Tommie Wieherkekr

Forest

Tommie Wieherkekr was born in Switzerland to Kerstin and Lars Wieherkekr where they lived for three years. Just after her baby brother was born, the family uprooted themselves and moved to Toronto, Canada.

When Tommie was born, her parents couldn't believe just how perfect she turned out. She had her father's nose and her mother's eyes, both features suiting her heart face. She only cried when she was hungry and only kept them awake through the night until she was two months old. Compared to the rest of the children at her mother's motherhood group who screamed, threw up and tried to run away from their parents, little baby Tommie was the dream child to have.

Her room was painted a beautiful pastel purple with white daisies and yellow daffodils added along the skirting boards. Glow in the dark star lights were stuck to the ceiling as well as spare cork-boards that would have all of her achivements pinned to them as she grew up. Both of her parents took as much paternity time as they could to bond with her and even when they had to eventually return to work, she was properly looked after by her grandparents who spoiled her completely rotten.

After they moved to Canada because her baby brother was born, she enrolled in her first primary school in the rural Canadian countryside a few miles away from a snow-covered massive mountain. This broke little Tommie's mind... gazing up at something which was so imposing and monsterous, made her feel so small and inconsequential. This would've normally freak out a small kid like her but she felt her body fill up with excitement as well as a desire to climb the damn thing all the way to the top! When she was sitting in class, she gazed out at the mountains over the hills.

She tried for months on end to try and pursuade her father to let her go outside and explore the wilderness but he always said no. He told her that she was 'too fragile' 'too precious' and 'too small' to do something as dangerous as that and silenced the conversation until she was older. As she was banned from going outside and exploring, she decided to download Minecraft and Raft to explore the outside world while still obeying her father's rules. She connected to the online communities and found out that people shared her love of adventuring and was able to get online resources that would teach her how to safely explore the world on her own as well as instructing her on what equiptment she needed.

As she got older and her parents slowly became less present in their lives, she looked after her brother every day when she got home from high-school, she made sure to give him everything he asked for to help him forget about their parents not really being there for him. Tommie grew up thinking that her parents were perfect, that they loved each other and that was enough for them to be the best parents in the world. However, when she got turned into her brother's full time babysitter without being given a choice otherwise, her perspective changed. She was angry and furious how they'd given up being parents to pursue their own passions, thinking thoughts like, 'if they couldn't handle another kid, then why did they have one?'. One day as she looked after him and the two watched TV together, he fell asleep on her shoulder, leaving himself completely open and vulnerable. She looked at him and promised herself in that moment that she wouldn't be consumed by anger and instead give him the childhood he truly deserved.

She withdrew thousands of dollars from her parent's bank account, telling her brother that it was a special allowance they'd put aside for him, and bought him the latest gaming consoles, took him on trips abroad, bought him tickets to his favourite bands, waited at the stage doors for hours to meet them, she hugged him when he had heartbreaks and popped champagne when he passed his exams. The best of all was her favourite adventure camp, a place where she'd spent every summer for the past 6 years, 'Sunnywinds'. The year she took Dorian there, introduced him to her best friend Yury as her darling baby brother as he cringed and tried to run away from her was the best few weeks of her life. She'd helped him learn campire songs, pitch a tent and toast marshmellows over the fire then when it went dark, she took him outside to look at the stars, just like she had when she slept in her cot with the glow in the dark ones above her bed.

When she was seventeen, she went Sunnywinds for her last year as a camper with the intention of laying all of her feelings on the table as this was going to be the last time she could see her best friend Yury again in person, since he lived in Florida and she was in Toronto. They talked online but things were different when they talked in person. He shared her passion, her need to go out and explore every continent, to dive through the coral reefs and venture into spidery cavern systems. He got her in the same way that her parents got each other... but she didn't know whether he felt the same way, whether he'd even want to be her adventure partner. She finally summoned the courage to ask him on their final night but when she came face to face with him, the words wouldn't leave her mouth. As the sun set and the pair sat on the log overlooking a great lake, she rested her head on his shoulder and watched the fireflies dance around the darkness.

Tommie graduated from highschool and took a chance to hunt down Yury and actually say what she wanted to say a year prior. She only had his phone number and his name but knew he didn't like to text because of how expensive it was to send texts between countries. No whatsapp, no Instagram, no Snapchat - nothing. Finding a single Yury in the whole of Florida was insane... but she persisted. Yury was an orphan and had two siblings, she knew that, and although it was slightly unethical, she used her parents wealth to bribe adoption agencies into tracking down every set of three children who were adopted across the past 15 years. After weeks and weeks of getting negative results, she finally got a result. Yury, Lev, Lilia were adopted by Augustus Smirnov and Aguero Leon. She put the names into google and pressed search.

A month later, Tommie settled into her new university in Florida to study Forestry and Enviromental Management and sent Yury a message. 'Hey, I'm in Florida. I'd love to see you again?'