It was the smell that brought me back first. The musty tapestries and dried flowers that lined the walls, the June sun through the stained glass windows illuminating the dust that filled the air in greens and purples, but doing nothing to warm the cold stone of the church. I was brought back to Sunday morning services, attending with my Nana, and now a decade later we were here to bury her.
I carried her, with my father and the other pallbearers, out of the church and into the sunlight, laying her to rest beside her husband, albeit near on 30 years later. I had cried many times since her death a week earlier, but I still had tears to shed for that moment, lowering her into the ground with a stark finality.
The crowd started to clear and as the other attendees piled into their cars, I decided the short walk to my Nana's house would do me good to clear my head.
I hoped a fence, and headed across the field to the footpath that would lead me to the back of Nana's land, ripping my suit trousers in the process. Dad would be pissed if he found out I damaged the suit he'd let me borrow. Hopefully I'll get to my sewing kit before he finds out.
Scrambling over the iron railings, I was again in a place that had been so familiar to me all those years ago. Nana had lived in this house, in this village her entire married life. It sat on 2 acres of land and to one side was the woodland that became my childhood playground. Back then I would visit Nana every weekend, as my parents went about their busy lives. She spoilt me, as the only child of an only child she said it was my birthright.
It had torn apart my ten-year-old world when we had to move away, my Dad's work relocating us to the other side of the country, after that only seeing her at Christmas and Easter. She had been my confidant, my ally against the strict rules my parents imposed. I thought I missed her then, but the feeling now was so much worse.
My secrets were my own from that day. My first kiss, my first boyfriend, my first broken heart. The hatred I felt from my Dad when I told him I wanted to study fashion design, not physics or medicine or law, like him. My first job out of university, as an apprentice for a fashion house, and the devastation of then losing it, in the economic downturn.
She would have known what to say, which fairytale or anecdote to bring me back to reality. Walking through the woodlands I remembered how my love of fashion really started with her. The afternoons we spent sewing tiny outfits to leave for the fairies. Dresses and trousers and even miniature boots that we would place by the old tree stump, only for them to be gone the next day, replaced by an offering of glass beads, at the time me believing that it wasn't just Nana switching them when my back was turned.
We would spent hours in the woods, amongst the 100 year old oaks as she recanted tales of Cadmium, a young fairy child of my age, and the adventures he would have with his many siblings. I didn't feel the loneliness of being an only child when I was here with Nana and her fairies.
Sitting down on the tree stump lost in my memories, I saw a flash of light out of the corner of my eye. A small yellow and white striped birthday candle, planted in the ground, lay alight. My first thought was, of course; it's the Summer solstice. On the longest day of the year Nana and I would help prepare for a festival the fairies held. We would make special clothes; collect berries I was told were their favorites and light candles for the celebration that would take place, after we went to bed.
But then I snapped back to the present, suddenly on edge that some unidentified person was here with me in the woods. I called out 'hello' and searched around the nearest trees. A neighborhood kid perhaps? Someone who Nana let share in her secret world? No-one was there.
I knelt and lowered my head to blow out the candle. As the flame extinguished it seemed to suck the air from my lungs with it. I stood as a crushing pain spread over every pore of my body as I saw the world around me stretch and expand. The trees shot up into the sky and the nearby stump receded. I gasped for breath as the woodland took on giant proportions, even the small yellow candle now reaching knee height.
Stunned I finally felt able to breathe, taking in large gasps of oxygen to still my spinning head, only to inhale smoke from the dying candle in front of me. A tap on my shoulder, I spun, now face-to-face with eyes of deep blue, I fell back taking the candle with me.
"What, by all that is good and true, do you think you're doing!" he spoke. The lithe form of a man stood before me, tattered clothes but clean and strong, blonde hair cascading past his shoulders. And eyes, so deep the sky itself would look away and blush.
