There I was, maybe eight years old, with a shovel in my hand coming up to my eyebrows, and a plan in my head the size of Wattle Park. Or maybe bigger, but I was not a cartographer, and besides, I had time.
I was going to dig a tunnel. It would take me a while, but I'd find you. Dad said there were pipes and sewers in my way, and I imagined other things, like coffins and kobolds and fossils and lava. Many tangential adventures, and I would relish all of them, but my eyes were on the prize. I think I dreamed of it every night. The last spadeful, showering dirt all over my head, as I poked up from the tunnel into your backyard.
It always happened by moonlight, with your parents sound asleep, your father snoring loudly, your mother shifting uncomfortably, and you half awake, as though you'd had some premonition. It was going to be so amazing.
I dug.
Now that I think about it, I was digging the wrong way. For one thing, I only went three feet down, and you have to go deeper to avoid pipes and meet kobolds, but perhaps I thought I'd burrow as the need arose. The greater problem is that I was heading west, and you were due north, so the route was undeniably circuitous.
But I had time.
Did I turn over the earth. I spent a morning at it, digging until I was completely submerged, until all that could be seen were my muddy sneakers, until I felt the tight panic of claustrophobia, until I was unsure of my workmanship. I didn't really know the circumstances that might precipitate a cave-in. I was woefully underprepared, now that I think about it. I hadn't even packed lunch. I was pulling dirt from in front and below me, and pushing it above and behind me. The hole was scarcely a spade wide, scarcely a spade tall, and only because the spade was bigger than my head. But if I was digging my own grave, I was thinking only of you, and the bright moonlight as I wriggled up through the hole into your backyard.
I had to call for help, and Dad grabbed me by the ankles and hauled me out. He said I should make the hole a little bigger, mate. He didn't say I was going in the wrong direction. Perhaps he thought I was taking the scenic route.
I stuck at it, and made the hole a little wider, and probably in the dark I was grinning like a fool, because I was thinking of the look on your face as I tapped on your window, a mud monster, a knight with a shovel for a lance, an inveterate Casanova whom no tyrant could imprison, to whom the under-creatures of the Earth held no fear.
That night I dreamed of the tunnel, like for night after night I had dreamed of the tunnel, and of you, with your great dark brown ringlets and your eight-year-old mysteries. The next morning maybe I figured that with progress of three feet down and three feet along, it would likely take me a while. But I had time.
I dug until lunchtime, and Dad brought me lunch, sandwiches with too much margarine, so I knew he had made them himself, and I squeezed the pale yellow stuff through the holes in the bread and flicked it against the fence of the sideway. He gave me a grin and said it looks like rain mate. I wasn't worried about that — I had my tunnel to keep me dry. I picked up the spade and wormed down into the hole.
The sky crackled and opened, and let loose a torrent that became a flood, and when my socks were drenched I squirmed back out. I looked up and realised I had a problem.
The tunnel became a puddle that became a pond. A week later, my father disappeared down the sideway. The next time I visited your tunnel, there was a rusty little treefern in it.
This is a way we've never met. It joins other ways, like face down in the mud, by, well, mud, and by accident, by indirect routes.