I remember the day my grandmother told me this story.
The story I am going to tell you now, the story that intrigued me then and still haunts me now.
It is not important, or maybe it is, that my grandmother wasn’t, strictly, my grandmother. She was grand, that’s certainly true: grand. An old woman, older than I am now, though I never knew exactly her age. She looked old, wrinkles lining the fall of her cheek and the edges of her eyes. Her eyes were deep, deep blue; when it was blue overhead they shone with a turquoise quality and when the clouds rolled in they became slate blue, dark and threatening. I caught a reflection of her once in a mirror, an old gilt framed mirror, covered in dust, so weathered at the edges that often you could pass it in the dark corridor it looked over without noticing any sort of reflection at all. But once I did, and though I didn't believe it then, I believe it now. My grandmother wasn’t old at all, she looked it certainly, but she never walked with the gait you might expect, she was quick and nimble and her fingers moved with a dexterity that belied the old frame she hid inside.
I had fallen in the street and Granny took me in, a little graze really, even though I still have something of the purple stain of grease and dirt that pushed itself up and under the skin; she bathed my knee and applied a little iodine, followed with a hot cup of sugary tea. I wanted to ask her where the tea came from; it was delicious, unlike anything mm bought in. It came from an old beaten tin, writing marking the sides but faded now. I still have it, a special day indeed when I found it.
On the second sip of my tea, when the last tear had been wiped away, she looked into my eye and held the side of my head.
Sadness is a funny thing she said. It can come and go. You came through the door tears everywhere, but where are they now. Sadness lives in tears. Sadness sits behind your eyes and mine, longing to be let out, shared and comforted. The first day Sadness came in to the world it came in the form of the first tear. A little girl like you was lost. A little girl, dirty and ragged and lost in the woods. Before that day the world was a very different place, and very different to the one we live in today.
