The Places of this World

Next time you see my dad ask him to tell you about my Aunt Lanie. She lived in a cabin all alone, a cousin or second cousin of mine had a story about her where she popped out of nowhere in the moonlight. She battles with depression, or battled with it, loved to live alone in the woods and worrying only about herself. And that's the thing, the thing they didn't get, thinking she worried only about herself. She wanted to be alone, wanted to have the trees and the cold and the fire and the animals and wind. She liked being the only one of her kind, she liked that it gave her space and time. Space and time, she thought, that was all she needed. That's all we really need to be who we are and figure things out and find how we got in the places of this world. Space, space and time, time. But anyway, that's how she told it. You ask my dad you might get a different story. But I hope that he understands, or that he knows at least. That one person could see a story one way, and another so differently. And everything is only a matter of space and time, and soon, probably, each will collapse on the other. But we're a long way from that I hope. Still, I'd like to know what he says.