From then on, he’d decided, he’d do the opposite of everything that he’d always done. Since he hadn’t liked the way that his life had been going because of the kind of person that he’d been until then, to do the opposite would have to be the right thing to do, wouldn’t it? Today had been going to be Opposite Day, if he’d have anything to say about it.
He would walk through the looking glass, and never look back.
He’d been sure that he’d have to end up somewhere, if only he’d walked long enough.
He’d ended up walking into a forest, which had only seemed like a very small portion of woodland when he’d looked at it from the outside. At first he’d thought nothing of it, assuming that he’d walk right out the other side before he’d know it. After hours and hours of having walked further and further into it, he began to wonder if he’d somehow become smaller, or if it had been the forest around him which had been becoming bigger around him.
The dark foliage around him had been as beautiful and scary at once as only his newfound freedom and responsibility for his own survival could have made it to his eyes at the time. Bugs crawled under logs, babbling brooks babbled, and stumps of long dead trees commemorated the location of those trees’ lives and deaths like gravestones. Cawing, croaking and buzzing sounds had echoed in the dark from behind the ferns, leaving him to imagine what manner of creature could have been emitting each and every sound he’d heard. It occurred to him he hadn’t had as much survival training as he’d have liked.
So he began to sing.
He sang softly and gingerly to himself, hoping not to attract the wrong kind of attention but singing to hold on to a sense of his own existence against the dark of night. He’d have rather have brought a machete to cut some of the lush vegetation out of his way, but for lack of one, a song on his lips would have to do for now. At least it vaguely cheered him up.
‘El cameleon cambia de colores segun la ocasion,
Tu corazon cambia de colores como el cameleon...’
He’d reached a clearing, and first thought that he must’ve been hearing an echo from somewhere. It had sounded as though the same song that he had just been singing had been being sung back to him from somewhere else somehow. So he’d stopped singing altogether and, when the song that he’d been hearing had continued unabated, a chill had gone down his striped spine. Had he been dreaming or hallucinating somehow, he’d asked himself? Had he been on some kind of bad trip that he hadn’t known about? He’d rubbed his eyes in disbelief as various multicolored pixels had seemed to have been coalescing right in front of him.
No, it had to have been real. There was just no way it hadn’t.
As the humming had tirelessly continued, Klein had begun to be able to slowly distinguish them forming the outline of a person’s silhouette, swaying like leaves to the breeze to the song that had been being sung. Swirling colors had finally settled on green as eyes that had been spinning around looking each and every which way independently from each other had finally settled on him.
“That’s a nice song,” the chameleon had told him. “Where do you know it from?” he’d asked the skunk. “Uh...” The reptile had tilted his head at him. “Cat got your tongue?” He’d pursed his lips with his extensible tongue casually. “Who... are... you...?” Klein had asked him.
“Boko, at your service,” he’d said with a flourish. “And you are?”
Klein’s parents had taught him not to talk to strangers. “I’m Klein.” His parents had taught him a lot of things. “What brings you to the forest, Klein?” Klein had scratched his head. “I’m not really sure. I had nowhere else to be.” Boko had smiled at him reassuringly. “That’s all right. The forest has a purpose in mind for everyone.” Klein jumped as another mysterious animal sound resonated through the wilderness. “Sometimes I worry what that purpose might be.” He had been walking for a long time, far along into the night. “Does the forest scare you, Klein?” The chameleon had clicked his tongue disapprovingly.
“I just like it better in the daytime, I guess,” Klein had admitted, with a smile that had asked for understanding. Darkness hid the unknown. “Ah, we’re all scared of what we don’t understand, aren’t we?” The skunk had certainly been on the receiving end of that. “We are.” He was listening. “I’m sure that, if you understood the forest, you’d no longer be scared of it,” Boko had assured him. “Are you offering to help me with that?” At that point, Klein would’ve been willing to get all the help he could get. “There are a lot of things I can help you understand, Klein... if you’d like,” he’d winked at the skunk. “And the forest is one of them?”
