World and I by Miranda Forster

World and I by Miranda Forster

Much of a frog’s life is spent in perfect stillness, resting and waiting and sensing. And some of a frog’s life is spent flying at breakneck speed. Log to branch to stone, moss bank to puddle. And some of a frog’s life is spent underwater.

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I am like a frog. I am crouched beneath rain-laden cedar, feathery needles brushing my head and soft earth depressed beneath me. Palms against mud. My lungs fill with forest air, exhaled fresh from trees then perfumed rotting-sweet by the underbrush. I squat like a frog and I wait.

What I am waiting for is hard to predict, harder still to explain. When it happens I will know. There will be a change to the landscape, subtle, the elimination of a familiar sound. A small sensory change and the whole world is different. Like a film with the soundtrack removed, slightly wrong. Like a world underwater. And then I will leap from my waiting-place and explore this different world.

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I was quite young when I did it for the first time, young enough to trust my senses fully. Young enough to witness anything and think: well, okay, I guess this is how things work. I was hiding, maybe for hide-and-seek or camouflage or sardines. So many hiding games. I was face-down in dirt beneath dense salal shrubs, motionless, heart in my throat. And then suddenly it was night. The darkening was too slight to notice, at first, but frightening when I realised the greens and browns around me were dulling to twilight blues. I must have won the game, I was silently gloating, as I peeled myself off hard-packed dirt and crawled from my bush. I must have been here for hours. I stepped with soft feet, adept at forest-creeping, always hoping to catch a bird or a deer by surprise. Always deflated when they sprung away scared. The forest was unchanged around me, colour muted by darkness, leaves still in still air. I spun slowly around, every sense tuned to some human noise—where were my friends? The camp counsellors? My stomach started sinking. And there was another absence, nagging at the back of my mind. It was awfully quiet. Where was the crash of the waves, which had hummed below every other noise like TV static? Where was the ocean?

I tasted fear in me like vomit and my feet started moving. The ocean was the ocean and quite unmoveable. But the closer I crept, dodging logs and fern clumps at a trot, the more frightening the silence became. The trees were thinning out, giving way to low scrub, and the air blew fresh and sharp with saltwater. Soon there was the crunch of beach pebbles. But not a sound, not even the lap of small waves on a still night. I ran to the edge of the beach. The water was glassy and motionless, gleaming like ice. I gingerly stuck in a finger—liquid. But perfectly still. I straightened and stared at the water, gazing towards where I imagined Japan would be, across thousands of kilometres of Pacific. It was then that I noticed the lights.

There were lights flickering on in the woods behind me, warm orange like flames. I dropped to a crouch, hoping the darkness would hide me among large rocks that dotted the beach. The lights through the trees had a slight sway, as if hanging. As my eyes adjusted to the lights, I noticed living shapes among them, human-sized figures briefly illuminated against the dark. I crouched perfectly still. The lights were swaying closer, and soon were accompanied by the crackle of feet on the forest floor. And then that familiar crunch of beach pebbles. I held my breath as a tide of marchers swept past me, lights bobbing above them. I imagined lanterns suspended by string from tall poles, but didn’t dare raise my eyes past the marchers’ legs, fearing that the gleam of my eyes in the light would announce me to them. I wasn’t sure why, but I felt like a trespasser.

The lights stopped at the water, and the figures gathered along the shore. I saw now that they had been carrying long bundles, one bundle and one suspended lantern for every four marchers. As I’d imagined, the lanterns were strung from poles like long fishing rods. They were now laying down the bundles at the edge of the water. I watched as each group bustled under their pool of orange light, seeming to unwrap their cargo and lift the contents into the water. There was no speaking amongst them, only the rustle of fabric and the crunch of rock. The water still silent. My heart pounded in my ears. As I watched, they untied their lanterns and placed one on each bundle, suspended on the glassy water. And then a great splashing as each group pushed their lit-up bundle off from the shore, the water finally rushing with sound, the bundles generating small wakes behind them. There was a residual lapping at the shore as the bundles drifted towards Japan—and then the lapping didn’t cease, and I realised that the waves had returned. The figures, now outlines in the dark, watched the lights bobbing as the bundles drifted away from shore with persistent pace like swimmers, the lanterns growing smaller as the distance grew. I watched with them. I had a sense of their reverence, their awe at this strange sight, and I felt caught up in their ritual. I couldn’t tear my eyes away.

Hours seemed to pass, the lights growing fainter, until they were nothing but a string of glowing beads on the horizon. And then the lights winked out, one by one. Up from the crowd rose a wail, hoarse voices joining in a harsh and dissonant chord. I gasped aloud, the sound swallowed in the howling. I was shocked by the pain of it, the grief. Hundreds of voices joined in anguish. The sound rose to an unbearable pitch, the howling becoming a scream, and it was then that I noticed my own voice joined in unison. We wailed like children ripped from our mother. I forgot my fear of being discovered. And then we fell silent, the echo skipping across the water. The sound rung in my skull.

The figures turned from the water, and marched back up the beach. I was once again washed in a tide of moving legs as they passed me without notice. I heard their crackling retreat through the trees and underbrush. And then silence, but for the renewed lapping of the ocean. I felt, in a way, wonderstruck, the way I felt after finishing a long novel or watching theatre curtains close. And I felt an immense relief. I had witnessed something like magic.          

