Ganymede woke up.
It was dusk, and she was lying on top of a hill. She must have gotten relaxed and dozed off there.
She stretched, stood up, brushed herself off, and took a deep breath of the air. It was crisp and nice, the way she liked the wind to feel when the heat of the day was ending and the cool of the night was taking its place.
She looked around. All the major landmarks were still there, as she remembered, though she had never seen them from this particular angle before. Up here, everything looked much smaller. Though, in a way, that felt appropriate; after all, this place took up a much smaller place in her memories than it once had.
There was the lake, and there was the mountain, and there was the forest. Really, a perfect microcosm of every kind of place you could really expect to go in a temperate climate like this one. A complete ecosystem on its own. Enough so that someone could be tricked into thinking that this was the entire world, that this was all there was to the world.
She looked over at her hometown, at the center of all of it, and she sighed.
It had been a year since Ganymede had run away from Sjöfn.
That night had been a blur to her, and she no longer remembered much of anything in the weeks that followed except delirious misery.
She knew that she had briefly considered returning to her Lunite companions in Dinrock, but had concluded it was pointless, for a variety of reasons. Dal-Sun was most likely dead, and it had been her fault. Martim may have been dead, too, though if ze wasn’t, she couldn’t imagine that ze would’ve wanted to continue traveling with someone like her. Arya, too, may not have wanted to continue traveling with the Lunites at all. Even as far as the rest of the town was concerned, Ganymede had gotten their entire guard force killed, too, and let the dragon run free again. There was no way they would have accepted her.
Even if they had, though, more than anything else, Ganymede had simply been too ashamed of herself to ever interact with anyone ever again.
She had fantasized about simply wandering into a forest somewhere, maybe a place that reminded her of home, and letting herself starve there. Or waiting until she got eaten by wild beasts, so that way at least maybe her body could be used to feed a family.
But her own survival instincts had kicked in, as miserable as she was, and no matter what predicament she was in, she would still seek out sustenance and keep herself alive.
She no longer remembered exactly how long she spent like that.
Even so, forests were still beautiful to her. And in spite of everything that had taken place here in the forest next to her hometown, it was still a place of comfort to her.
She felt this way even though she had only rarely been in this particular part of the forest before. Back when she originally lived here, she had generally kept to the area of the forest that was closest to her town’s borders. She would occasionally go elsewhere just to see what it looked like, but there was no real reason to go too far from her town most of the time.
Now, though, she had every reason not to get close to the town. She couldn’t risk anybody seeing her. It would only hurt them, and it would only hurt her. So she stayed here, in this part of the forest far away from her town, almost on the opposite side of the mountain.
The forest was still very much the same as it had always been, though. It was strange. So much had changed for her, she thought she would’ve felt different about it, but she didn’t. It looked the same, sounded the same, smelled the same.
She supposed her hometown was completely unchanged, too. It had always prided itself on being like that. Now that she had changed so much, there was no way she could go back.
And funnily enough, she felt no desire to return. She was as much of a wandering traveler here as she had been anywhere else, and this felt more natural to her.
This was what home meant to her, now.
Ganymede didn’t remember how long she had spent being miserable in the forests near Dinrock, all she remembered was that, at some point, living in the forest had become normal to her.
Her thoughts of herself and her time outside the forest slowly faded. She became another being of the forest, just like all the beasts living in it. She stopped expecting companionship, and came to see the life in the forest as her companions. Not “friends”, exactly, she still didn’t trust the idea that she could have friends–but they were creatures who were dealing with the basic challenges of simply living, just like she was, and they felt like comrades to her in that sense, and that was good enough for her.
As her memories of outside life gradually faded, so did most of the guilt she had associated with failing to live that way, failing to thrive that way. Here, there was no pressure put on her to try to understand the intricacies of socialization that she could never keep up with. Here, she didn’t have to worry about trying and failing to understand the “core essence” of a person and try to connect with it to help people stop feeling lonely.
…No. To stop herself from feeling lonely. The people she had tried to connect with were never lonely like she was lonely.
But here, she didn’t have to be lonely, because here, there were no expectations of her meeting with anyone to begin with. She didn’t have to worry that she was trying to connect with anyone in the wrong way, because she wasn’t trying to connect with anyone at all.
She was still lonely, but she was no longer being reminded of it every day, and this fact helped her feel better about it, somehow.
So she lived for a while, and kept forgetting memories–not forgetting forgetting, but no longer dwelling on them every day–and gradually, she managed to find some peace with herself and who she was. Loneliness and all.
As she made peace with herself, though, she realized she also needed to make peace with the fact that, despite everything, she still wanted to try to stop being lonely. She still wanted to connect with people.
Just maybe not everyone, anymore.
She had a better understanding at this point that not everyone was going to want to be her friend. She had seen enough bad parts of herself that she understood why, too, and didn’t blame them for it. But she was starting to wonder if she was really so bad that no one would want to be her friend. After all, she’d met many people who had done very bad things, and she had still wanted to be their friends, anyway.
