Monachopsis

You walk to the bus station in the rain, your left hand in a fist as it almost always is, simultaneously very aware of everything around you yet lost in another world. You stomp in every puddle, hoping you’ll fall through, peek through every bush and thicket, looking for something askew. But everything is hopelessly normal just like it always is.

You sit at the bus stop. You wait. You are alone. Cars go by, things you have still not gotten used to: too fast, too loud. Again you are looking for something unordinary. Unfortunately, the unusual is far too unusual these days. The bus arrives, as it always does and a few people sit silently, scattered across its few, stained seats with the hospital-curtain pattern.

As you sit, you imagine that one by one, each of these people gets dropped off, even the driver, until the bus itself is carrying you down the road, racing past this grey world, blurring into smoke. It goes until it reaches a tunnel that dives into absolute darkness and howling noise and when light breaks, you find yourself self on the ship, soaring through the air, magic alive in your blood again. Stranger things have happened.

But it does not happen. In fifteen minutes, you get off at your stop.

But you are unable to climb the stairs to your apartment as your mother is already outside and waving at you from beside the red van pumping fumes into the cold air. You nod, toss your backpack into the back seat, and sit in the passenger’s.

“Sorry I didn’t tell you but another therapist had an opening today but it had to be at four and no later. I figured it was better this than wait a whole three weeks.” You say nothing, “Is that okay?” she looks concerned.

“Yeah, it’s fine.”

She pulls out of the parking lot in silence, smiling weakly with her mouth but not her eyes, “Everything okay at school?”

“Yeah. I mean, the same as always.”

“That’s good,”

You are not so sure.

She turns the radio on quietly while you stare out of the window.

The therapist’s waiting room is cramped and quiet. The receptionist has a speech impediment that sounds as though she is just about to break down crying. Another mother and child pair are there as well, but the son obviously is giving her a wide berth, side-eyes and all. Thirteen minutes. Month-old magazines.

A middle-aged man with elderly eyes stands at the door and calls your name, piece of paper in hand. You rise, but not before your mother gives you a kiss on the cheek, and are taken back through a tight hallway lined with dense old carpet.

You sink into the sagging, grey couch and read the spines of the books on the shelves. All about depression, parenting, and various behavioral disorders.

The therapist introduces himself and says, “I’ve been helping kids like you for over twenty years. Nothing you say to me, unless it threatens yours or someone else’s life, will leave this room unless you want it to. You can tell me anything.” You say nothing, “Now,” he pulls out a paper from his file, “your mother is very worried about you. She says you were fine up until a couple of weeks ago and then you just…changed. She says you’ve lost interest in things, become very cynical. Do you know why this is?”

“Because the world is inherently uninteresting,” you are not looking at him, but you can feel him looking at you. Closely.

“And did you draw that conclusion two weeks ago?”

“Yes.”

“Your mother says you don’t have a history of depression. But have you experienced depressive episodes, you know, feeling like you don’t have a lot of energy or like life is kind of empty?”

You think you hear his voice become patronizing like he’s talking to a child. But he is, isn’t he? “No.”

“Do you know why you might be feeling this way now?”

“Yes.”

Silence.

“Can you tell me?”

“You won’t believe me,”

“I assure you I will,”

“You’ll call me crazy,”

“I am a psychologist and I treat people with mental illnesses and disorders every day. I promise you I will not call you crazy.”

Now you look back at him, “No, but you will give me a name for a diagnosis I don’t have and teach me to forget everything I tell you.”

“Do you not want to forget the things that make you sad?”

“They aren’t what’s making me sad. This, the whole world around me does.”

He puts the paper aside and perches himself on the edge of his chair, setting his gaze tightly on you, “Ok, I cannot promise you that I will believe you and if I start doing anything you don’t like you can get up, leave, and sit in the waiting room until your mother comes to get you. But she isn’t going to be back for a couple of hours. So, would you rather sit in the lobby reading August’s ‘People’ magazine or talk to me?”

You break eye contact, thinking. He adjusts his posture until he is sitting on his bent leg and sits forward. He’s right, after all, “Ok. But you better not tell me I’m delusional.”

“You have my word.”

“Ok. I was walking to school, the same way I always did, until I saw something running past me and it dove into the bushes. Now, at first, I thought it was a fox but I was thought, ‘foxes don’t run like that, do they?’ And it was blue. Really blue. So I followed it.”

“Sorry, when was this?”

“Four years ago. Or two weeks ago.”

“Or?”

“Both.”

“Care to…elaborate on that?”

“I’m not seriously losing you already am I?”

“No, no. I just want to understand.”

“Look, all you need to know right now is that, at the time, I didn’t understand. For me, for my memory, this was four years ago. Ok?” he nods, “So I followed it.