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I don’t remember how I got home that night, or any such night since. When my eyes opened, I would be bathed in my bedroom’s morning glow, light pouring through curtainless windows. The Other World, as I thought of it, couldn’t always be accessed, but I went there a number of times in the years since. And I thought about it constantly. I developed a ritual for it: I had to be alone, hidden, and absolutely still and silent. If I waited long enough, it was as if I tricked that Other World, sneaking up on it and slipping into it while no one watched. When it worked, it was always the same: a darkness, strange silence, my fear and my feet carrying me to the water. No matter how many times I did it, the fear was like new—where was the sound of the waves? I would discover the glass-like ocean, overwhelmed with deja-vu, but unable to remember the next stage of the sequence until it happened. Still shocked when the lanterns were lit, still disturbed by the pain of the wailing, left amazed by the ritual in its completion as the body-carriers retreated. For, somewhere deep in my mind, I knew what the bundles were: bodies. Strapped to some sort of raft, wrapped up in cloth, brought to the shore and cast off with a lantern like friendlier funeral pyres.

Sometimes, I’d crouch under bushes and wait for the World—and nothing would happen. I had a desire, vague and ever-present, that compelled me to drop to my knees in the woods and sit silent, despite not quite remembering what the World had in store for me. My life felt washed-out and grey against those lanterns shining orange in blue twilight, the most beautiful colours I’d seen. My emotions were hardly a flicker compared to that raging, burning grief when we screamed in the dark. I craved that strange catharsis, that release. But if it wouldn’t come, I couldn’t force it. There needed to be a sort of alignment: I had to want the World, and it had to let me in. I spent hours upon hours squatting in bushes, waiting for a World that wouldn’t let me in. I told my parents I had taken up hiking.

I supposed everyone has a World like mine, secret and strange, like masturbation or the deepest-seated fears. Too profoundly personal to explain. No one told me what that Other World was for. And then I learned all on my own, one day, which is how these things typically go.

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I was two days shy of eighteen when it happened, and it hit us like a train in the night hits a damsel who’s been tied to the tracks; we saw it coming and could do absolutely nothing about it. When she died, they told us it was an illness, incurable, think of it like terminal cancer. Her life expectancy had been twenty-five anyway. We knew she was sick, but it feels different when it’s not mutated cells or a virus that takes somebody. When it’s pills, or a rope, or a knife. (They never even told us which it was, leaving everything a horrible possibility). When they told us, we were all at school, wondering where she was and expecting the worst. And then she was gone forever and I would spend the rest of my life remembering that last argument we had. And the time she texted that she loved me, in case she died on a plane ride, with a laugh I could feel through the screen.

After, we crumpled in on ourselves like a tin can. We stopped attending classes, stopped talking to anyone but each other. There was a void, and it sucked us all inward. And we didn’t have the faintest idea what to do. I wanted to live; I wanted to die. I worried my grief would cause weight gain. I felt like a monster for having worries so vain. I stopped moving and eating and loving. I was cruel. Every time my parents fought, I waited for one of them to kill themselves. My best friend stopped showering, and lines reappeared on her arms. I waited to lose her, too.

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One night, a few months after it happened, my eyes flew open in the dark and then I was slipping into my father’s rain boots. The boots clunked beneath me as I trudged to the edge of my lawn, to the cover of trees. I hid in their scratching embrace and let the World find me.

I stood up to that puzzling silence, succumbed to the familiar confusion and fear. I kicked off the heavy boots, tripping barefoot towards the soundless water. I stood on the beach and waited for the lights, which nonetheless surprised me when they flickered on through the trees. It was then that I noticed the difference: I hadn’t dropped to a crouch and tried to hide. When the marchers arrived at the beach, I felt their lanterns illuminate me, and squinted in the fiery light. As they marched past me I noticed a lilting and straggling carrying-group–it had three marchers instead of the usual four. I joined them, shifting a shoulder beneath the long bundle, my body propelled without thought. I felt a familiarity in the weight of it, the shape. And I suddenly knew it was her. When we arrived at the water, the lantern swaying above us, I untied the ropes binding cloth around her. We lifted her into the water, and placed our lantern in her cold hands. And we pushed her off shore with the dozens of others. We watched as they drifted away. And then we wailed, hundreds of voices screaming inhuman, and I let tears trace down my cheeks like warm fingers. I screamed my throat raw, tasting blood, tasting salt. My ears filled with the sound of pain. And then we turned from the water and marched back up the shore. My legs gave way under me at the edge of the trees. The marchers walked on as my eyes drifted shut, our scream still buzzing in my bones.

When I woke, I was lying in bed, eight-a.m. sun dripping in like hot oil. I walked to the kitchen, where my mother was grinding the coffee. And it occurred to me that I loved mornings, that I loved my mother, that I loved the world we shared. My friends and I spent that summer in circles around beach fires, smoking and crying and burning letters in the flames. We filled the gap she left with rituals. And since then, I haven’t gone back to the Other World; I haven’t needed it. If I do, I trust it will be waiting.

* * * * THE END * * * *
Copyright Miranda Forster 2025