The Time Has Come
“The time has come," an old lady said, sitting in front of a waterfall. She’s dressed humbly, not modern, not from other time. A white dress with a black scarf covering her head and a little sweater to hide her body from the wind. She has sandals, but she knows it’s much more comfortable to walk barefoot in nature. It’s the beginning of autumn; the fog is starting to arise, to grow deep, like clouds kissing the flowered grass as well as the river’s flow formed after the falling water spectacle. There was only the sound of the water jumping abruptly, smashing the lagoon’s calmness before the river’s birth. “The time has come," she repeated again, again, and again; her eyes observed steadily the event while standing on the grass. It sounds like a call to the water to sing its chant as it sleeps during the trip from the mountain to the flat lagoon. Her voice is soft and profound; the frequencies can only be heard by nature’s atoms.
The solitude of the moment is something she has never felt, perhaps not in this way. There’s something magical in the communion with the waterfall: the cleansing noise; trees observing the scene; birds flying around, playing with the falling, moving liquid; the salmon use it as a sport as, at the end of their time, they’ll climb up the waterfall; even the sun can create its rainbow, using each drop of water as a kaleidoscope, thus the beginning of colors. “That’s it!" The old lady shouts out loud. “Somehow, things and beings have this feeling of ending and beginning; of movement and stillness," she continued her thought watching the surrounding events. She didn’t want to fully understand the feeling of solitude; why bother filling empty gaps with thoughts?
After a while, a child appeared from the woods. He had an awkward face expression, with no joy, but no sorrow either. “He’s very mysterious," the old lady wondered. The boy came near the old lady, sitting next to her, not too close, not too far, just the right distance to be felt. He didn’t pronounce a word, nor a sound. He stood in front of the waterfall very still, just looking, while the old lady started to grow a vast feeling of burden, like a dart pocking her heart and mind about him. “Where does he come from? Why is he here? What is this cold mystery around him?" She thought incessantly, but never, at least at this moment, had the courage to raise her voice and question the boy. Her peaceful time is over; now every movement became a thought, even the act of seeing started to devolve into disconnected images, and her focus drove directly to the boy.
The daylight went down. The sun drifted away; the cold began to gain its place as the light fades. “It’s time to return home," the old lady told the child with a smooth voice, one that he couldn’t grasp. She started to worry about his presence. “Soon, darkness will be born and with it, a lot of things can happen here if we stay. This is the wilderness, and we’re not allowed to be here. Please, come with me," she said earnestly. Nevertheless, the child with a sudden breath, broke his gaze towards the old lady. He stared at her with his eyes wide open and, suddenly, the old woman started to feel goosebumps, her body shook like an earthquake and began a cold fever; the wind stopped and the few lives around them faded away. Words couldn’t be expressed, not even a calm breath.
Darkness arrived with a breeze that stitches the skin; it passes through any tissue one can have in the forest. The trees can’t protect the old lady from the weather; their leaves cried of terror watching the overwhelming scene of her with the boy. However, the night has made them feel sleep. Hidden noises appear progressively: an owl singing to its next prey; a fox smelling humans and rabbits, calling more for the little one to begin the chase… The boy’s eyes still stood steady; nothing happening in his environs was to bother him.
The old lady wondered, “Does he feel?”. “Hey! Do you feel something? Are you good, my little chap?", she mumbled, but her voice didn’t have any effect on him. “What is happening here?", she asked. The fog was thick, her gaze blurred, losing the boy’s silhouette. She panicked, and ran to his aid towards the last place she saw him. Wherever she looked, he wasn’t there, swallowed by the fog or caught by the trees. “I must return home," she thought again, but every road disappeared by the fog and mud from the heavy rain.
Darkness is the realm of the forest at midnight; it threatens every form of life that crosses its death path, leading to the cliff in front of the waterfall. No one can make it through when one stays deep in the night, nor can one camp here, since the wilderness is awake and ready to eat any fresh or old flesh that dwells.
The old lady, blurred and deceived, fainted away at the root of the oak near the cliff in front of the waterfall. She couldn’t move her cracking body, so the tree’s root was the ideal bed to rest. She knew though that the wild here could be a threat to her life, but the fatigue was intense, and the haunting boy remained, troubling her mind with nightmares at the glance of her sleep.
In one of those nightmares, the boy appeared as a baby figure. The old lady started to tremble with a chilly sweat. The image is neat and vivid as the baby was smiling at her, his eyes were deep black and his gaze very profound. She couldn’t hear his voice, but she continued thriving her dream to keep this image as it is, and perhaps never wake up. Tears fell then out of her closed eyes; no one knows if they were of joy or sorrow.
The heavy rain settled down as the old lady’s sleep and dream became smooth and soft. She slowly opened her eyes as thoughts about the baby in her dream bloomed like butterflies breaking up their chrysalis. Her expression immediately changed, acknowledging something. Now she realizes that she has just seen her son in her dream; but what she really understood is that that same boy who appeared to her in the forest is her cherished and forgotten offspring she lost a few months after his birth.
