My name was Alice. I was a girl.

When I was six years old, I met a spirit.

I was running. Back then, I was always running. I was always in a hurry, I was always in a rush, I always had somewhere I wanted to be. Everywhere I went, I was running full-tilt, and everything I did I rushed through. I didn’t stop to think about anything, I didn’t stop to look at anything. To look was not the point. The point was to get there before anyone else and to exult in my speed. “Windswept,” my mother would say, and she would pat my runaway hair into place.

On this particular day, I was running into a forest. My grandmother’s forest, as it had always been in my mind, was such a dark and mysterious place and, curious soul that I was, I was desperate to explore. She had never told me I couldn’t go, and so in childish innocence I assumed that I could. And so, with a head full of creatures and shadows and running, I ran into the trees.

The first thing I knew was that it was very dark. The trees were so high and their roots wrapped up in the air and you couldn’t even see the sky above you for how thick the leaves grew. I ran and I ran and I ran until I didn’t know where I was anymore, which was of course just part of the adventure.

When I saw him, I knew he wasn’t right. It wasn’t obvious, it wasn’t frightening, it wasn’t off-putting…it was just there. I just knew that he wasn’t supposed to be there, just as I knew that I wasn’t supposed to see him. And, of course, being a child, I didn’t care. All I knew is that he was my age, he was alone, and he looked like he was having more fun than I was. He was tossing a ball around and chasing it and catching it, but he wasn’t laughing. In fact, he wasn’t even smiling.

He asked me to play with him and I did. I don’t know how long we played, or how long we talked afterward. I told him that I was a human, and he told me that he wasn’t. We didn’t exchange names, in typical child fashion. But even back then, I knew that his eyes were too old. Though they shone with fun and laughter, they were not the eyes of a child nor the eyes of a human. I didn’t care back then, more than content just to sit and play with my new friend.

Whenever I visited my grandmother, I would go out to the forest and play with him. Sometimes he wasn’t there and I’d play with myself, or just run through the forest trying to find something to do. I never looked for him, though I had already decided at seven that I was very much in love with him. I knew I would never find him, no matter how hard I looked, and I would have to entertain myself with other quarries.

After that, I began to see things, or ghosts of things, at first only in the forest, and then outside as well. It only happened sometimes, and they never talked to me. I only ever tried to approach one, chasing it through the streets and into a river. I was wet to my shoulders before I finally gave up and decided that the chase wasn’t worth it. I got used to it, with time. They began to become familiar, a part of life I knew and even welcomed. I began to ignore them, began to accept them. It became easier when I realized they cared as much about me as I would care about an ant in a windowsill.

When I moved away from my grandmother’s, I stopped seeing things as often. I’d see them every now and then, but they always vanished when I turned my head, and I stopped paying them any attention. I began to miss them, and my attempts to recreate them in paint or ink failed miserably. They were not of this world, and it was a foolish task to try and drag them here.

But every time I went to visit my grandmother, though my visits were much less frequent, I still went out to the forest to talk to him. I continued to grow, but he didn’t. It didn’t matter. When I saw him, I was six again and my heart was just as caught in wonder as the very first time. But the days when he wasn’t there when I arrived began to grow more and more frequent, and the moments that I was taller than he was became more and more noticeable, and soon I gave up going, knowing he wouldn’t be there when I arrived. He had little use for me now that I was tall and beautiful and blooming.

As I got older, my life got quieter. My love of running, that beautiful quality that had brought the spirits to me, slowly faded away until I was moving sluggishly through life. My silent companions began to fade and my trips into the forest ceased altogether. The human world had claimed me again and I loathed it. I had no more use for running and I had no more use for life. In dreams I yearned for my childhood, when I was certain to catch a glimpse of a fantastical half-thing lurking in a sunbeam.

I drifted through school, spending more time staring out windows than doing my work, spending more time running in my head than rifling through books. By the time I was eighteen, what few friends I had left drifted away, and my now-faded existence slipped from their minds as easily as water through a net. I watched them go and I merely mourned their existence, slow, boring, and so very human.

I think there was a boy, someone who thought he was attracted to my spaciness, my constant dreaming, my absence in life. He would follow me everywhere I wandered, would listen when the rare urge took me to speak, and wove me new dreams that briefly, just briefly, broke me out of my old ones. Soon, he too was left behind, not in a rush or in a hurry, or in any malicious manner. To be honest, I don’t remember. One moment he was there, the next he was gone. Some days I even wonder if I imagined him up. He wasn’t a spirit, that much I knew, but that didn’t necessarily mean he was a human either.

When I got a little bit older, I dropped out of school and moved in with my grandmother, in her faraway house with the huge forest with the blue air and the spirits. She didn’t mind my dreaming. She understood the pull, or so she said. She let me wander out into the fields and into the river and into the road, and she never asked me why I never had the courage to go into the forest. She was glad of it, I think. She always used to lecture me about moderation.

I don’t know how old I was when I Left. I don’t know why. But one day, my fear went away and I heard the voices calling my name. I kissed my grandmother goodbye, cutting my lip on the stone, and I left all my things and I went into the forest.

It was just like I remembered. The air was so dark that it was blue, the trees were so tall that you lost them, the sky was so far gone that you almost forgot it existed. I wandered and wandered and wandered and walked and walked and walked until I was lost. And while I was out in the forest, I began to see them again.

At first, they lingered on the edge of my vision, as always. Then, slowly but surely, they began to approach me and then, finally, to talk to me. They never said anything of consequence, and I never spoke back, but perhaps that’s what they liked. Days would pass by with me just lying there listening to a story told to me by a spirit. Sometimes I would tell them a story, usually something I had heard days before.

One day, I decided I needed a place, a place just for me. I climbed into a tree, sitting high in its branches, protected and vulnerable. I stayed there for who knew how long, swapping stories and watching the world silently like the human I was. And then, finally, I died.

It wasn’t a sudden realization, my death. I just looked down at myself and saw that I was dying. My heart was stopping, my breath was slowing, my vision was going dim. All I could see were the spirits gathered around me, watching me with their big hungry eyes. But just beyond them, just over their shoulders, I saw something that caught at my heart. Yes, my heart, which had remained untouched and unmoved since I was six years old, moved at this little sight, this very last glimpse of the world of the living.

I saw a sparrow, sitting on the branch. Though he was small, he was glorious, and without a single care in the world, he spread his little wings and flew away, leaving only a few tiny feathers behind to remember his presence. And as I died, I thought to myself, wouldn’t it be just wonderful if I were as free as that sparrow, and could fly high into the sky forever.

They say life is cruel, that life has a sense of humor that is sick and twisted, but I think that death is far more so. For when I found myself again, my bones were light and my heart was large and my love belonged to the empty blue of the sky.

My name was Alice. I am a sparrow. When I was very young, I died. And now that I am old, I realize that didn’t matter.