Every Adventure Begins With A Return

You’re never too old to begin.

Savannah stared at the journal, her palms sweating. She rubbed them on her housecoat, then cinched it tighter across her generous waist. Slowly, she sagged into a chair at the kitchen table.

It was a strange journal.

Not strange in how it looked—black leather, faded gilt edges, gently worn, like it had been well used and cared for over many years. The handmade design was fancier than she’d choose for herself, but not particularly peculiar. She could picture its maker, hunched over a worktable, painstakingly sewing the pages together into a spine.

No, the journal’s mystery wasn’t in its cover or its pages, but in the tremors it left inside her. Oh, how it made her feel.

Anxious.

Excited.

Powerful.

Guilty.

She didn’t know why.

She didn’t know where the journal had come from. When Savannah had come into the kitchen that morning, soft sunlight drifting through the cottage’s open window over the sink, it had just been there. Placed in the precise centre of the table. Closed. Waiting.

So much possibility.

Savannah’s hand shook as she pulled the journal toward her. The leather felt cold and coarse beneath her callused fingers. The birdsong she made her tea to every morning had gone silent. Her breath was ragged, too loud, too old in the quiet.

Her mother had always warned her: If you keep turning life’s adventures away, Sunshine, eventually they’ll stop knocking.

Savannah had thought they stopped knocking long ago. Back when her hair wasn’t streaked through with grey. Back when her ankle didn’t twinge every time the temperature dipped below freezing. Back when her cottage came filled with friends and lovers and her mother’s madcap laughter.

“Adventure,” she murmured, brushing her fingers across the journal’s cover.

A pen rolled across the kitchen table. Fear slammed into Savanah. She jerked backward, almost tipping her chair over. “Well, hell’s bells.”

She white-knuckled the edge of the table, held on until it didn’t feel like she was about to vibrate right out of her skin. Anxiety. Excitement. Power. Guilt.

The pen was in Savannah’s hand. She couldn’t remember picking it up. The journal was open to a blank page. She couldn’t remember turning to it. A current was running through her body that she couldn’t ground.

Savannah put trembling pen to paper. She wrote five words.

Give me back my mother.

A knock at the cottage’s front door broke the silence.

She froze. The pen clattered from her hand. No one ever came to the cottage. Not anymore.

Another knock. Firmer this time. Demanding.

Savannah stood, the chair legs scraping against weathered tile. Her housecoat snagged on the table corner, anchoring her for a moment—as if giving her a chance to change her mind.

She didn’t.

She walked to the door. Her hand hesitated at the knob. Adventure, she had said. The tingling, sticky taste of fear on the back of her tongue was something she’d have to get used to. If she was to be an adventurer.

Savannah opened the door.

And stared.

On the porch stood a young woman. Barefoot. Soaked to the skin, though the sky outside was clear. Her hair was long and wild, chestnut brown with a streak of silver right where her mother’s had always been. She looked like—

“Savannah?” the girl asked, blinking like she hadn’t spoken in years.

Savannah gripped the doorframe. “Yes?”

“I- I think I’m lost,” she said, uncertain. “I woke up in the woods…and then I was here. I don’t remember…”

“What’s your name?” Savannah whispered. “Do you remember?”

The girl pressed a hand to her heart, shivering. “Alberta. My name is Alberta.”

Savannah’s knees wobbled, almost buckled. Her mother’s name. But this wasn’t her mother. Couldn’t be. And yet the girl’s eyes were exactly the same soft hazel. The same tilt to her nose. The same—

“Come in,” Savannah heard herself say. She realized she was blocking the doorway, and stumbled backward.

Alberta glanced down at her feet. “Are you sure?”

No. She wasn’t sure of anything anymore. Except that her life had changed. That she had written five words and the journal had answered. Anxiety-excitement-power-guilt.

Savannah nodded shakily. Alberta stepped inside. The birdsong resumed outside, tentative and sweet and just a little bit bleak.

Back at the kitchen table, the journal lay open. The ink from Savannah’s words shimmered like wet paint. Or blood. Beneath them, in a slash of handwriting that wasn’t hers, a new sentence had appeared.

Every adventure begins with a return.

Savannah closed the journal and set a second teacup beside the stove.

Let the adventure begin.