Though, that was part of it, too. She didn’t want to be friends with those people, anymore. But it made her think that someone didn’t have to be totally good to be her friend, and she didn’t need to be totally good to be someone else’s friend, either. They just had to both be trying their genuine best.
That was what she had never found.
…Well…
No. It was too late for that now.
But maybe it could happen again in the future, with someone else. If she cared as much as she did about it, why wouldn’t someone else out there want it just as much?
She decided she would start trying again.
Ganymede stepped out of the forest.
Well, it was hard to tell when she was “out” of the forest, exactly, because it wasn’t like trees just out-and-out stopped growing at any particular place. But the area was opening up enough that it was easier for her to see the horizon again.
The horizon wasn’t her goal, though. Her goal was the mountain now in front of her.
She stepped up to it and placed her paw on the rock. She had only ever been here once. Just that one time. She had always been afraid to go back after that. Not that she had ever had any reason to go back, anyway, but now it felt odd to her.
Because she was looking at it now, and it was just another place. Just somewhere to be, just like anywhere else. She could be in a forest, or she could be on a mountain, or she could be in a lake, or she could be in a town. All of them were different experiences. All of them had their own challenges and rewards. It was only a matter of need, or preference.
She preferred the forest. For a while, she needed to travel. Right now, though, she needed this mountain. Not just any mountain, but this one in particular.
She thought of the fears that she associated with this mountain. They weren’t fears inherent to the mountain itself, just something she had come to associate with the mountain. And it was funny to her, because it wasn’t even as if the pain she associated with the mountain was unique to the mountain. She had been carrying that pain long before she came to the mountain, and she was still carrying it with her now, and she would still be carrying it long after.
The mountain was just a place. Just a place for her to be, if that was what she wanted.
And as long as she made peace with herself, with her sadness included, she could be anywhere that she wanted to be.
She pulled out her climbing equipment and she started scaling the mountain, just like she and Haruto had done so many years ago.
It was some months ago that Ganymede left the forest and started traveling between towns again.
At first, she wasn’t sure exactly what she was doing. She knew she was still trying to connect with people; that was always what she had done. But she had never really had guidance on how to do it, even when she thought she did.
She decided she would simply exist alongside them for a while, just like she did with the creatures in the forest. That ended up working out okay, in its own ways. When she made that conscious comparison between the two, she realized that it wasn’t really any different, it just showed itself in different ways. People still found food and drink while they were awake, and found shelter to sleep. People still explored their surroundings looking for sites of interest.
And people sought each other for companionship, too, as creatures in the forest did.
Ganymede realized that there were many different types of connections that people could make. Sometimes people gathered together to make work easier. Sometimes they gathered together to entertain each other. Sometimes they gathered together to find love and have children together. But there were many different ways to make connections, and each method had its own value.
And in spite of what Ganymede had been taught about outsiders, she was often more readily accepted into more gatherings than she expected she would be, even though she was always a complete stranger to the people involved. The people didn’t expect her to stick around, no; but while she was there, as temporary a fixture in their lives as they were in hers, they were glad to have her there to share in the celebration of a festival, or to share in the competition of a game, or to share in drinks and stories of the day.
Ganymede realized that there was a happiness to be found in this, too, a happiness to be found in being a stranger, in meeting someone for the first time. But she also realized that this did nothing to alleviate the deeper kind of loneliness that she had always felt within her.
She realized, too, that the reason she felt this way was because she was always a stranger. Once the big gatherings were over, people would go back home to their spouses, or to their families, or to their best friends. They would return to the people they had already known for years, who they enjoyed having around for reasons other than getting to know someone new. They would return to the people they wanted to keep seeing, day after day, no matter how familiar they were or how old they got.
Even though Ganymede had lived in her hometown for years, she never felt as though anyone there “enjoyed” her as anything more than a permanent stranger. An oddity, a curiosity. A source of new things to see. Not someone to return to day after day because they wanted to see her more than once at a time.
They all had families and friends, people they could return to, that didn’t include her. Even her own “family” hadn’t treated her like someone they wanted to see very often.
Ganymede had already long suspected that she didn’t belong in her hometown. She thought she might have belonged in the Lunites, but that didn’t work out, either. She wasn’t sure what to look for, anymore. She wondered if fate had possibly meant to have her be born in some other, far-off town, where it made sense for her to live and everyone around her actually wanted her to live there. A place where fitting in came as easily to her as it had to everyone else in her hometown.
After all, no matter how many towns she went to, that seemed to be how things always worked. People always looked like they belonged there, they always had family and friends to talk to. They seemed comfortable and happy in their work. Ganymede felt that what she had always been missing was that sense that she belonged, and she knew it wasn’t that she couldn’t feel like she belonged, because she clearly felt a hole where she should have the feeling of belonging. So there must have been a place where she could feel it. She just hadn’t found it yet.
