Field Note 01
The Edge of the Unknown
I have stood at edges.
I know what it is to stand at the edge of the unknown and start building. Something you grow around yourself without meaning to. Reason by reason. Layer by layer. Until it feels like wisdom. Until you forget you are building at all.
And far beneath all of that, something flickers.
A firefly or an ember. From the edge, you cannot tell. Whether it is alive and unpredictable, or holding the last of its heat before it either dies…or sets everything ablaze.
They can feel exactly the same.
There is a creature in this story who has been standing at the edge of the forest for a very long time.
The trees are old and close together, the kind that block out the sky before you are even fully inside. The light between them shifts in ways she cannot predict. She has heard things. She has assembled the evidence. Rehearsed the worst of it until it feels like memory.
It is worth saying. She is not wrong to be careful. The forest is real. It is cold in places. There are creatures in there. Ones that take something from you. Anyone who has lived long enough in this world has encountered a few. Maybe many.
She has also built a story about what kind of creature she is. What she is capable of. What she deserves to find.
Those assumptions come from somewhere.
They are echoes from the past. From things she remembers and things she does not. Old rooms. Old faces. Old moments that never found an ending.
She has been carrying them so long, packed tight on her back, that she has stopped feeling them as something separate. She has mistaken their weight for her own.
There are more of them at the edge than she knows.
One evening another creature settles beside her.
They are quiet for a while. The forest sounds move around them.
“It is not what you think it is,” the other says.
She presses her thumbnail into the inside of her wrist. A small pain. Something to hold onto.
“You do not know what I think.”
“No. But I know what I thought. I was wrong about most of it.”
She watches the tree line. Something moves inside it. She has been holding her breath.
“There are creatures in there,” the other says. “Real ones. More than you would expect.” A pause. “Some of them bite.” Another pause. “Some of them purr.”
She says nothing.
“There was one I could not stand to look at. I did not know what kind of creature it was. Something about it made the back of my neck go tight. I stayed with it anyway. Kept looking instead of turning away. Slowly I understood. What I could not stand was something I recognized from a long way back. Something I had been carrying in my own pack.”
The other lets the silence sit for a moment.
“And when I finally let myself look at it fully, really look, I did not have to carry it alone anymore.”
Her thumbnail is pressing harder now. She feels the edge of it. She loosens her grip before it breaks the skin.
“What actually happens in there?” she asks. “To you.”
The other is quiet for a moment.
“The strangest part was discovering I was not what I thought I was.”
“What were you?”
The other laughs softly.
“Depends who you ask.”
She turns toward them for the first time.
“What does that mean?”
“It means that at the edge, I only knew myself alone.”
The other looks toward the trees.
“In there, other creatures were having an experience of me. Some of what they saw surprised me. Some of it I argued with. Some of it felt impossible.”
A small pause.
“And some of it felt strangely familiar.”
The forest shifts in the evening light.
“I went in convinced I knew what kind of creature I was.”
The other stands.
“I came out less certain.”
A pause.
“And somehow more myself.”
They brush something invisible from their sleeve.
“I left an old name hanging on a branch somewhere.”
A small sound escapes her. Almost a gasp.
You have been building. Maybe for so long that what began as a shelter has started to feel like just the way things are.
What is underneath it?
Somewhere in the forest are creatures carrying packs of their own.
Not because they know the way.
Because they know the weight.
What if meeting them honestly, in real time, is what makes it possible to set something down?
She reaches back and feels the pack on her shoulders. Heavy. Worn into the exact shape of her.
She notices her heartbeats.
Pounding.
She takes a breath. Then another.
She takes one step forward.
The leaves close behind her.
What happened next is the subject of everything that follows.
— Tamara
In Real Time is where the forest continues — in real relationship, in real time, with others who are also finding their way in. Groups now forming.