Jan 11, 2014, 7:29:20 PM
I woke up disoriented, in a strange place, feeling absolutely exhausted. I didn’t know what woke me or how long I’d been asleep, but it seemed like I’d been trying to get a decent night’s sleep for years. When my life started falling apart, and the specter of homelessness started to loom over me, I never imagined the thing I would miss most would be a good night’s sleep.
Not that I ever had an easy time sleeping before. I mean, part of what brought me down was difficulty sleeping. Some of that came from my creative side. When inspiration hit, whether it was a story I was trying to write or a picture I wanted to paint, the creative impulse took hold and didn’t let go until I passed out from exhaustion. While I was caught up in it, nothing else mattered. Those were the only moments I ever really felt certain of anything.
Unfortunately, I was not making a living from my art and writing. I had to take whatever odd jobs I could get to pay the bills, and the income was rarely enough to do more. If I could not get a full-time position, I got two or three part time jobs, or I cycled through temp and contract work. At the end of the day, with time taken out for meals, chores, errands, bathing and sleep, there wasn’t much left for writing or drawing.
So, occasionally, I sacrificed sleep for art.
More often, I just lay awake battling my personal demons. The truth is, I did not write or draw anywhere near enough to stay good at it. Worse, the demons started to creep into my art and I found myself creating things I didn’t want to share with anyone. Okay, I wasn’t dreaming up Fight Club, but my art became my therapy and the results were way too personal to hang on a wall or publish.
I pushed those thoughts back and shifted my weight, trying to find a comfortable position and discovering that my bed for the night was a couch. It had the generic familiarity all couches get when you’ve spent a while couch surfing. The space around me was unfamiliar, and I could not get my eyes to focus on anything in the dark. I stopped counting after four walls, concluding that the room was open to a few others.
That seemed like more shelter than I was accustomed to, so I pulled my coat in tighter around myself and closed my eyes. I missed the warmth and weight of a good blanket, but the absence of night’s bitter, biting cold was a relief. I had a pretty decent chance of getting back to sleep. My thoughts were starting to disconnect and spin themselves into images when I heard it again, a muted conversation.
For a few moments, the words crashed over me in a formless wash of surf. One voice had a deep, rumbling undercurrent, while the other sang like wind and children dancing in the sunlight across the sand under the distant cry of birds. I couldn’t make out the conversation, but the second voice stirred a memory–unusually vivid as memories can be on the verge of unconsciousness.
I’d been walking, lost in thought and oblivious to the fading light when I’d first heard it. I’d glanced up and came to an absolute stop at the sight of her. I’d never seen her before, but I knew every detail by heart. I had spent years in vain, trying to draw her, to paint her, and I could not believe my eyes. I stared, waiting to spot the fatal flaw, expecting the illusion to collapse as I focused on her.
She finished talking to the person she had bumped into and resumed walking, headed away from the store she had just come out of.
I blinked and rubbed my eyes, but my vision did not change. This girl, whoever she was, was real. And, she was walking away. I fell into her wake without even thinking about it. I recognized the surge of energy that kicked in, the sudden pounding of my pulse, and remembered other times when I had chased after a glimpse, full of hope and bound for disappointment. I always looked twice at girls with red hair, but it was never the right red hair, the right face, the right form. I was never sure what I was looking for, only that I would recognize it when I saw it.
Now that I’d seen it, I felt torn between awe and agony.
It wasn’t really necessary to think it through, as I followed. The first time I’d felt this attraction, I thought it was love at first sight. I stumbled into the predictable fiasco, making an absolute idiot of myself and embarrassing the hell out of the poor girl–or completely freaking her out. Probably both.
I learned something from it, though. I didn’t find that first girl any more attractive than other girls I’d seen. I was just caught off guard by her resemblance to someone who was intensely and inexplicably imprinted on my brain. I never noticed it before, but I had always measured people against that image, like an archetype or an ideal.
I looked for her the way a person looks for a lost loved one.
It sort of made sense. I was 5 years old when I was adopted, and I lost touch with everyone I knew in the process. I had no idea who this girl was, but she clearly represented someone very important to me, someone torn away from me who I remained connected to at an unconscious level.
It’s as good a theory as any. All I really knew, was that I had this girl on the brain. Jung would call her my Anima. I tended to think of her as my Muse. A very frustrating muse I was never able to see clearly enough to draw or paint, or even capture in writing. She was kind of like the sun, shedding light and warmth on everything around her, but I couldn’t look directly at her without going blind.
Not the version of her that lived in my head, anyway.
I knew the girl I was following could not possibly her, but she was a perfect match for the template in my head. She was about five inches shorter than me, but tall for a girl. Slender, but obviously athletic–she was more of a dancer than a gymnast, and probably a swimmer. Her movements had a quiet grace, a confident poise. There was something slightly feline in her features. A heart shaped face, straight nose, generous mouth and eyes like a storm on the ocean. Her dark red hair was full and long, with rogue curls rippling free from flowing waves.
