#larquill

Lyrics and Inspiration: Fairytale by Alexander Rybak

Years ago, when I was younger,

I kinda liked a girl I knew.

She was mine, and we were sweethearts.

That was then, but then it's true.

Two children, hair wild around their heads like messy halos, dirt clinging to the edges of their clothes and mud stuck between their toes. Smiles on their faces growing as wide as their eyes at each new thing. A stick bug looking for food. A deer stepping lightly through a forest. The call of a bird, shrill and loud above the gentle sounds of the forest.

Dipper’s cap is long forgotten. He doesn’t need to hide, not out here. His birthmark is clearly visible, freckles in an odd pattern, connected by a shaky line of pen. Wirt says he looks cool.

And Wirt, forever cold, even with the warm sun beating down on their backs, closed up in his cape. The ends are frayed and covered in burs, but the blue stands out brilliantly against all the green. Dipper doesn’t ask. It’s not important.

It’s a summer of laughter and running wildly through the woods, shouting Catch me, catch me! And hiding in thickets. Neither of them wants to leave.

But growing up is impossible to avoid, and both have their responsibilities. Dipper packs up his gap-toothed grin and Wirt abandons his dissonant laughter. The wind is ready for winter, and they say see you later!  instead of goodbye. 

I'm in love with a fairytale

Even though it hurts.

'Cause I don't care if I lose my mind.

I'm already cursed.

Sometimes Wirt is there. Sometimes he isn’t. Dipper is thirteen, his voice hoarse from changing hormones and from screaming into the silence hoping for some kind of response. He thinks he sees blue through the leaves, but it’s the sky, and he wants to give up.

A childhood of silly games and happy giggles is a fading memory. Dipper wonders if he dreamed it. 

The awkward smile seems like a curse, haunting him at the back of his mind when he wonders what he did wrong.

Dipper has never been one for sitting around doing nothing, so instead he does something. He picks himself up and starts writing. He documents the way the temperature seems to drop around certain parts of the wood. He illustrates in rapidly-improving style the odd twists of the trees. He finds the money for a library computer pass and does whatever research he can. Maybe he doesn’t have time for anything else. He knows it’s worth it.

Every day we started fighting,

Every night we fell in love.

No one else could make me sadder,

But no one else could lift me high above.

Dipper is fifteen. Two years of research have given him a book of matches and bags beneath his eyes. The forest seems colder than he remembers when he steps into it for the first time this summer. Nine months of seasons and he still knows where each root and rock is, carefully making his way to the center even when he can’t see his feet.

The match casts shadows over the trees around him, turning the knotted wood into pained, twisted bodies, calling out for his help. Dipper isn’t there for them.

He steps closer to Wirt’s favorite tree, a towering mess of tangled limbs and leaves. The blaze of the match is nothing compared to the blaze of his eyes. 

“Please,” comes the voice from behind him. Dipper spins around, his match extinguishing. In the shadows he can only make out the vague shape of a cloak. “Don’t do this,” the voice whispers.

“Why not?” Dipper asks, arms crossed because even if he can’t see Wirt, he knows Wirt can see him, and it’s important that Wirt know how pissed he is. 

There’s a pause. “You know what I am, then?”

“I have an idea,” Dipper says, and it’s so hard to keep malice in his tone when Wirt sounds like that. 

Wirt sighs and his shadow melts a bit. “I’m sorry, I couldn't-”

“Sorry?” Dipper interrupts. He actually wasn’t expecting an apology. “You abandoned me. You lied to me!”

“Lied? I never-”

“‘See you later’, that’s what you said. It’s later, Wirt! And I can’t even see you!” Wirt’s outline shrinks a bit. “I want more than ‘I’m sorry’, now. I want an explanation.”

The silence of the forest becomes deafening for a long moment. Dipper has to cover his ears, and then Wirt is speaking again. “Come again tomorrow, in the day. I’ll… explain what I can.”

“No,” Dipper pulls his hands from his ears. “Everything.”

“...Right. Everything.”

I don't know what I was doing

When suddenly we fell apart.

Nowadays I cannot find her,

But when I do, we'll get a brand new start.

Wirt isn’t there the next day. Or the next. Dipper’s research stagnates, and then one of his journals is lost when a leak in the ceiling soaks the pages beyond legibility. He’s seventeen and walking through the forest when he should be somewhere, anywhere else. He’s given up on seeing Wirt, but something about the air still calms him the way Wirt’s smile always did.

Dipper is eighteen, nineteen, twenty. Every summer he still goes back to the forest. He talks out loud to the rabbits, the raccoons, the birds. He tells them about his life, how he’s doing, asks if they could please let Wirt know he’s okay. Dipper is studying mythology now. He wants to be a researcher. The things he found on his hunt for Wirt lit something within him, and he regrew his passion into something more… productive. Dipper sits on a log, his head in his hands.

“Please, Wirt, I don’t…” Maybe he’s finally going crazy, talking to open air like this. “I’m sorry. I didn’t understand, but I want to. I miss you. Wirt..” 

Dipper imagines the hand on his shoulder, and dreams the cold comfort he gets from it.

I'm in love with a fairytale

Even though it hurts.

'Cause I don't care if I lose my mind.

I'm already cursed.

The forest is no place for a home, not for him. Not for someone whose clothes and hair and mannerisms are all manufactured, manmade, fake. But Dipper stays close, his useless degree at least getting him a job as a forester. He clears fallen trees, checks on the wildlife, chases away hunters(not that the forest needed any help with the last one) and more than anything, he talks to Wirt.

Occasionally Dipper needs extra cash, and he’ll venture into town for odd jobs. The people trust him with their work and nothing else. The crazy man who talks to the trees he lives with. Dipper is fine with that reputation. 

And with time, he’s happy. The forest is calming and protective of him. People are difficult and scary. More and more of his home leaves the grid, until he’s surviving on rainwater and old logs for firewood. He knows Wirt keeps him safe. Wirt is the one who leads him home when the skies darken, or to bushes full of berries when he’s hungry. Maybe he can’t see Wirt, but he’s there, in the trees and in Dipper’s heart.

She's a fairytale, yeah.

Even though it hurts.

'Cause I don't care if I lose my mind.

I'm already cursed.

Dipper hardly notices as he becomes more and more a part of the forest. Leaves in his bed in the morning likely blew through the cracked ceiling, or twigs caught in his hair are from midnight walks through the wood. 

His face sags with content wrinkles and his hands grow knobby. Checking on the trees becomes painful as his joints creak and scream. He fashions a cane from a branch left on his doorstep. Pamphlets advertising retirement are promptly burned. Dipper is old, and in love, and happy.

Soon it isn’t skinned rabbits or firewood on his doorstep. It’s Wirt, his age indeterminate. He’s older than Dipper remembers, though he has the body of a young twenty-something. The only tell of his true age are the bags hanging heavy beneath his eyes.

“You came back,” Dipper says.

“I said I would,” Wirt replies.

“It’s time then?”

Wirt nods. “Is there anything you’d like to say goodbye to?”

Dipper looks about at his home, a rundown cabin on the brink of collapse, nestled on the edge of the forest he loves so much. “No.”

Wirt hums, sways awkwardly. “Are you ready?”

Dipper smiles, and seeing this Wirt relaxes. He smiles back.

Two men, boys, friends, lovers, soulmates meet in an embrace as warm as the sun and strong as the trees. Years of waiting, loving, proving themselves worthy.