Continuation of 'To Fall'

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The few remaining trees lined the road like sentinels. Ancient and watchful, seeming to examine the car as it drove along the mountainside, sending up sprays of still-loose bitumen on the tighter corners. They had been here for longer than the road had. The woman in the car knew this, she remembered them when the road was gravel, and even then they'd looked identical to how they did now. Gnarled branches reaching up to the sky, dwarfing her and yet being dwarfed themselves by the mountains behind. In her memories, there are more of them, hundreds, thousands more, covering the whole mountain- there wasn't a place that wasn't sheltered by their leaves. This is not her memories, however. This was the real, this was the now, and the mountain here was not the one she remembered. It was windblown and eroded, red earth exposed to the sky where before it had been covered thickly by vegetation and trees. Her house was no longer here- and no one but those who had lived here in the past would see this and think of a world of green and brown, teeming with life. Overgrown roads, dotted every few kilometres with houses- homes. Homes of families, families like her own had once been.

On windy days like this one, the dust stirred up in gritty storms with no roots to hold it back. The scent of it, acrid and dry, wormed its way through the air conditioning vents until the car's interior hung with the smell. Her nose wrinkled up at it- at the difference. Again, dissonant with the memories she held so dearly.

Her car had been driven on country roads before. It had gotten the majority of its use from driving from her mother's house in the city to her father's each weekend, her father allowing her to switch into the driver's seat.

It was possible to see the mountains from the highway- but she never looked. Not from the days when her parents had first split up, when she had stared, brooding, out the window, not saying a word to her mother or father as she was trafficked from city to country, then back again.

One day she did. She never knew exactly why, but on one Saturday's drive to her fathers' house, she let her gaze wander to the mountains. What she had seen was alien. The moment passed, she didn't look again. But it was as if it planted a seed in her brain, something that she couldn't just weed out by not looking like she'd done so many times before.

Slowly but surely, that seed forged into something tangible, the pledge that when she was able to drive on her own, she'd go to the site of her old house.

If she remembered.

Though it was almost unrecognisable, as she drove towards it, her memories grew stronger and more vivid.

At this time of afternoon, just bordering on darkness, the workers had gone home and the place had a feeling of desertion. Not the desertion it had before, when there was still that hint of life, hidden behind closed doors and trees. This was dead. There was nothing here- and no one to stop her as she drove right past the "Warning, Construction" sign and up the road that led to where her old home had been.

A strange sort of thrill- a childish, rulebreakers thrill- stirred in her chest. The road turned from tar back to gravel, a sudden change that sent her small car jumping, shuddering on the rougher road. Something about it made her laugh. She was going home.

To a home that was no longer there.

Despite this, she remembered exactly where to turn.

Her car came to a gravel-grinding halt at the roadside, a cloud of dust floating around it for a few seconds until the wind swept it away.

It was a wasteland. It appeared that the place where her childhood home had stood had become a storage area for supplies, as various beams and pieces of nameless steel were stacked among the cracked foundations. All else had been removed. Perhaps there was the trace of her mother's garden, a raised hump of earth that still sported some grass. It was probably her memories tricking her. Maybe the raised patch had always been there? She was grasping for memories like straws, trying to connect this...carnage to the still vivid recollections of her old home.

It was getting darker- if she didn't get up to her old spot now, she wouldn't be able to see anything.

Squinting into the mid-darkness for anything she could trip over, she narrowly missed a metal bar that someone had left lying right in the way of the path. The path was no longer restricted by thick trees or bushes, but she felt the need to stick to it nonetheless. It was mostly indistinguishable from the rest of the area, and her feet found the way more from memory than from any visual cues.

There- the top; with longer legs and less resistance, she reached it a lot sooner than she had in the past.

It was open to the sky, without so many trees to enclose it. It felt empty without them. The wind was cold and carried the smell of petrol- she wrapped her arms around herself, feeling exposed beneath the open sky. Why are you here, it seemed to ask. This place is dead.

The only beauty left here was the stars, starting to creep out of the darkness- as if they, like her, longed for clear air to breathe. Over the edge, beneath dry, river-worn rocks with no river left to round them further, she could see the road; a long, dark line reaching out into the distance where it was lit by streetlights, then city lights, then, somewhere far beyond the smears of humanity's influence on her horizon, faded into darkness again. Darkness and gravel and leaves. Somewhere different than here.

Somewhere where she would go, after this. There was no point in staying up here. What was here was gone. Lost to her, but somewhere else, perhaps she could find a new special place.

It wouldn't be the same as here. But it would be somewhere- somewhere that she could belong, like this place had been. Somewhere so far away from the greedy hands of that cityscape so that it would the same, forever.

It took a long time for that image to fade out behind her. Even when she got back in her car, driving back along the road now illuminated by her cars dim headlights, it stayed, not as a memory, but as a conviction.

Her car lights would shine her own path, watched still by those doomed trees, guardians of a place that had been lost long ago.