“It darted into the thicket that surrounds the swampy place in the hills by my school. I had the time so I kept following. It was running and so was I, but I never lost sight of it, almost like it wanted me to follow. I knew now that I would be late, but I didn’t care anymore. I needed to catch this thing, for one reason or another,” you look up at him and he’s stroking the bristly hairs on his neck, leaned forward, eyes focused squarely on you, “I was tired, panting, my side aching, but the creature had stopped.

“It was a cat, very skinny, like it had barely been eating. But, as I say, blue. But it had markings, too, like the moon and stars, and with the fur on its side shaved into a spiral that curled all down its bony body. It just sat there next to this pool of black water, staring at me, tail waving back and forth. And then it just…dove into it. It disappeared. Minutes passed and nothing happened. No bubbles. No ripples. No cat.

“I poked a stick at the water and the tip just kept going down deeper. A three-foot stick in a puddle and still I couldn’t find the bottom. I found a branch that had fallen from one of the big trees, must have been five feet long, and lowered it into the water, all the way down just until I would have to put my own hands. Then something grabbed it,” you check again. The therapist is still expressionless, “something, I swear, took hold of it and held it still, and then tried to tear it out of my hands, almost pulling me in. But when I got close to the water, I noticed my reflection wasn’t there. It was someone else’s: a girl, white hair, grey eyes, branch in her hand,” your always fisted hand tightens and presses against your chest, “She looked back at me.

“I fell backward into the half-dead, half-frozen leaves. The rest of the branch was dragged down and the water went still again. For a moment, nothing. Then…a bottle.” You pull it out from behind your shirt where it has always been hanging. Tiny, delicate, you marvel at how you kept it all these years. You offer it to Joseph and he takes it in his hands, squinting his old, watery eyes at it, turning it around as if appraising it, “It just leaped out of the water and landed on the leaves beside me. There was a note in it and in quick but beautiful writing in blue ink it said, ‘jump in.’”

“Did you?”

You nod, and you smile for the first time in a while, “I left my jacket and backpack behind, anything that would break in the water,” you close your eyes, “I wasn’t wet when I reached the bottom…and the bottom was the top.” Confusion furrows his brow again, but you do not notice, “The girl, the white-haired girl, took me by the wrist and pulled me out. But this place was warm, humid, alive with incense, fresh air, and the smell of old books.” You sigh, “you should have seen her smile.

“Aletta. That was her name. She told me she had been opening portals for ages, but they had all been in the ocean or places where people never came or would not follow. She told me I was the first. She told me she needed me. A lot of people did.” You take a moment deciding where you should begin, only to realize you can’t, “It’s been four years, doctor. I cannot even start to tell you everything that has happened between then and now, but I can tell you just how beautiful this world was: ships that fly through the air, beasts both horrifying and majestic, sometimes both, and the magic! I felt it wake up in me the moment I got there, the second Aletta took my hand, like being reborn and able to harness all of the potentials you ever had, like fire in your blood…” but your body drops, losing its excitement and tension, now that you remember that it’s gone, “and that’s why I’m sad, doctor. I can’t find my way back.”

For a good long while, he says nothing. He sets the tiny glass bottle aside and takes the clipboard with your file and starts to write, the pen strokes scratching at the silence. “Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?” you nod, “Do you have a history of drug use?”

You spring to your feet from the old couch, fist your other hand, and scream, “For God’s sake!”

“I just want to assess all of the possibilities,”

“I knew it! I knew it! Why do I waste my time talking to anyone? What is it? Schizophrenia? Psychosis? Was it just a very lurid dream? Well, I don’t want to hear it.”

He sets the board aside and sets his head on his index fingertips, “You have a beautiful imagination and I swear all I want to do is help you. But I can’t if you don’t let me.”

“I am almost eighteen years old and I’m stuck in this body again with a child’s face and voice! I’ve won scars and they’re gone!” You flash our left hand out him, open, but the fingers stiff like talons, “You see this arm? I lost it years ago. I watched the monster’s maw clamp down on it, I felt the skin tear. I remember the blood, the pain that followed for weeks. I learned to fight, to survive, to function without it, and now it’s back, as soft, small, and untouched as it used to be.” You find that you are panting now. Your throat is scratched and sore and has been constantly cracking. Joseph looks truly startled. You drop your arms at your side. Silence is ringing, “You’re telling me none of that happened? You’re telling me all of that pain, all of that time, was in my head?”

“Please, sit. Can I get you some water?” You shake your head and do not sit, “What I have to tell you may not be what you want to hear. But there has to be a logical explanation for all of this.”

“There is. But it isn’t here. I’ll be in the lobby.”

