The last time was the first and only time, yet.
Someplace verdant and good and wretchedly wild, someplace ageless and hushed and hallowed, I chose to hide it.
Tangles of honeysuckle and trailing ivy keep secrets so well and no one ever needed or wanted to know, anyhow.
With bleeding kneecaps, in the too-brilliant gauze of a blinding mountain morning, I made a castle of towering canyon pines — eerily alike the play-pretend homes I once forged from acorns and evergreen boughs and whatever else the woods would offer me. I heaved the hinges shut; the sound of a dreamer's death blow, dealt. I bore a dragon from my fury and fear and locked her inside with one command only: Guard this, until, if ever, and most especially, if not.
I grew the outline of a life in the garden there. I plucked rosy words from the trellis to crown the lonely lapels that looked the most or the least like love. I drank only tepid water from a stream that could not scorch me. I swam in its shallows for so long my arms ached. I began to drown in shoals I could all but stand in.
They say that the universe will continue to teach you the same lesson until it is learned. Is that why I am back here? In this old soul of a home where I have lived thrice now, precisely three years apart, and always in August, always in dire need of something deeper: Apartments 57, 7, 75. They stitch a lovely-looking palindrome and a story strange enough to try and write, at the very least.
When you arrive, I give you the well-rehearsed tour reserved for visitors; all proper begonias and ever-expanding meadowfuls of milkweed for monarchs. Now, I sit with you in the sweetgrass and raise a glass of something superfluously sugared and too expensive to taste so bad, and almost forget what you are referring to when it spills onto the soil, your palm raising to point. You ask me what sleeps within that timber fortress — the most sacred space that no one else could even see. You ask me what utters such sad sounds — this fire that no one else could even feel.
An utterly safe and feeble fabrication leaps to my lips but your eyes on mine are safer still, and all at once, I am not sure that I've truly known how this feels before, even perhaps when I thought I did.
So I take your hand and lace your fingers through mine, careful and tight as the first shoe strings you ever tied.
"That's where I keep what matters most," I say, my sparkling eyes dancing with the light in your own.
"What matters most?" you ask, as it begins to rain like I haven't seen in years.
"This time."