The Queen Of Forest Pil

Secrets come in waves like death coming in threes. There's a pattern. When you can hold a secret, you get more. When you drop it on its head, secrets stop coming round. 

Ramona held secrets like candles with care and caution. Don’t breathe too hard or the flame might flicker. She held onto the secrets of the garden and told the bees her mind, so that they would trust her back. Ramona saw life in black and white. She was an extremist, using the yellow stripes of the bees as fuel for rage. She couldn’t see the color, or she didn't want to see it.

Once her mother, when she was a baby, had told her that when the midwife took her out her mother’s stomach, she had forgotten to give her the Guide Book To Life. This explained why Ramona felt the way she did, she was missing something that everyone else had been given. She was promised a Guide Book at conception and the midwife just forgot. Her luck was never very good. 

When her mom told her this, as a matter of fact, she had smiled. It all made sense.

"I know you feel different. In a world of squirrels you feel like a bird. You feel so chronically unique"

Her mother had said.

"I love you Ramona"

"I love you Mom"

And then she was gone.

Ramona knew that the missing pieces could be shifted and cemented back together if she could only find the right tools. She needed that book. She told herself, when she grew up she'd find the book and be the good guy. Willingly stripped of her identity, she wanted the secrets. 

She often thought, growing up, about how she’d find the book and it would all make sense. The world can't be this grey forever. She knew that much. 

Now, it was time to find the key to her happiness. Ramona was older now, yet more pained than ever. She wandered the seven seas, she had time to think. The bees buzzed, they didn't keep quiet. She had no one to trust. No one to hold her between two warm palms. She felt she could explode. The anger she directed toward the world in which she lived in, was justified by her life as a young woman. She was made to be a witch and burned alive. If only everyone saw the world how she saw it, they would be witches too. 

She wanted badly to right every wrong a man had ever done. She was one woman at war with one thousand abusers and cheats. And couldn't see it any other way.

Ramona couldn’t find the exact right wave to ride. She was swept out in the wrong direction. Away from all the love. She looked for the book everywhere in her home. Above the refrigerator, with all the empty liquor bottles and dusty jam jars. Under the rug, where her whispered secrets settled in the night. In the dog bowl. Under her dresser and bed and behind the bookshelf. The Guide book to life wasn't found and seemed to be burned up as ashes in her ashtray. If only she could glue them back together and read those sacred words, the words would help the pain. Thick layer of remedy over years of ache. 

She nearly gave up.

"How do I move like a squirrel when I was born with wings and a beak?"

just when she was heading for the hills her feet stopped in their tracks. They walked her back. They took turns taking the lead and moved her briskly into a room full of the spirits of one thousand bad men. She was so scared and fought for hours. After all the pain she was victorious. She moved from body to body kissing each on the forehead, staining them with a pink O. The fight was over and an intensity and passion gripped her, in a way she hadn't felt before . She had to find the Guide Book To Life soon. She was starting to slip down, almost to the men's level. She had to find it before another young woman lost in her own messy world realized she was missing the book as well.

Ramona was an extremist. She believed there was only one book. She had to be the first to find it.

She had slain the rotten mean men and painted sweet kisses on them for all the times she wanted love and got touched by evil instead. Ramona moved on.

Unlike most, she was brave. She kept looking. The mean men couldn’t stop the warrior she was. The men with their misery leading first had tried to drag her down but fighting back looked like bodies piled into shapes and poses that God wouldn’t approve of. She continued her search.

She walked far to see where one might hide a Guide Book To Life. In desperate need of answers she took to the bees again. Calling them for help, the pesky little things came by the wind and told her to go to the forest of Pil where a man named Pil had once taken it as his own. The king of the forest. Pil had passed away, a death of loneliness, years prior. All that was left of him was the trees. So Ramona listened to the bees and went. 

She marked the trees she looked behind with chalk and dug holes in the dirt to look under the earth. 

She stopped. She saw something new. The roots of the trees holding what looked like a baby. She stepped closer. The baby was her. The roots nurtured and fed baby Ramona. She suckled on the tree itself. Leaves and dirt caked her little face. Many ants crawled down and up and all over her chubby arms and chest. She looked peaceful. Ramona didn’t remember ever feeling peaceful. This baby looked loved. 

She stood up and brushed off the baby girl.

"I love you"

Ramona said to the baby. She heard her mothers voice behind her,

"I love you Ramona"

And then she was gone.

She saw that under the baby's arm was a piece of folded paper. “Willingness” it read. The Guide Book To Life was just one paper, dirty and crumpled. And willingness was all that it read. 

Willingness. A state of readiness to change. Willing to see the world in a different hue. View the bees with trust, not feel like a witch, or at least be willing to see yourself as a beautiful good witch, not bad, not evil. And the men slain were never so bad either, as the ones from her past were. But she had placed them in a box and labeled them all “cheats and abusers”.  

her willingness to love again, that was the secret to life. The search for the guide book, or paper as it happens to be, led her to herself. Made her view herself in a different shape and space. The baby looked loved. She knew she had to be willing to be adored and taken care of. By men, by women, and everyone else in the world. Let her secrets go and undo all she had been taught. She had to be willing to try.