Closer To The Sun [Poly] [Bi]

2 - Campbell

Q.O.T.D – Be honest... do you normally skip prologues? ;)

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Campbell was twelve when Shea wandered out of the woods into his backyard, twigs in her hair and dirt caked to her ankles, and the first thing he wanted to do was cry.

He did not. His father and mother had ingrained it deep within him that not only did boys not cry, winners did not cry. Warriors did not cry. Future CEOs and congresspeople and empire-builders did not cry.

Campbell had started to wonder if this fundamental schooling had damaged something fundamentally important inside of him. But damaged or not, children or not – MacGowans did not cry.

Not even when your best friend, who disappeared into the woods two years ago, who park rangers and volunteer search parties and helicopters failed to find, whose face appeared on the front of the local papers and the nightly news for a week, appeared suddenly in front of you, two years older, as if she had materialized from the trees.

Not even when you remembered standing stiff-shouldered at the funeral two months after her disappearance, when her family members still had some hope, but the local police department did not. 

Not after abruptly leaving that dew-sodden cemetery plot, pushing past mourners and well-wishers with their red, soggy eyes, because your parents had poisoned you to all emotion.

Shea walked up to Campbell, lip quivering. Despite his elation at this miracle, he felt the poison running hot, and for a moment Campbell was worried she might start crying. But she just looked at him, picking at a scab on her elbow, and said, "I don't know why I left. And I don't know why I'm back."

Campbell stood up, fear vibrating down to his knees.

"Where did you go?" he asked.

Shea's mouth twisted in every direction, the way it used to do when she was about to say something she didn't want to. When the words wouldn't come out, and so they tugged at her lips in a battle of wills.

"I think," she said, then stopped, then started again, blurting it out in a rush:  "I think I am sometimes a tree."

It was a nonsense thing to say, standing there with her scuffed knees and curly hair and dark, searching eyes. It sounded as nonsense as Campbell often felt. Shea looked as person-like as she ever had; as person-like as she had the day before she disappeared.

I think I am sometimes a tree.

But Campbell, who had been feeling very un-person-like himself, surprised her by replying, "I'm... I think... I'm a mouse. Sometimes."

They each stood there, feeling the thrill of saying out loud something that should have been impossible. Something that, to any other ears, would have been a children's fantasy, until they got old enough for it to become a delusion.

If Shea and Campbell had been inseparable before, it was nothing to how they became in the years that followed. After that day, it was like she had never left him. After that day, he never left her again.

Everyone called it a miracle, the day Shea LaRue wandered out of the woods. Nobody but Campbell believed her when she told them where she'd been.

Nine years later, he still believed that little girls could wander into the woods and turn into trees. He believed it because he needed to. Campbell needed to believe that it was okay for a person to sometimes not be a person. 

It felt better not to be the only one.

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