The sound of a cross-plane V8. Approximately 650 rpm. Long-stroke V8 engines were slow, yet powerful. This was something you had always been aware of. Why am I here? Where are you? Where did I lose you? I had you. You were with me. How could I have let you go? Hoe did I let you go? I don't know. And you are too far away to answer me.
I went in town today. I left our sweet home by the Forbidden Forest to do that. Recently there has been a lot of talk of the slick suits from the North, driving around their black chrome-covered limos. Do you perhaps know of them? Because I have no idea what they're doing here. Virve's store is like always, though. Empty, I know you are smiling at the moment. You can hear me, can't you? I know, you can hear me.
Do you remember the day when I had to physically hold you back? That strange summer day, when we were still children. You, in your black dress that your granny had sewn? When Virve's drunkard of a husband finally went off? You may have been the only person nearby who did not flinch at the sound of gunfire. You had wanted to go in, you had wanted to see, what remains of a person who decides to voluntarily shuffle off this mortal coil. I did not want you to see it. But maybe I should have let you go. But I did not know back then. I was young and stupid.
Yes, I know. I am not much smarter these days. I have never been. Even now, when I am trying to find you. When I am trying to understand where you disappeared to. I have spent many a night by now by the Border. In that little house when we once played. Hide and seek comes to mind the most. On several nights I have heard the quiet guitar playing, which seems to be as close and yet as far as your voice. I have not heard it since, but I can still hear it in my mind as if I had just now been talking to you.
Can you even imagine where I am right now? Of course you can. This old concrete slab by the road, neither of use could find a proper use for. I am here, sitting in a warm car, trying to understand how I lost the right path. Why I cannot understand what is going on. Why I am feeling that every time I turn around I will see you again. Why am I seeing things that cannot be possible, that cannot be real? I love you. I have to say it, despite you asking me once, at the very beginning, to never say it.
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And only now do I understand why you would ever ask something like that. When there is nothing to love, then there is nothing to lose. I should have understood it sooner. I visited your uncle. Forgive me, but he was the only one I could turn to. The only one who could tell me.
It is all so strange here, so alien, sitting in this car, right by the forest. It is so cold here. There is no you. There is none of that peculiar warmth in here that you grandma's old house possesses. That the forest has, even the Forbidden Forest. And now that I am away from you and can no longer feel it, I have no idea what to do to find you.
I know you are here, with me, but still, I cannot sense you. There is only this alien and endlessly mysterious world you always talked about. The world you always wanted to escape from, to the attic of the old house. You wanted to see that world, look into it from the outside, but never participate. And now I can no longer find you in this world. I cannot save you from this world. I hope the world has not done to you what it has done to so many others. I hope I don't ever have to find my own voice from those airwaves you found. Burnt into the natural noise floor of the world. And however much I wish to hear your voice, I do not want to find it out there from the endless aether.
Do you remember that black Volga? The stories around the village how on All Souls' Night, five youngsters had been in a black Volga when it ran off the road killing everybody? Remember those uncountable nights when we drove from one village to the next, trying to find that mysterious wreckage? Trying to understand why the world had decided to do so. I remember. These cold snowy November nights.
When it became too cold to be on that attic, under the roof. When we had to move downstairs and shut the hatch, sleep along with granny’s spirit walking around and in the morning we would find things moved around, many of them in places they had not been left in the evening. How I wish you were here. You would like this time of the year. When the world is especially strong in expressing its peculiarities. So strong that one starts to doubt everything they hear or see. One starts to doubt whether they are awake or dreaming. I saw you today. I am sure it was you, who else would drive this car as aggressively as you?
Maybe that was the part of you that I still do not understand. You weren't afraid. You were never afraid. Anything. Ever. And now it would seem that fear has been looking for you for far longer. And it has found you.
But I? I am still sitting in one place, looking at a twitchy hand on the dial, wishing it to be still. Wishing you were here, telling me what I should do. Wishing you could help me find you. I cannot do that. And event though I know I cannot, I will not stop looking. I have to continue. Whether you would do the same for me, is not important, it never was. I have to find you. I have to. I have to. I hope the Train Depot is something that helps me along.
Tonight I will be back at the Forest Lake and later at the playhouse. I hope we meet once more...