Tapestries

It was a normal day. The sun was out. A few white clouds were in the sky, but it certainly wasn't going to rain. Little rays of light made it through the trees, lighting patches of the forest floor below. It wasn't quiet, because no forest was truly quiet, but all the sounds were expected for the woods.

Hazel walked to the house in the forest. It wasn’t far from the road. If you were inside, it wouldn’t be hard to get to the path, and to civilization. But if you didn’t live here, there wasn’t much reason to come.

Hazel didn’t have to come alone. She had family. She had a friend who’d also recently gotten a memory back. She’s chosen to go on her own though.

The house had plants growing up the walls by now, but it was still largely intact inside. It had only been . . . twenty years? Twenty one?

It seemed alright when she opened the front door, just dusty. She walked past the front room that functioned as a kitchen and living area. She didn’t remember this place perfectly, but there was a wide window letting in a lot of light in the room, especially when the sun was rising, which meant her past self wouldn’t have wanted to use this room for her projects. And she was pretty sure the stairs going up to the small second floor led only to a bedroom.

There was a door on the back wall of the kitchen. She took that. Yes, this was the room she was looking for. It was dark. No windows in here. She lit the lantern she’d brought with her, and swung it around. This seemed to be the largest room in the building. It was filled with tapestries. They hung on the wall or were folded, messily on the floor. One sat on the desk. She saw one with a bird, a pheasant, on the floor. And one with a rose. Though the one on the desk was the start of an ocean image. So that was different than most of them. She couldn’t be sure if there were a lot of them, or if they were just big. The one on the desk was small, but the ones on the floor were a bit harder to tell.

Many of them were unfinished. With some, it was easy to see why. There would be an obvious mistake in an early part, with too much progress made afterward to go back and fix it. Or there would be knots and tangles at the end, and it looked like those weren’t so much folded as thrown to the ground in frustration. With some of them, Hazel couldn’t be sure why they weren’t completed. They looked fine, nice even. They just stopped, part way through a row. It was amazing those hadn’t unraveled further.

There was one hanging over the desk that was the most impressive of them. It was the largest. It depicted a willow tree with swaying branches over a pond, and there were a few animals as well. A bird by the tree, a fish in the pond. There was a trim around the outside. But it was still hanging up in this room, in this house, instead of anywhere else. Which mean she hadn’t shared it. She hadn’t thought it was ready yet. It wasn’t perfect yet.

Hazel ran a hand, gently, along the tassels at the bottom. There was a frown on her face.

She had never tried to make a tapestry in this life. She had some knowledge from the memories of the life that came before. But, ignoring the gaps in those memories, her fingers didn’t have the knowledge her mind did. She wouldn’t be able to do something like this. Not that it was too late to learn.

She tilted her head, taking a step back. Hazel didn’t remember much of her past life. She couldn’t be sure what made her want to retreat so far from everyone else, to hide her work away so thoroughly until she thought it was ready. For she had done that. She had a past life, but if she told anyone, even the people in the nearest town, they wouldn’t know that person. She’d worked on these at the expense of everything else, and how many had she finished? How many had ever been seen by anyone other than her?

On the one hand, it all seemed so pointless now. On the other, she had thought about it, hadn’t she? She’d thought about how she could take up tapestry weaving again. And she still wanted to share the tapestries that were lying around here. They deserved more than to collect dust. She didn’t care as much that they weren’t perfect right now. But if she did take them, would she explain where they came from? Would she be satisfied when all these were gone, or would she want to make more? And what about the ones that were obvious unfinished? Would she want to complete them? Would she constantly compare any new ones to the ones in here, and come up short in her own mind?

Hazel looked at the tapestry hanging on the wall. Maybe she couldn’t technically call it perfect, but it looked good now. Really, really good.

The idea of not taking them was painful. This was her life’s work once, and it was the only thing to show for that life, the only thing that had mattered.

But . . . it was her old life’s work. She had a life right now, and she knew she was young. She knew she had time for it to mean something, in a way the past one hadn’t.

She picked up the lantern she’d set on the desk. Her limbs felt stiff. She wasn’t sure if she was making the right decision, but she was in fact making one.

She managed to turn and walk out of the room. She closed the door without taking anything with her, not even the really good one. She walked out the front door of the house, leaving prints in the dust. She shut that too, and started towards the road. With each step, the walk got easier. With each step, she was closer to her real home.