Boko had grinned, changing his skin color back to meld with the colors and outlines of the trees around them just as he had before he and Klein had just met while spreading out his arms. “Of course I do, I am the forest, can’t you see?” The skunk had chuckled as the chameleon had innocently retaken his usual green color in front of him. “I like you. You’re funny.” Boko had shifted his skin to a bright red. “You lie,” he’d said with false humility. “I like your singing,” the chameleon had added while shifting his skin back to green. “Oh, it’s not really that good,” the skunk had waved off. “Do you sing, Boko?” But Boko hadn’t heard his question.
“Oh, look... The sun is coming up...!”
Boko had announced this to Klein as though he’d made one of the most solemn revelations that someone could make. He’d only ever heard straight men reveal the scores of some of their sports games with this kind of level of reverence. It’d sounded as though Boko really hadn’t been certain until that point as to whether or not the sun had been going to come up that day, as though the fate of all people had hung in the balance until the moment of sunrise.
In an instant, Boko had used his tail to propel himself upward up to a tree branch above him. Grabbing the branch with his arms, he’d swung his legs up between his arms behind him, bringing them back forward over the branch to swing his body up and sit up on it. Standing on the branch to face the coming dawn, he’d breathed in deeply with his arms outstretched and his palms upturned, enraptured by the light washing over him as he’d drank in its warmth.
He’d begun to sing.
It’d seemed as though every possible color of the rainbow had coursed through Boko’s kaleidoscopic body as he’d chanted to the sun that he’d been so ecstatic to welcome into a new day. The forest rang around them with a hymn that had seldom been heard since before settlers had come from across the sea. As a reptile, the sun was the source of energy that the chameleon’s body used to recharge its batteries. He was like a tree. Its warmth gave him life and made it holy.
At that moment, Klein so wished he could have been Boko himself! It’d seemed so fun.
When he had finished singing, Boko had used his tail to break his fall after he’d jumped back down to the ground from his branch. He’d looked rejuvenated. “Maybe you’re right,” he’d told the skunk, “maybe it is much better in the daytime after all,” he’d winked at him. “Did you come up with that?” Klein had sounded impressed. “No, I could never have come up with that,” Boko had shrugged off. “It’s a hymn to Inti, the sun god of the ancient Inca.”
There had been something so refreshing to Klein about hearing about the gods that had existed here before Christianity had shown up. “Do you actually worship him?” The skunk hadn’t wanted to be rude, but he’d always been curious about other people’s beliefs, and about how their experiences could have shaped them to have been the way they were. “I worship everything, Klein. I’m an animist.” The skunk had gasped.
“You don’t say! I’d never met another animist before.” He’d been an animist after all, he’d decided then and there. For the purposes of this conversation, he had been. It was almost as though his prayers had been answered, paradoxically enough. “You must be tired after spending the whole night walking through the woods on your own,” the chameleon had observed, “would you like me to help you find somewhere to get some sleep, perhaps?”
Klein had stopped and thought about it. It’d sounded like such a convenient lure to have come up at just the right time the way it had, on an intellectual level, but from an emotional standpoint, he’d felt completely at ease around Boko. He’d just gotten an incredibly positive vibe from him somehow. The chameleon had aroused his curiosity enough to make him want to see what the rest of his life must have been like. “Thanks, if you’re okay with that,” he’d answered.
“You must have quite a story to tell about how you ended up here tonight,” the reptile had pondered, “You should write it down someday, maybe.” Klein had never thought about that. “Why do you think that?” Boko had looked at him seriously this time. “You should always do everything you can to remember your past,” the chameleon had told him, “It’s the most important thing there is.”
On their way back through the forest to Boko’s dwelling, the chameleon had shifted his body’s color to black and white in just the right way to make himself look like a skunk, just like Klein was. Klein had laughed, seeing a literal manifestation of the vibe that he’d been getting from Boko that he’d found a kindred spirit in him that would be a breath of fresh air for him. He hadn’t been sure of whether he should’ve said anything about it or not after how things had gone the previous time he had felt that way and said something, but he’d had to admit to himself that, whether it’d be reciprocated or not, he’d been developing a serious crush on Boko.