Two hours. People pass in and out but they take no notice of you and your efforts to not be seen crying. Your mother comes to get you and it’s positively pouring outside when she does. Again, you do not eat when you get home and go to bed at seven.

You find yourself at a mirror, but you cannot look into it for some reason, as if some supernatural force is turning your head away. Something evil. But you fight it like you always do, flexing your neck and staring in. But your face is not there, nothing of the room is. The mirror is bending, twisting like liquid. You touch the glass and your hand goes in, cool, and something, someone, takes it. You pull it and a familiar face emerges. Aletta. But she is not happy to see you. Her grey eyes are wide but expressionless, lips pale and unmoving. Your hand, all the way up the arm to where it was cut, turns to ash, crumbling into nothing. Aletta, released, sinks back into the mirror. You thrust your other hand forward but it hits solid glass. You claw it with your one hand. Your heart is racing, the room collapsing, the mirror shattering.

You wake up.

You can’t take it anymore. You cry, you bawl into your pillow so you won’t wake your mother down the hall. You don’t belong here. But did you ever? Why, you curse, why did you try so hard to get home? How we’re supposed to know this world would have waited? How could you have known there was no way back?

Why did you promise her you would be?

The days heal like your arm did: sharp, constant bursts of pain and sleepless nights for the first few weeks. But you get better and better at ignoring it. It never stops hurting, of course, but it gets numb, a little bit at a time. Though you still question whether or not you will be able to survive without this part of yourself.

You grow to hate horns and fire alarms. Every single one reminds you of the fireballs, the catapults, the siege. You remember being so sure that day you were going to die as you were surrounded by the roaring of war. But every time it happens and you have a fit, that same fear awakening, you tell the teachers, the counselors, your peers, that everything is fine. You’re done trying to convince people of your story.

You take up martial arts. It is familiar and it takes up your energy and your rage. They call you a prodigy, a natural, but you know that isn’t true. You remember being in the hot training yard at noon, sweat pouring down your face, sticks being broken across your back. You remember when you could fight with fire and darkness and not just your hands and the blunted weapons. You remember what these hands were capable of. You remember killing with them.

Sometimes, on rare occasions, you go days without even thinking of your old home. That is until something, however small, pulls you back. It’s always bittersweet as you read or draw in the springtime grass when a breeze ruffles the winged seedlings of dandelion and it makes you remember those days with the dryads in front of the great tree, witnessing a beauty and companionship you’d never known. Your eyes become misty and bright as they well with emotion. Even here it is beautiful, the plants, the birds, and the trees. They still bring back sweet memories. But it still isn’t the same.

But, one day, you find a friend, a good one. He’s the first person you tell since the therapist. He admits it’s hard to believe, but he tries. Better yet, he tries to make it better. You play games and go to places that make you feel a little more at home. You are not cured, but you are treated. You are not fixed, but you will survive.

“I have an idea,” he says as the last semester of your senior high school year comes to a close. You are almost eighteen again. You sit in your room as you do the final revisions for your final essay. Your left hand is just as capable a typist as your right, “Have you ever tried writing it? Your story?”

“I’m not that good a writer, you know. It’s taken me all week just to be happy with this,” you gesture to the glowing computer screen.

“You don’t have to let anyone else read it. Just write it for you. Then you can keep it forever, relive it whenever you want. And even if you did let other people read it, I’m sure they would love it. It’s a wonderful story.”

“They wouldn’t believe it though, would they?”

“No. But then you could bring your world into this one. Introduce your old friends to your new ones.”

You think on it a while. You let the few remaining weeks pass. You attend your graduation even though the diploma is not a trophy you are particularly proud of. When you are back home and alone, you sit at your desk where your college acceptance letter is filed and your computer sits open, a blank word document opened on the screen.

You don’t even care about wording, grammar, or syntax. You just write. A memory will resurface and you have to race back before you forget and inject it where it belongs. You don’t want to forget a single smell, a single emotion, a single detail.

You write about how Aletta the Witch summoned you through the portal, about her hut in the forest, about the magical blue cat, about the prophecy she told you about and showed you in the yellow parchment books she bound herself. The soldiers, you say, immortal and in red armor, drove you out of the forest that night and for days you wandered through alien country, finding many strange beasts for which you had no names: some friendly, some far less so. The castles and the forests, the waterfalls and the caves, the arenas and the witch huts: you could go on for hours… and you do. Some are a blur, some are so crisp it could have been yesterday. But the feelings, the feelings, those you would never forget.

When you start, you are filled with such excitement you cannot type the words fast enough. For hours you sit there, not eating, oblivious to the world around you. Hours pass until tomorrow becomes today.

And then, you find something. Or rather you don’t.

