Once

I sit alone in my bedroom with the curtains drawn and the lights turned off because I find the darkness soothing. Tears slip down my cheeks and drip from my chin. The inner workings of my mind are a mess of burnt fuses and smoke and sticky cogs. Nothing works as it should. There is no order to the world, only frustration and chaos and that hot, twitching pressure around my temples.

Someone hacked your bank account, my brain tells me. You left the burner on. There’s a typo in your English essay. Something awful is going to happen.

My neurons fire without cease. Cortisol floods my bloodstream. My hands are sweaty; my heart beats faster; I want to scream but my jaw is clenched shut and I have no air in my lungs and I can't breath and my fucking brain is going into overdrive. I'm a pathetic piece of shit and nothing will change, things never change, no one cares, it's all in my stupid head—

When I’m fourteen I google my symptoms. OCD, says the internet. Depression. Just glitches in my psychology. Nothing I can't handle. Go to school, come home, sleep, repeat.

It's spring, 2019, and I’m seventeen years old. I cry often in the darkness of my room because I'm exhausted and because I’ve fallen into a cycle of misery that I can't escape. The hours pass. Now it's late on a Monday and I really ought to be in bed.

I stand up and turn on the light and survey my cluttered room: my bunk bed, the built-in desk and shelves of books below, my closet, my FC Barcelona poster, the window that peers into our backyard, overgrown with dandelions and lilac bushes. The mountains to the north, the cold and the rain. The world. It's dark now, but the world is out there.

My gaze drifts to the books in stacks on my desk, lined up on the shelves, in piles on the floor. I see it, then, on the shelf between Neverwhere and The Fellowship of the Ring. A thin, coral-pink spine belonging to my childhood journal.

This is not fiction. But if it was, I would describe in florid detail my approach to the shelf. How things slowed, as if I was moving underwater. The hesitance I felt in my heart—the particular shyness that comes with meeting an old friend. How I extended my hand and grasped the volume and coaxed it from where it had sat for the last eight years. The small weight of it in my hands. The inky-brown smell of paper. The cover, unadorned, save for the word Paris in silver, old style font.

But really all that happens is I pull the journal from between the other books and open it, looking inside with a sort of detached curiosity.

Dear Paris, the first entry begins. The vineyard is big. It goes until the hills. The sun sets behind the old tower.

I begin to read, and remember.

And as I remember, my room seems to fall away, replaced by fields of grapevines and tall, whispering grass. And there you are—the boy I was, waiting for me. Waiting all this time. Hello.

~

It's 2010. You are eight years old, stubborn and shy, walking on a narrow path that twists through a vineyard in Provence. The evening sun warms your face and casts the world in golden light.

Next to you is the girl you befriended at school. You are two children hurtling through life without thought for your destination. But, of course, there is little need for thought. The world is wonderful; a place of beauty and possibility. You can be anything or anyone, and right now you are rebels. Vagabonds. Together you run ahead of your slowpoke parents and leave them in your dust.

You pass a stone tower where the sun seems to melt into the ramparts, where donkeys graze behind an electric fence. You cross a limestone creek bed. Neither of you stop until the girl says, "Regarder!" and then you pause and look to where she points.

In the distance is an oak tree. A great, twisting oak tree that rises above the surrounding vines and all other things like a sentinel to some folkloric kingdom. There is something alluring about its domed silhouette. How it stands all alone in the grass and the grapevines, its boughs stretching toward the cloudless sky.

There is an unspoken agreement between you and the girl. That's where we'll go.

You set off. The wind that brushes your face smells herbal, like lavender and rosemary. To the west you see the rim of the world burning orange with the setting sun, and to the north, beyond the vineyard, are black and rolling hills.

Your plastic Star Wars watch reads quarter past eight when you reach the oak tree. There is a bench beneath the draping branches, in the sweeping shade, and together you sit down, your legs dangling above the ground.

"C'est joli," says the girl. It's pretty.

"Oui," you say.

And it is pretty. The sky fades from orange on the horizon to a hazy indigo overhead. The vineyards, the whispering grass freckled with spots of red where poppies bloom, the great stone tower in the distance—it evokes a profound and breathtaking joy in your heart. You imagine yourself a hero, like the ones in the stories you've read. You feel as if you can achieve anything.