She kept looking.
Ganymede wiped her sweat off her brow. She wasn’t sure how far she had to go, but she was a good distance up the mountain, now.
She looked down. It was hard to see, but she was definitely farther up than she had gotten on the mountain the last time she was here. It was definitely a greater distance to fall than she had fallen last time.
Realistically, she knew she probably wouldn’t survive it if she fell right now, and yet, she couldn’t help but feel that she had already been through much worse. That might be why she didn’t feel afraid.
She scanned the side of the mountain. She wondered if she could spot the area where she had originally fallen from the cliff as a pup. Never mind whether it was visible from here or not, would she even recognize it if she saw it? And how would it make her feel if she did?
Did it even really matter? She was an adult, now, and she was so much higher up than before. And she felt silly for ever thinking that this mountain could take her all the way to the moon.
…But then again, it was surprising exactly where some places could end up taking you. And she still wasn’t sure exactly where this trip would take her, by the time she was done.
She looked up at the moon. It was still there, just as it had always been. There was no need for her to try to pursue it. So long as she was on earth, there was nothing she could do that would bring her any closer to it or any farther away. And it didn’t really matter one way or the other, anyway.
It was, after all, just a big rock in the sky.
The last time Ganymede had seriously thought about her original lifelong goal to pursue the moon was just two or three months ago.
She had arrived at a new town, but was already feeling no real hope about connecting to any of the people there. So she walked a fair distance from the town until she found a hill where she could simply sit and consider the moon, as she once used to do all the time.
She used to be able to look to the moon to find comfort and inspiration whenever she felt her loneliest. When she didn’t feel like she belonged anywhere on earth, all she had to do was remind herself that there was some other place out there waiting for her. Someone who was alone, like she was, just waiting for her to arrive.
Now, though, whenever she looked at the moon, she just felt even lonelier.
The moon was a reminder of too many other lonely experiences for her. The moon had brought her into too many situations that had caused her nothing but pain. It wasn’t even that she felt that she had really failed to reach the moon; instead, she felt as though she had made the exact connection to the moon that she had always wanted to make, she had finally understood the true core of the moon… and the moon had simply rejected her, just as everyone else had.
She flopped down on her back. Why did she ever think that it would turn out otherwise? The moon wasn’t the only one that she had ever hoped she could get close to, only for it to turn out badly in the end. She had that same experience with everyone. It seemed like she was just naturally drawn to situations like that, no matter what. The moon was just the biggest example of it.
As disheartening as it all was, though, she didn’t want to believe it was because she was unlovable. She could believe she was unlovable, she was certainly often tempted to believe that, and yet, that didn’t seem like the right conclusion to her.
Jess had told her that her focus on the moon was what was pushing her away from everyone else. Ganymede thought that there might be some truth to that. It had always been a path leading to a dead end, and it made sense that no one else was willing to follow her on that path, assuming they saw it coming before she did. And yet, Ganymede didn’t feel that it reflected the full truth of the matter, either.
Dead end or not, there was always a reason the moon was important to her. That was what she always felt like no one else really understood. And even though she had now lost the moon as a goal, there was still something left over in that original wish of hers that she still wanted to pursue. Still needed to pursue. Whatever it was, she knew it was still important, and she knew everything she had done up to this point would be worth it as long as she could finally get it finished. But what was it?
She took a deep breath. Why had the moon stood out to her so much, back then? Why the moon, and not the sun, or the stars, or the mountains, or the oceans, or any other number of things?
She looked at the moon and tried to remember.
She had thought the moon was lonely.
She had thought the moon was lonely, because she was lonely.
But the important part of it wasn’t that she didn’t want to be alone, even though that was a big part of it.
The important part was that she didn’t want anyone else to be alone.
Ganymede pulled herself up onto the ledge. She had finally reached her destination.
The cavern entrance was a large one, maybe the biggest one in the mountain, she wasn’t sure. After all, mountains weren’t her realm of expertise, as her aching limbs were reminding her right now. Still, the entrance felt very big, to her.
But the size of the entrance wasn’t the part that was important to her, but rather, what was inside of it. Ganymede hadn’t been sure that this was where she would find what she was looking for, but she had had a hunch, and she had found evidence for that hunch as she had looked into sightings in the area. Now, as she saw the soft glow emanating from within, she was certain she had found the right place.
As she kept stepping forward, she felt a deep tension rise in her body, a tension she hadn’t felt since her time in the Lunites. A kind of almost overwhelming anxiety, but one laced with anticipation of something that needed to be done. Just like back when she thought she was finally reaching the moon. Now her entire body hurt both physically and emotionally, but as always, she needed to see this journey through to the end.
She walked to the end of the cavern, and found who she had come to see.
And reflected in Sjöfn’s face was a disarray of emotions that Ganymede understood all too well.
Here we go