Tell The Wolves I'm Home

by Carol Rifka Brunt

I felt like I had proof that not all days are the same length, not all time has the same weight. Proof that there are worlds and worlds and worlds on top of worlds, if you want them to be there.

Being art seemed like it might be like having a disease. Suddenly you became some kind of specimen to be discussed, analyzed, speculated on. I didn’t need people staring at me, trying to figure out what I was thinking. Look at the bigger girl, the one with the braids. Look how obvious it is that she’s in love with the artist. How sad. How pathetic. I didn’t need that at all.

“Being a romantic means you always see what’s beautiful. What’s good. You don’t want to see the gritty truth of things. You believe everything will turn out right.”

“Don’t you know? That’s the secret. If you always make sure you’re exactly the person you hoped to be, if you always make sure you know only the very best people, then you won’t care if you die tomorrow.”

“No, no. It’s the most unhappy people who want to stay alive, because they think they haven’t done everything they want to do. They think they haven’t had enough time. They feel like they’ve been shortchanged.”

I really wondered why people were always doing what they didn’t like doing. It seemed like life was a sort of narrowing tunnel. Right when you were born, the tunnel was huge. You could be anything. Then, like, the absolute second after you were born, the tunnel narrowed down to about half that size.

All the jealousy and sadness. All the meanness that could come out of loving someone too much.

I knew the way lost hopes could be dangerous, how they could turn a person into someone they never thought they’d be.

Maybe all I wanted was for Toby to hear the wolves that lived in the dark forest of my heart. And maybe that’s what it meant. Tell the Wolves I’m Home. Maybe Finn understood everything, as usual. You may as well tell them where you live, because they’ll find you anyway. They always do.

That all the jealousy and envy and shame we carried was our own kind of sickness. As much a disease as Toby and Finn’s AIDS.

That the past, present, and future are just one thing. That there’s nowhere to go from here. Home is home is home.