I Wish

Chapter 62

This was… this was insane. This whole place looked like a kiddie book picture in a  Christmas book. There was a perfect circle, like you walked up the freaking mountain up to the snow covered plateau and saw this? This sparkling, glittering, twinkling, absolutely massive tree? The snow was so iridescent it straight up glowed.I hadn’t felt the kind of pulse thrumming excitement about Christmas since I was a little girl, determined to stay awake all of Christmas Eve night to wait and see Santa. Actually, I thought with my neck craning hopelessly in an attempt to see the top of the tree, there was a thought. Where was Santa? Seriously, I was looking at this thing all I could think was where... the... fuck... was Santa? If a sleigh and reindeer showed up, my brain would be totally on board because if he was real… and there was once again doubt because if everything here was legit then there were some serious possibilities, then who the hell else’s Christmas tree could this possibly be? Whoever was responsible, I want them to come and decorate my place this year… or Ivy’s, or both because let's face it. If I get the chance to double dip Christmas this year and do it twice over, I’m doing it. No hesitation, and no f**k’s given. I love Christmas, it’s like a little apology for all the crappy things that happened during the year. Correction. I should clarify, I only love Christmas because someone else was in charge of organising and cleaning up those things, I’m not completely nuts. I’m sure that my enthusiasm would drop if I ever got to graduate to the level of an adult where I was hosting them. I’d help at home more than the catering I do every year, cooking turkeys and making potato salad and stuff, but I wasn’t any good at organising. Comes from having overly prepared parents. Anyway I was rambling, and who could blame me? This was amazing, and where did the ornaments come from?! Who put up the tinsel and the lights? Because when I say Christmas tree, I do mean a CHRISTMAS TREE! With all the traps, and trimmings, and baubles, and oh my god! I wondered briefly if there was a star or an angel on top, because there was no way that someone hadn’t put one on there after going all out like that. Whichever way they went with it, there was no way I would be able to see it from here. It was so high up that actual clouds blocked my view. If I got to the top of this thing there was no need to hold out on Covid disappearing so I could take a trip to visit SkyPoint. To give you some idea of how big exactly this thing was you need to stack two and a half of them one on top of the other and even then that was just what I could see up until this point. Oh god, this is just so unreal. I loved it. Pre-climb, I loved it. I feel the need to be very clear about this.

“I’m never going to let myself forget a single second of this,” I promised myself solemnly, before moving forward and trying to find a way up this bad boy. I had no idea about how I was going to go about this, but it was happening. I would figure it out, and if I tried to do that standing here I was just going to be staring like a stunned mullet from now until the end of time. The way I saw it my best option was to make like Nike and just do it. Whatever problems come up I’d deal with as they arose, and there were going to be many. Asbently, I notice the way I’m almost vibrating out of my skin in excitement and seconds away from squealing like a fan girl. Brightly wrapped boxes were packed tightly underneath the tree. The amount of room between the lowest branches and the floor was astounding. All different shapes, sizes and colours. Taller than I was, easily. To give some kind of scale to these… Ah, sorry the things I was about to equate them to are sort of brain bending to process, and I’d been told that my brain melting out of my ears is a legitimate thing that can happen here. The big ones, the ones that would have had stuff like dolls houses or bikes for humans, were the size of small apartment buildings here... I am not even f*****g kidding. The medium ones were the size of houses, some two stories and others one, but all of them huge. Scattered around were what were supposed to be smaller gifts. Some of these ‘smaller gifts’ were as big as large boulder-like rocks, and others were the size of four wheel drives. Yeah, that was… I could feel my fingers twitching and I swallowed. Don’t think about how hard it’s going to be. Instead I decided to wonder about if they could possibly hold anything inside, and if they did then what the hell was that big? They were covered in tears and scuff marks. As if they’d been used as stepping stones for a long, long time. The brightly-colored ribbons, and string that looked more like climbing aids, and reinforcement for the bridges that had been built. Fallen branches, or in some cases what looked like timber designed for the job, had been secured to form them. The lowest branches formed a snow glistening green canopy above me, so high that no matter how hard I could throw something it would never touch them,  and somehow I was going to have to get up there.

“People wouldn’t have built bridges all the way to the top if it wasn’t necessary,” I groaned sadly, pained about the theory, and looking upwards in resignation, and took the time to acknowledge that I really needed to stop talking to myself. It was just, it wasn’t like there was anybody else here to talk to. Saying things out loud sort of helped to process what was happening as real instead of a fever dream of some kind. It’s like every time I think that I’ve seen enough that I was ready for anything that this world could throw at me, something else unbelievable would happen, like hello! I believe that you were unprepared for me. Also, I was wrong. They did not build it because it was necessary. It was really more of a choose your own difficulty thing, and boy was I pissed off when I realised that. Once again, I was seriously under where I was supposed to be fitness wise, and this was not the best way to help with that. This was the most brutal way to deal with that. The easiest way up seemed to involve climbing onto a damaged present with torn shiny silver paper, and grabbing a dangling blue ribbon from the next one over. It was grubby, like people had come this way all the time. There were dirty handprints, and suspicious red brown stains that I did my best to avoid. This particular present had been climbed on so much that most of the paper had been shredded off. The reminantes being held on by string, and finished with a particularly beat-up bow. One of those weird circular curling messes, that come individually with doublesidedThe paper made it a pain in the ass to get up there. In fact, everything that was silver happened to be extremely slippery, making the white unadorned outside of the box a much better option, but even then… The paper was no help, shredded in random bits all over the place, bunching under my feet and ruining any and all chance of leverage. I grunted, and forced myself to work harder. I was going. Up. The f*****g tree. I was and I did not care one whit how hard it was to do it. Once I’d gotten up there... thinking that the worst was over, and I’m dead. With hindsight that concept was hilarious enough that anyone with experience with this place was going to start dying with laughter. I’m thinking that the less I say about that the better. I straightened up, and fussed with my clothes. Red faced, with a stitch, and breathing hard but up there nonetheless, I looked up at how far I had to go. It was a loooooooooooot…. Plenty of rocky, iffy looking bridges, tractionally unhelpful wrapping paper, slippery ribbons of death and that wasn’t even counting the tree itself. This was just the part working to get to that, and briefly I had to wonder if I was nuts… probably, but I was going. It didn’t matter that this seemed to be a random thing that was going to get me no closer to Ivy, and more than likely killed in the process. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t actually sure if the top was something that was actually accessible and not just a concept that you could never reach. Like tomorrow. I was going.

And was going to be so totally freaking worth it!