A lot to take in at a glance, and a glance could never be enough–I was not the only one on that street inclined to stare at her.
Apart from wanting to get a better look at her, I had no idea what to do if I caught up to her. I was living rough and looked like it. I’d scare the crap out of her if I tried to approach her, and even if I didn’t, what could I say–“I need to look at you”? Creepy enough, but the truth was, I wanted to study her for hours. Draw her. Paint her. Capture her image so I could never forget it. I was an artist, but if I said so, she’d probably think it was a pick-up line.
I was pretty sure I had a sketch book and a few pencils in my book bag, so maybe if she stopped somewhere for a while, I could perch somewhere nearby and do some random sketching. Provide a little evidence of my trade before trying to make contact.
Wow. That sounded stalker-creepy just thinking it to myself. I know it comes from being a writer. Planning scenes out comes as naturally to me as breathing. The problem is, that kind of scenario works in a story because the characters are generally innocent of intent–or they’re bad guys.
I don’t think about my appearance much, but I could see my reflection in every window we passed. Tall, dark and not particularly handsome. Dressed in black; worn leather shoes, denim jeans, t-shirt and leather jacket, with a black bag at my hip. Oval face, worn features–pretty sinister looking in the early evening light–with long, fine dark hair pulled back into a thin pony-tail.
Some girls find me attractive, but if I was a girl, I think I’d find me kind of frightening.
While I was fretting about that, I realized I was catching up with her. She had stopped several times to talk to people, and before I could even wonder what she was up to, one of the people in the group she was talking to tapped her on the shoulder and pointed directly at me.
I resisted the urge to look behind me as she turned in my direction. She gave me a quick look, down to my shoes and up again to meet my eyes–which had to be wide with disbelief. I stopped in my tracks and stared back, as she took inventory of my appearance. Any doubts I had about her appearance fled, along with my wits, as she seemed to run through a mental checklist.
I didn’t know how I knew. The body language was as subtle as it gets, but I knew the process from the inside out. She’d never seen me before, but she knew exactly what she was looking for. Part of me thought that made perfect sense, but the rational part was trying to seize up in denial. While I stood, brainlocked, she nodded and excused herself from the group of strangers she’d been talking to.
She shook her head as she approached me. Coming to a stop, she gave me a final appraisal and announced casually, “You look like shit. That threw me for a moment.”
The gears in my head slipped and words spilled out. “This is where I’m supposed to wake up.”
Her eyes locked on mine, and she smiled. “You look like you’re about to pass out, actually.”
To my complete mortification, that’s exactly what I did.
I blinked my eyes and rubbed my face, dread certainty settling in as I came fully awake. I’d had dreams like this before. Sometimes it was just a glimpse in the kaleidoscope of fantasy and memory that stews in my sleep. Sometimes it seemed as real to me as anything I’d ever known. Sometimes more real. The hard part was always waking up and having it all slip away.
Before that rationalization could seat me firmly back in line with harsh reality, a voice intruded. Her voice. “Have you finally gotten around to waking up?” she asked, stepping out of the shadows of an adjoining room and into the fall of light from a window somewhere above me–in the wall to the right of the couch, actually.
“I don’t know,” I confessed, certain I should feel even more disoriented, but mostly clinging to the hope that returning consciousness usually crushed. “I could just be dreaming I’m awake. I should be asking where I am, but all that really matters is that you’re here. If I am dreaming, I hope I don’t wake up.”
“Works for me,” she replied, “as long as you don’t pass out again.”
I nodded, then shook my head. “I can’t believe I did that. I don’t think that’s ever happened to me before.” I slipped my legs off the couch and sat up. The closest experience I could think of was nodding off after a big meal–or a few days without sleep. In those cases, I’d feel my head going into a fog and could try to fight off sleep. Before I blacked out, I felt like my brain was in overdrive, seeing the world with unnatural clarity and then: snap; out go the lights.
“Sorry about that. I didn’t plan to catch you off guard like that. You were harder to find than I expected,” she explained, sliding gracefully into a chair across from me.
I couldn’t help smiling. “I never expected to find you at all.” I took a deep breath and sighed. “You’re not surprised by that,” I observed, the intuitive part of me screaming about the implications my rational mind still refused to consider. “I still don’t know why I was looking, and it never really occurred to me you’d come searching for me.”
She shrugged. “I’m just sorry it took so long. You’re older than I was expecting. You weren’t supposed to be homeless.”
“I feel the same, if it makes any difference,” I tried to joke. I got the ghost of a smile in reply, but then she feel silent, waiting. I could have asked why she was looking for me, but I was afraid I already knew. I’d spent a long time thinking about the impossible, looking at it from the outside. It should have felt more confusing to look at it from the inside, and in many ways it was. Questions were flooding through me, but I couldn’t bring myself to ask any of them, because I felt like I already knew all the answers.
It was scaring the crap out of me.
She looked calm. Completely confident in herself, her expression touched with sympathy and wry amusement. She knew I was on the verge of freaking out. “I’d introduce myself, but you know me better than I do, so the real question–the one that you’re trying like crazy not to ask–is, what am I doing here?”
