They say there are some places in the world where time passes too quickly.
They warn you not to spend too long in these places, they fear that if you dally, you might forget the world behind you.
She thinks, on the other hand, that the world is behind you for a reason. For that is, sometimes, where it belongs. When they warn her, rallying forlorn stories of lost lives and forgotten memories, she meets them with a fake smile and carries on.
“It’s only five minutes,” she says before she flees.
Her legs ache by the time she reaches the forest, they’re littered with scratches and dirt, little souvenirs of her journey. She wears them proudly, displaying them like an Emperor would his robes. They’re a receipt of her passion, the password to her secret grove.
When she stumbles across it on this familiar path, it looks no different to anywhere else in the forest. To her, however, it is of a different make entirely. Each leaf that crunches loudly under her feet feels like silk, the sap smells of saffron and the summer that surrounds her feels electric. It was a place like no other.
It was one such place where time passed too quickly.
Excitement fills her veins, aching like adrenaline. She jumps, in some unceremonious leap, and lands amongst the leaf litter, scattering the remnants of autumn around her form, outlining her like an angel.
The sky is blue and cloudless, a beacon of azure that shines, and shines, and shines. In the open sky, in all its nakedness, she finds the reason she loves her grove so much.
And, consequently, she'll miss it so dearly.
“School is coming,” she warns the trees as they whistle in the soft wind. “I won’t be here for a while… a long while.”
There isn’t an answer; trees don’t speak. She wonders what’d happen if they did, she bets you could find the answers to all the mysteries in the universe inside of trees.
“I’ll… I’ll be lonely,” she says, and the words sink into the silence of the forest like blood through a bandage.
How true it was, even now in such a place, she was lonely. Not because she lacked friends, mind you, but because she would lack a place such as this.
Part of her wondered how something could feel absent when it was right in front of you, how one could feel nostalgia for a time that hadn’t yet passed.
“Just let me stay,” she pleaded. “Despite, despite, despite…”
She couldn’t think of what her continued presence would be in spite of and how desperately she grappled with the words to find something.
The trees don’t give her words, but they’ve given her more than enough—they’ve given her peace. Even though parting seems so full of sorrow, the forest calms her, as it always had and always will.
Because even in the times where such mundane things as leaving for school seemed titanic, a weight that threatened to throw her to the ground and crush her, when it felt like this age of childhood was fading fast, it was here.
It was always here.
That, she thinks, is what makes her feel certain of her future. Even if she cannot find a school, even if all the jobs decide she isn’t enough, even if the world falls apart at its seams, her grove will be her, waiting to listen.
So she breathes, a deep exhale that lets the tension ease from her shoulders, bunched up in colossal knots.
So she closes her eyes and smells the saffron, frolics amongst the silk.
So she gives the grove something back.
“Spring will be here soon,” she promises. “You’ll have so many new friends, all the flowers will bloom. It’ll be beautiful, you won't even need me.”
If trees could smile, she thinks they would.
“And it’s July,” she whispers to the trees. “And I have hope.”
Hope in what? The trees finally whisper back to her.
“Hope in what I’m becoming,” she answers.
In that single, beautiful moment, where time holds her no longer, she blossoms in her own early, personal spring. Sometimes, that is the power of these places where time passes too quickly, the importance of quiet moments. The single, unparalleled strength of taking a breath and leaving the world behind you, even if just for a moment.
When she exits anew, fresh to the world, those five minutes have morphed into hours. That is how July finds her.
July finds her happy.