The girl taps you on the shoulder, and you see she is pulling a plant from the dry earth around the oak's twisting roots. "Racine de réglisse," she says. Licorice root.

She brushes dirt from the plant and nibbles on the root, thrusting the rest into your hands. Try it, she says. It's good. You don't know what else to do, so you oblige her, pulling off a small piece and placing it in your mouth, chewing hesitantly. It is bitter, and faintly sweet. You manage to swallow and give a thumbs up. The girl laughs. You don't like it? she says.

No, you say. It's good.

She raises her eyebrows. You're making a funny face.

I'm not.

You are.

She laughs again and a comfortable silence gathers between the two of you, and the sun dips lower on the horizon and the sky turns rosy pink, then purple. She is sitting very close to you. Her hand finds your hand, and your fingers lace. It is not exactly a romantic gesture, because you are both eight years old and you don't understand love, not fully, not yet, but your heart skips a beat anyway. Then she says, We should find our parents.

You nod and jump down from the bench and she pulls you away from the oak tree. You don't think to look back. Your eyes only see the path in front of you, to where you will go. The girl runs beside you through the vineyard in the dying light and your heart swells with something like wonderment, a feeling you will not know again until many years later, when you stand in your bedroom, lost and alone, reading from a journal that brings the memories flooding back.

~

The entry ends with two words: Goodbye, Paris. I turn the page and find the second entry. I read through twenty, thirty, eighty pages, all of them filled with my wandering, not-always-legible handwriting, until the last page, where there's a side note.

I will get another journal, so I can keep my story going.

I smile sadly. I suppose that never happened. Rain begins to drum against my bedroom window, and I close the journal and gaze at the cover, flip it over, open it again.

I wish I could have warned you about the future, so you'd have time to brace yourself for what would come. It's inevitable that people change—for better or worse, and often both. I just thought the change would be gentler. Kinder.

My thoughts drift to the girl and I wonder what she’s doing these days. I haven't spoken to her since my family moved from France back to Canada, eight years ago. Such is the nature of life. It brings to mind that Yeats poem my English class is studying.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.

The world is a place of chaos, of fragility. This is the only Truth I know. But at one time, you—the boy I was—saw beauty in everything. You sat down and wrote about it in your journal, and you saved it for me to find all these years later.

I frown and set the journal on my desk and turn off the light before climbing the ladder into bed, my mind swirling with thoughts of grapevines and lonely oak trees and distant, golden sunsets.

~

I walk to school the next day. Grey clouds press against the world below, misting over the mountains to the north, catching like cotton on the pines. My OCD has a vice grip on my brain this morning. It hisses in the dark corners of my mind with malignance: your phone is damaged.

I pull out my phone and stare at it for the twentieth time since leaving my house. No, I tell myself. There’s nothing wrong it. It’s in my head. It’s all in my head.

I take a breath and imagine myself among the grapevines, the sun on my face, the wind tousling my hair.

I think about you all through the day, and again when I walk home from school, and I think about your life as it was in Provence, and as it is now, in Canada. I think about where I will be in ten years, and then I stop, because it scares me. I frown. I blink. Then I imagine, unflinchingly, a future where anything is possible. Where I can be a teacher or an author. A museum curator, a travel entrepreneur, an entomologist.

I realize we are powerful as children; we hold the world in our hearts. Then we grow, we change, we see the shadows, and we understand what it means to walk through darkness. But we can still smile at who we were.

Now I'm plodding slowly forward. Toward what? I'm still trying to figure that out. But I think often of those days when I was young and full of wonder, and it allows me to see, again, the possibility. A glimmer of hope. The light at the end of the tunnel.

Each time I open my journal I remember what Was. There's the oak tree and the sunset. There's the stone tower to the north. Feel the wind. Listen to the tall grass murmur.

These memories—they leave me feeling wistful and overwhelmed and unaccountably happy. They smell of rosemary and lavender and when I become truly lost, deep in the caverns of the past, I can taste them: earthy, herbal, bittersweet.

Like licorice root.