I opened my mouth, but nothing would come out.
She laughed, and then she sighed. “It’s okay. I freaked out pretty bad when was reading the books for the first time.”
“Books?” It was not the most articulate question I ever asked, but it squeaked out past the collision of other questions that leapt to mind.
“Your books,” she clarified with a piercing glare. “The books about me. The books you don’t seem to have written yet. That’s why I was looking for you.”
Just like that, all the questions went silent. I didn’t need them. I could not deny that, impossible as it seemed, I probably did have all the answers. I knew it, because I knew the exact scene she was talking about. I’d thought about it for years, trying to figure out how to write it.
It was a simple premise, and one that seemed brilliant every time I looked at it. In the fantasy story I wrestled with endlessly on my word processor, my protagonist, an embodiment of my muse, stumbled across a collection of books from another world. Books that focused on her and her adventures. It was kind of my own take on Heinlein’s World-As-Myth paradigm.
If I’d been able to write my stories, and managed to get them published, I would have thought someone was trying to punk me. As she pointed out, however, I didn’t write them. How could someone punk me with something that only existed in my head?
I stood up, skirted the coffee table between us, and knelt beside her chair. She watched as I put a hand on her knee. Under a layer of synthetic-fiber material that, to the best of my knowledge, existed only in fiction, her knee felt warm and solid.
“I’ve never been prone to vivid hallucinations. Some drugs really mess with my senses, but my mind has never played a trick like this on me,” I commented, trying to wrap my head around what was happening.
She gave a harsh laugh, “This is just a taste of what I went through, reading those books.”
I nodded. The books may not have gotten finished, or published, but I spent decades trying to write them–thinking every scene through over and over, trying to get them right. “I’ve got an idea. I never got that part of the story perfect, so I can only guess what you really went through. Some versions were pretty ugly,” I admitted.
She stared at me for a moment. Something passed behind her eyes, washing out a subtle tension I had not noticed until it was gone. “I think I finally get it. Part of it, at least,” she said, to herself, I assumed.
“If any of this makes sense to you, you’re way ahead of me,” I told her. I returned to the couch, and kicked my feet up on the coffee table.
“There’s still some paradox involved, but not the kind I was most afraid of,” she said, pulling her feet up under herself, as she shifted into a more comfortable position on the chair. “For a while, I was afraid that finding you would be like meeting my maker. I’m sorry, but, well” she made a broad gesture in clear reference to my appearance, “you’re not what I picture when I think of the Goddess.”
I looked down at myself and had to smirk. “You would not be alone in that!”
She screwed up her nose and gave me a lopsided smile, and we both burst out laughing. When I got my breath back, I said, “I can almost imagine how this is possible, you being here, me being able to write about you, if I slip into writer mode. I don’t know if I could explain it, and it’s just not possible at all in the world I live in. But it’s happening. You’re here. How?”
She sighed heavily, “Damn. I was hoping you’d be able to tell me. But, if you haven’t finished the story, then I guess you don’t know as much as I expected. I was hoping you were the key to getting back home. Now, I’m thinking this is how the paradox gets resolved.”
I was pretty sure I could follow that, but it couldn’t hurt to be sure. “You think you’re here because I didn’t write the books?”
She cocked her head to the side in thought, gnawing on her lower lip for a moment, before shrugging and giving me a nod. “You seem to already be tuned in to me somehow, but there’s some kind of interference. You said there are different versions of what happens to me. The story I read was accurate, but the story you’re writing isn’t finished. Now that I am here, I can help you finish the story. Maybe, in the process, we can figure out how I get home.”
I took a moment to digest that. I had to. I’ve got a pretty open mind, and honestly, I wished for most of my life that the people and places in the best sci-fi and fantasy novels were real. I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling that way. Nothing in my experience–short of dreams–prepared me to confront the possibility that they were. In dreams, you can take the impossible in stride. Stop to confront it, try to grasp it rationally, and you just wake yourself up.
So, I tried to take it slow. “You seem real. God knows, I want you to be real. So, it follows that your home is real; all those things I struggled to write about are real–gods, angels, demons, dragons, magic, and all of that. It’s all real.”
“I don’t think ‘real’ is the right word,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s more accurate to say those things are true. They exist independent of the world you live in, and the people in your world don’t really know how to engage something like that. Not even your own souls. When you’re trapped in the box, it doesn’t matter what tools lie outside the box.”
“And the box is reality?” I asked.
“No. To put it very simply, the box is life,” she said, holding up a hand before I could interrupt. “The trap is thinking reality exists only inside the box; that there is nothing outside the box to engage in. The trap is when the box is your only reality; when you deny anything outside the limits of the box.”
I considered that for a moment, before venturing, “So, it’s not accurate to say all the things I know of from your world are all real, but it would be right to say that those are all things that have their own reality?”
She raised her eyebrows and gave a little nod. “That would work.”
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