Foreshadowing

My fingers mindlessly played with the pendant around my neck: silver, with an azure blue stone.  Azure, a warning for patience.  Take it slow.

Below me, a ways down the hill, the field grass turned into thick forest brush.  The sun was setting on the other side, burning the treetops in evening orange.  It would be dark soon, and my nerves would further falter.

Azure.  Patience.  Slow.

The birds sank into the forest.  The fireflies spilled out of it, like motes of yellow magic.  Stars lit up the inky sky, heralded by the chirping of invisible crickets.  Everything was right there in front of me.  The first step, or maybe my last.

Please, Dizz.  Another day.

I shook my head and rose to my feet.  There was no power in watching.  There was no power in waiting.  I had to start my story, and the only way to begin was by beginning.

With decision in every step, I entered the—

My fingers mindlessly played with the pendant around my neck: silver, with a crystal clear stone.  Clear and new, with a bend in the light.  Warped.

Above me, a familiar ceiling with familiar moldings.  White and simple, with the illusion of decoration.  My parents loved when things looked expensive, especially when they were not expensive at all.  Familial and familiar.  The root was latin, familia: of one household.  Except that household was then defined as “subject to the control of one man”.

How fitting.  How poetic.

Then I remembered where I was supposed to be, at the woods.  At the—

My fingers mindlessly played with the pendant around my neck: silver, with a crystal clear stone.  Clear and new, with a bend in the light.  Warped.

Above me, a familiar… with familiar… my familiar.  I snapped upright in bed.

“Seriously?” I asked angrily.  Sarcastically.  No, that wasn’t the right word… oh, what was it…

Rhetorically?

Yes, rhetorically.

Should we start over?

“No, we shouldn’t start over!” I fumed. “You’re wasting my time!”

Can you waste something infinite?

I groaned.  I wasn’t going to debate right now.  And anyway, my time wasn’t infinite.  Sure, maybe my time was a little more malleable than the average person, but to say I had an endless amount of it was missing the point.  If my time was truly infinite, why would I have so much impatience?

Sounds like you’re debating it.

Without another word, without another thought, I got out of bed and went across the room.  I opened my vanity drawer, grabbed the notebook inside, and flipped it open to an empty page.  I took the pen off my—

You’re starting a lot of your sentences with I.

—nightstand and wrote one word on the page: pendent.  I tore the page out of the notebook.  I went back over to my bed.  I picked up my stuffed teddy bear.

Come on, at least pick something less cliche!

I touched the paper to the chest of the stuffed bear and it came to life.  Well, it didn’t become a real bear or anything.  It stayed a stuffed animal.  But it could move on its own.  It could walk around.  It could even talk.

“You’re so cruel to me,” the bear sighed.  Its mannerisms conveyed its disappointment rather well, without the expressiveness of a human face or a moving mouth.

“You brought this on yourself,” I chastised.

“I’m trying to help you!”

“Well maybe you can help in a less annoying way,” I shot back.

The bear crossed its arms and pouted like a child.  It was actually pretty cute.  If he was still in my head, he would have hated that thought.

We were both quiet for a moment.  A lull in conversation, as we took stock of ourselves.  Me, in my yellow sundress.  My bedroom, dressed in morning sunbeams.  We felt the same, like synonyms.  Then there was the pendant around my neck: crystal clear.  Pen and I were back at the start.

“Why take me back here?” I asked.  But the venom had slipped from my tone.  I sounded… something else.

“You were acting recklessly,” the bear said, taking a seat beside me on the quilted bedspread.  As I continued to look out the window, I knew Pen was looking in the vanity mirror on the other side of the room.  That’s what he did the first time we were here.

“You really don’t trust me, even now?” Hurt.  That’s how I sounded.

“It has nothing to do with trust,” the teddy bear said under his breath.  Though he had no breath.  I should have chosen a better description.  Maybe next time.

“I’ll never be ready for the—“

“Don’t!” Pen cut me off.

I sighed.  He didn’t even like when I said the word. Saying it is writing it, I remembered.  He didn’t even want me to think it.

“I’ll never be ready for… it,” I revised, with emphasis on it. “We both know that.  Sooner or later, I have to just…”

“Believe…”

I nodded.  Wasn’t that what this whole journey had been about?  Pen would have loved the foreshadowing, saying something like that so early in the story.  But for now, he wasn’t my Critic.  He was a teddy bear.

“I’m scared,” he admitted. “What if I lose you?”

“You won’t,” I said, picking him off the bed and pulling him into a hug. “I promise, you won’t.”