Sweet Kate

This isn't a story, exactly, but more of a sketch.


I collect sunsets. I press their substance between the thin pages of a thesaurus or dictionary, or on occasion the thick pages of whatever slim novel I've slipped in my purse to read in odd moments (in the elevator, at stoplights, in the waiting). They fade and flatten, like flowers, but something of their beauty is retained, a hint and a memory. Press a violet or a rose petal and you will lose something of the beauty of the flower, the colors will gently leach away, but there will yet remain a hint and memory of scent that will awaken memory. It is the same with sunsets. A pressed sunset is more like the memory of a sunset; the fire has faded a little, the clouds are less white, perhaps, but yet the faded substance will waken the memory of the thing itself. They make me smile, these sunsets.

My cousin collects sunrises. She puts a drop of ether upon their hearts, and then pushes a straight pin through it to hang in neat rows upon corkboard. Her sunrises are more lifelike; they do not fade as quickly as my sunsets. Yet because she has impaled its heart, I think her sunrise loses that inexpressible something that causes us to sigh or sit in silence before beauty. They are beautiful, and they are dead, her sunrises. By trying to preserve in perfection she has captured the details and lost the essence. Their souls have fled her straight pins, but yet the souls of sunsets linger in sweet scents upon the pages of my books, because I have not sought to posses them, merely to remember.

Dear friend, if I could, I would give you a small happiness. You would come home to find, in the middle of your table, a small box wrapped in brown paper (a paper bag from Trader Joe's turned inside out and put to use), with no idea how it got there. It would have stickers, and your name in glittery handwriting, and would be tied with bit of string in honor of the song.

You would open your package and find your small bit of happiness, nestled inside, on top of newsprint from a week ago (I have already read the comics). It will look like the sky reflected in a puddle of water, brilliant blue and bright white clouds, or snow on the distant, misty mountains, or the almond orchards in bloom, a pink so pale they are nearly white, or a kitten not yet three weeks old, or a sunset so pink that no painter would ever dare to paint it. It will taste of warm peach cobbler, or cold vanilla homemade ice cream, or chocolate with raspberries, or friendship bread made with craisins and extra cinnamon, or peas picked fresh from the garden and warmed by the sun. It will smell of fresh sourdough bread, or hot cinnamon rolls, or sweetpeas in the moonlight, or roses on a warm twilight evening. It will feel like the soft fur of a puppy, or the soothing cold marble, or the silky smoothness of daisy petals, or the luxurious smoothness of silk that catches at all the imperfections on the tips of your fingers.

This is the small happiness that I would give you, that when you are sad, or lonely, or melancholy, you may look at it, or taste it, or smell it, or feel it, and it will be a small thing. You will be able to hold it in your two hands, cupped gently around it. This is the small happiness that I would give you, dear friend.

I wandered into Fairy sometime in the middle of December. Somewhere between step and step I found myself there, where everything is different and yet nothing is different. My world was turned upside down and shaken, to have the bits come softly floating down and change the landscape so that something I have seen every day is suddenly different, and yet is as it ever was. I am perpetually slightly off balance in Fairy, because while I have longed for it, I find it unsettling. It is not a comfortable place to be. And yet, I would not go back, even if I could. The shadows are darker, true, but the light is more beautiful, and the mountains move my soul. These cannot be the same mountains that I have looked at and longed for most of my life. These mountains are more blue, and more clear, and further away and higher than before. They awake in me a longing, not for the mountains, but for that which the mountains are but a shadow. These are not the mountains of a mortal world, but of the Fairy of Phantastes. They are so beautiful that it aches, but the ache is itself a pleasure. It is what Lewis has called joy.

I see strange things in puddles, in the broken bits of mirror that lie as shards on the ground, reflecting the sky. But the sky that I see within the reflection is not the same sky I see when I look up. It is more lovely, and dangerous, these glimpses I see, because it is the sky of Fairy. There is something indescribably compelling in these upside down glimpses of Fairy.

The almond orchards surely are not mortal almond orchards. They are in full bloom, some pale pink with reddish trunks, some dusty white, exultant against the clean grey clouds and misty blue mountains. The rows are carpeted with soft white petals. The beauty of the orchards is something like a wood, with all those trees slowly living and growing, and something like a garden with their neat rows. They are very awake. I think that if I wandered among them I might lose myself. The almond orchards have always bloomed, but they have never been this beautiful before.

And yet, with this beauty, I find that I am a little scared, because there is no going back to the mortal world, even if I desired it. I long, sometimes, for the comfortable world when mountains and almond trees did not awake in me such a strong and irresistible desire. I miss the safety of a predictable world. Yet I know that there is no going back. Once you have stepped into Fairy you can never truly go back, because Fairy must of its nature change you. I know that the only way to go back is through Fairy. And if the shadows are darker, then the light is brighter, beyond imagining, and is the light that I have longed for.