Re: Wren + Ana: woods
The woods were filling with living things. Repose was less empty than Ana remembered it and it was less empty than she remembered winter and both these things could have crowded her. She was used to solitude, now. She was used to days that melted into dusk around the glass walls of the studio and began and ended without words. It was not her entire life and Ana did not wish for solitude always. It was exposing, no? To be left entirely with yourself was to peel back any veneer you had, any intention of pretending you were not exactly as you were. She liked it loud. She liked people, and heat and warmth and laughter. But she had filled up with sadness in France. Poured fill, she was a vessel for other people's sorrow and she felt age in her bones this week. She needed time and solitude to empty and the forums, they were good for remembering why she should.
Crack and snap and someone was present and the woman who drew herself out of the wet greens and umbers and burned browns was pale pink and white and clean in the way of someone who did not live embedded in the woods. She carried the smell of the place on the edge of town: tents, burned butter, sawdust, strangeness on her clothes and on her hair and she smelled sweet, unctious rather than powdery, over that familiarity.
And then she spoke and Ana heard familiar cadence in her ears that accorded with the drawn-in breath that she pulled into her lungs lightly past nose and teeth to smell again.