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Enchanted Forest, they said.
Always be there, playing, they said.
Anybody who is Friendly with Bears can find us, they said.
Anybody who Believes.
Perhaps.
Nobody looks, these days.
Not since He grew up, left, went away, re-evaluated it all, wrote about his neuroses and psychoses, and turned it all around. Fortunately, you had to have a Brain to read it.
I didn’t feel the need to tell them. Let them remember their glory days, let them stay in their enchanted imaginings.
But sometimes, when they’re reliving it all – well. I never was one for Song and Dance, Gaiety, umpty-tiddly, umpty-too.
So it’s quiet down here, in this Gloomy Place where no-one ever did come much.
My Own Little Corner, with a House in it.
It isn’t Cosy. Not so very Cosy at all, at three o’clock in the morning, when the wind howls, and the sky is dark, and I am alone, and I wonder – wonder what any of it meant.
Why?
Wherefore?
Inasmuch as which?
No, between ourselves, it isn’t cosy at all.
Of course, from time to time they come by, and visit, all of those who ever did.
Sometimes they speculate why He doesn’t come back, or when He will, or If He will bring someone new and small with him, be reborn, make us all anew.
I don’t tell them.
They Mean Well.
That’s the best you can say for them, they Mean Well.
They haven’t any brain, none of them, just small bits of fluff.
Oh, they think they have, at least, some of them do, but that isn’t Real Brain, not Intelligence.
Rabbit, now, Rabbit’s all very well if you want something organised, but you try discussing Descartes’ theories, or the Heisenberg Principle, and you’ll soon find he’s – busy.
It’s not really a conversation when one person’s tail is only just in view for half of it.
Owl, then, you say, Owl – well, Owl can spell Tuesday. You can’t help but respect someone who can spell Tuesday.
Well, perhaps.
If he could spell it right, maybe I would.
As it is, he lives in the past, in a world of his great-uncle, his grandfather, a world of important and interesting things happening – and this is the important point – to other people.
I don’t call that very Intellectually Stimulating.
The others – fluff.
Harmless enough, in their way, but still just fluff.
It gets lonely sometimes.
Rabbit has all his Friends and Relations, Owl has his memories. Kanga, Tigger and Roo – as close a little family of three as you could imagine, pleasant to outsiders, but they don’t really Notice Other People.
Pooh’n’Piglet – even the names run together. Hand in hand, always Sure of Each Other.
When you don’t have hands – or paws – you wonder what that would be like, Sometimes.
When you don’t have anyone whose name runs with yours.
When Rabbit organdises an expotition, and they all join in, believing that one day, one day He will come back.
When I know the truth, and they Bounce content in their pretty fables.
But there it is.
We Can’t All, and some of us Don’t.