Wallpaper

My magical Chinese garden was small: tiny willows pagodas and mulberry trees emerging serenely from the mist pastelwise like Shangri-La over and over on the far side of an equally diminutive stream under a parchment sky. Slipping unnoticed over the footbridge at the top of the stairs I’d wait alone under the willow overhanging the bank ribbonfluttering silvergreen in the breeze where their wintry silences couldn’t reach me, hoping that maybe I’d meet another child like me escaping into the garden through the wallpaper in her house but we moved away unexpectedly before that happened.