Memories (Of Dreams and Demons)

The Forest

Four years pass: a blur of work, bullies and internal struggles.

What was real? What was fake?

Do you ever think back to your childhood, and nothing remains but flashes and feelings that sum up entire years? Memories don't tend to come to the fore unless you sit and focus, and they are random at best. The early years in the countryside consists of 'setting up': clearing wide swathes of land for building a planned house. I live off the grid. Electricity is gifted in a couple of four-hour bursts each day from a loud, diesel generator. Water is pumped using a car engine through a green hose; heated with firewood chopped daily. I sleep in a trailer surrounded by family in a single room. The necessities of the nineties become a precious commodity.

Memories fade under the weight of today. Things that happened years ago become an old story detailing the life of another; like old paper containing words and images you can't quite place. But I don't like to think about the past too much. It sends me deep into dark thoughts; leaves me wishing I could sweep it all away and forget. If you don't remember something, you forget the pain of living it or losing it. Poof: pain gone. But what if the price was too high? What if you lost who you were in the process?

Times are hard for those who live out of the norm, at least from a child's point of view. It's so hot in the countryside, but soaked in sweat and forged in heat we work. I raise the self-made black goggles that wrap around my head. Their tightness leaves a red, sweaty indent in my skin, but that's better than having my eyes stung constantly from smoke and dust. Looking around, I take stock of the work I've been doing for years.

As a child I once imagined a forest exactly like this. A mysterious and beautiful place, full of terror and darkness and adventure and love. Now, I pull it down tree by tree and throw it in ever-burning fires. Dirt roads zigzag between the once wild and thick landscape; cut away in swathes as if the forest were a field of wheat. A couple of large dirt clearings impatiently sit and wait to be filled with the markings of human habitation. I tear down hundreds of trees by hand, winch and pulley, being deemed far too young to be trusted with tractor or chainsaw. I shovel rock, dirt and stone the weight of a lifetime into huge mounds out of sight. Four hours a weekday, eight hours a weekend day. Only the grind remains.

Working under a hard sun firing rays through choking clouds of dust, I can feel my young muscles growing. Despite being a slim and short build, my clothes hide a body forged in hard physical labor. Only a harsh, bitter laugh meets anyone who would still call me a 'city-boy'. Still, I often try to steal time away inside on a computer or in a book, rather than outside on the motorbikes or with the animals. Fragments of what once defined me glide away on the wind, weightless pieces of my young soul dissipating into nothing to be forgotten forever. I don't try to define myself any longer.

My senses tell me it's getting dark soon. Looking up, I can barely make out the sky. Just huge, old trees loom over me, blocking out the light and washing this place with mysterious shades of green and dark grey. They will most probably be torn down soon enough too.

Smiling bitterly, showing not a shred of genuine mirth, I look deeper into the woods. It too grows darker as daylight fades and the trees and brush thicken, untouched by human hand or tractor. Shadows play along the edges of my sight. Little bobbing balls of light beckon me down an ancient dirt road that winds naturally between the trees. An owl sits patiently on a tree ready to answer all questions. Questions. Naoko is beside me. No, she's gone. Just a childhood memory; another fairy tale I imagined and wrote about as a kid. All of it: a failed attempt to escape the reality that surrounds me. The vision vanishes.

My sight flashes black an instant when our dog barks at a tractor roaring up ahead, before returning to normal. Shaking my head to be free of thought, I hear the tractor slam into trees and push aside boulders. It's roaring back into action. I'm not allowed to drive it, working by hand only. Snapping my goggles back down into place, I wipe clear the itching sweat along my brow and continue gathering leftover logs and stone left in the wake of the tractors uncompromising path. We've still got at least a mile to clear.