The Wood Where Things Have No Names

Jade, in The Wood Where Things Have No Names, is described as a young woman in a garden in winter and she begins her monologue as if she had been speaking earlier:  “So she goes through the mirror to the room on the other side where everything is reversed and time behaves strangely.”  She speaks of how everything is jumbled up and things are not what they seem, that you forget what you want to remember and remember what you want to forget so that all the good things disappear and only the bad things stay.  Something is always wrong on the other side of the looking-glass.  She says the test of whether anything is real or not is if it makes you happy.  If it does, then it isn’t real. Being in love, she says, is like writing a play in which everyone is miscast, but you don’t realize it until half way through the second act.  She says it is beginning to snow and in the wood where things have no names, there is no future and no past, only a perfect whiteness.  You look in the mirror and nobody is there.