose laughter was left on the airwaves. And at that moment, when I climbed back into the house, and was reminded of the car, I found the keys to it on a coffee table in front of the couch.

*

The day turned slowly into night. Slower than it usually happened these days. I waited, I sat outside with the clock, I looked at the seconds ticking by. I looked at the sun sinking closer and closer to the horizon. How it turned the sky and the clouds yellow at first, then orange and finally the sky turned red and the clouds a dull pink. This was just before the sun disappeared completely behind the horizon, turning everything blue and gray. Slowly, darkness also started to creep closer. And in mid-summer, this happened slightly faster than towards the spring.

I left the house as soon as the artificial light looked bright outside. I took the car and headed into the forest via a small dirt road on the curve, opposite the farm house. An old road, which the Soviet military engineers had reinforced with concrete slabs brought in from the North. And later smoothed everything over with dirt to make it look as inconspicuous as possible. The stories told that they were trying to build a road around the Border, around the perimeter of the nuclear base, or whatever the hell that base was. To keep away the local country folk who came a little too close to the Zone. Of course, nobody had really used this road for years, not even the soldiers, and thus the reinforced section of the road only led to the first checkpoint. But that was enough for me.

By the time I stopped the car next to a half-destroyed building of gray brick, the forest had turned ominous and pitch black, as was proper for summers here. There was a footpath here, which was almost impossible to find in the dark. I started to walk down it, trying to keep the border to my left. My gut feeling said that I would not have to go far. Unexpectedly, the broken branches and trampled grass led the way, and even when there was none of those, I could still sort of see a line of pillars made of poor quality concrete, denoting the Border. I slowly started to realize that I knew this place. Back when we were young, we had come to play here. Back when there was still barbed wire running between the pillars. Soldiers rarely came here, even they did not want to guard a forest full of landmines.

As soon as I left the car behind the twist in the path and the trees, I could again hear your ringing laughter all around the forest. Perhaps it wasn't even a laughter, just wind and a trick played by my own hopeful heart. Assisted by a ghostly glow ahead and some faint guitar sounds. This was the place, I knew it. Here was the place that your laughter and this unearthly power had brought me. The only question was, why. Why this place? What was here to see? What was I to find here? So many questions were rushing around in my mind.

This place was definitely familiar to me. To us. Somebody had built a shed here. A small low thing, like a play shed for children or a hiding place for forest brothers. The roof of the shed was no more than half a meter off the ground while the floor was at least half a meter below the surrounding ground level. Half the wall was of earthen stones, and the other half of old logs. On top of that a spindle roof, made of long planks. And it was very well hidden. The soldiers never found it, the parents of the children never found it, Honesty, I was surprised that I had managed to find it myself in the dark after all these years. I again knew what I had to do.

I opened the door slightly and crawled into the hiding hole. I crawled onward slowly, remembering all those times that the village children had come here to play, to read books, to have secret meetings. Just as the grownups did in their secret bunkers and hiding holes.

I stopped crawling as soon as my hands hit something that was not dirt. It was a book. Lots of books, left here from a decade ago at the very least. They were intact, seemingly in good condition, if I considered only what I felt in my hands. Possibly even in readable condition, slightly damp, but definitely not waterlogged. I sat against the interior wall and just waited. It took some time for my eyes to adjust to the darkness, to the faint light in the forest within this little hole. I could see the books, I could read the titles on the covers.

There was even this one book, in English, which Marten had taken behind his parents' back to win a wager with you. Back then it was just about old books, especially Western ones. No matter what they were about. And now seeing all this, reading the titled about personality disorders, it reminded me of your indifference, your fearlessness concerning the world.

And again I heard this sound seared into the airwaves, into the aether. Set free either by the forest around me or my own unsound mind. Faint guitar music accompanied by a laughter of a young woman. I wasn't even sure anymore if it was you. This sound kept echoing both in the forest as well as in this shed. And the laughter was definitely here. Giving rise to the same kind of feeling as we had felt in the old farm house. That we were being watched. That we weren't alone.

Suddenly, accompanied by an echoing laughter, a small stone rose from the ground, floated towards me and fell on my legs. I just kept looking in front of myself, the dark emptiness. And surely, it seemed as if there was a nondescript figure. Something that sort of was there, but at the same time, it was not possible to be absolutely positive, as if the faintest of lights would dispel the figure.

Slightly to the right of the figure, there seemed to be another one like that, a dark spot. And next to that, another one. They all seemed to be there, but also it could have a trick of my eyes or my mind. If only the small stone had never moved.

"Are you here?" I asked, directing my focus to the first figure.

"Or here?" I looked at the second one.

"Or here?" the third one.

A faint breeze, played around with some dry soil and sawdust next to me. Lifted it up in a spiral and then blew it past me. And then a feeling came over me. A feeling that somebody was sitting on my right.

"Don't look with your eyes. Look with your soul." A voice whispered.

A voice which both my mind and my longing recognized as belonging to you. You were here! I had found you!

Happily, I grabbed the place next to me, and before my hands stopped, I noticed that there was nothing beside me. Yet I felt something. I felt you, your little hand, soft and cold. I could not see it in the dark. But I felt it, you were there. But I could not see you. You were here, but you were not here.

"Where are you?"

I asked. Listening to my voice reflecting off the walls.

"Here." Your voice replied.

"Here where? I cannot see."

"Here in the shed, right next to you." Your voice said and followed up with a carefree laughter.

"You are not here." I said. "I can feel you, but I cannot see you."

"Where am I then?" You started to ponder.

"Why did you leave our home?"

"They called me. The moon called me."

"No. When I brought you home?"

"You did? I cannot remember. I don’t even know how I am talking to you right now. I don't know it is your hand squeezing mine right now. I cannot remember anything."

"Where are you?" I asked again.

"I don't know." I could hear your voice tearing up. "It is dark here. So dark. Granny and Granpa are here too."

"Grandmother and grandfather are dead." I said.

"No, but they are here, with me. Am I dead too?"

"I don't know. But I would like to know. I would like to find you."

"But I am here. With you. Yet I am not..."

I pressed my hand into a fist. Your soft cold hand was gone. And I had a feeling as if I had awoken from a dream that had not yet run its course. Like I have often tried to turn a page in a book, only to groggily find myself scratching at a pillow.

It is also a mystery, how I managed to return to the farmhouse. The whole way back, to the car and to the house, I was deep in thought. Thinking about you. Thinking about everything in the shed. Was it all real? Was it really you there, making contact by means unfamiliar to either of us? Or did I fall asleep there, as had happened when I was looking for the radio stations? I don't know. And you do not either. I will keep looking for you, I will try and find a way to save you.

I hope this letter reaches you. Be it from the Forest Lake, the shed or perhaps you will catch it as a wisp of smoke off the air. I want you to know that I am still here. I love you so very much. And I will not give up.