You forgot the name of the place, the inn where you waited out the storm. You think little of it, though. It probably wasn’t important. But then you start to realize you’ve forgotten the names of other places, of people, of creatures. You start taking breaks to eat and to pace, to force yourself to remember. Some you do, but some you just can’t. When it finally gets to be too much, you sleep.

For the first time in a long time, you dream about it again, about your old friends, about Aletta. The dream, this time, is peaceful. You are at the Lantern Light festival and they are all there, singing and dancing as the red paper lanterns take the burden of light from the sun. You know this song, at least you think you do, but only one melody line sings through. The rest is in an incoherent scramble of notes that want to be a song but just aren’t. You try to listen so hard that everything and everyone else starts to vanish from your awareness until you are left with nothing but the few notes of that song. It’s driving you mad as it plays over and over until the stress of it finally wakes you.

But morning, and late morning at that, does not bring clarity. You still can’t remember. You don’t even get out of bed because you will let nothing break your focus. You will remember. You have to. You write down the lyric eventually along with what you think the notes are, though you can’t even remember the last time you read sheet music.

You persevere. You keep writing. You’re writing now about the day you lost your arm and your hand begins to grow stiff, remembering along with the rest of you as you pick at its invisible wounds. You remember laying there, bleeding, the pain surpassing your known threshold so much that you scarcely feel anything. You were certain you were dying. But Aletta was there. She drove the beast away without so much as landing a scratch on it. She ran to you and took out her spellbook and cast sweet, healing light on what was left of your arm. She was smiling. She knew you were going to be okay. As the bleeding stopped she cradled your head in her lap and she said…

Oh, God.

What did she say?

You don’t remember, do you?

You’ve moved since your return, far from the school, far from the glistening black pool. But you have to go. You need to…

You ride the bus alone, few people on the same old, weathered seats. You squeeze your eyes shut and bury your face in your folded arms. You hope you will, you practically beg you’ll wake up anywhere but here. Focusing on the rain splashing against the bus windows, you try to believe there are hitting that window in that castle- oh what was the name… It doesn’t matter! It doesn’t… But there where you kept your quill and paper, hot tea infused with those purple flowers, a candle slowly burning down. You almost convince yourself you smell it until you open your eyes to fluorescent light and dull-eyed passengers.

It’s a few blocks to the clearing with the lake if you could even call it that. The area has changed: buildings are being built closer and closer, the leaves are falling away instead of blooming in springtime grace, and there’s somewhat of a sourness in the air. But the pool is the same, just like when you left. It is still, dark, and reflective. You look down but it’s just you, the new you with a face free of scars framed in well-kept hair. You grab a branch and dip it in the water, disturbing its calm surface. But this time it touches the bottom, the soft mud only a few inches down. But even still, you wave it, poke in and out, and whisper to yourself come on, just take it. I’m back now, like I said. Please?…. Please?

You step into the water and, as useless as you think it is, you hold your breath in anticipation of sinking. You don’t, though. Your shoes and pants are soaked through and in that cold, desolate moment, you are as alone as you’ve ever been.

That night you walk down the streets alone again. For the first time for as long as you can recall you are not stepping in every puddle, pushing every brick, stomping on every pothole cover, pressing your hand on every mirror. You don’t care. It’s not going to happen.

It’s been eight years now, not four, since you jumped in the black water. But you don’t remember her voice, scarcely her face. If she was standing before you right now, would you even recognize her? The memories are dying, you can feel them fading. This moment, right now, is the most vivid they will ever be again, and it isn’t enough.

You are almost to the bridge now and sunset has long passed. People are scattered, traveling in small groups bracing against the brisk wind and the first tears of the storm. Not you. You’re cold, yes, and the rain stings your uncovered face and arms, but you are still numb to it all. You would give anything to feel alive enough again to care but you don’t. You just don’t.

You stand now on the bridge between worlds, but not the two you have ever come to know as home. Between life and death. Should you call your mother? Your friend? Say goodbye?

The water is splashing below you, so dark and so cold, fierce against the jagged rocks of the bed. You don’t belong here. You never did. You can admit to that now. And you are sure now that, yes, you would rather feel nothing than despair.

One leg swings over. The other follows.

You hold Aletta’s little bottle in your hand and up to your chest so that only one hand is holding onto this world. Light flashes behind you and you hear a shriek behind the sheet of rain. But you do not let it keep you here.

You let go and you are enveloped by cold water.

But you are dry, though you do not feel nothing. In fact, there is an incredible pain in your hand. You look and it is bleeding profusely from the tiny shards of fine glass sticking out of your palm, a tiny cork, and chain among them.

You are warm.

It smells like incense and old pages.

You look around. You are sure you’re dreaming.

“Already?” an exasperated voice comes from behind you, “You’ve been gone two minutes and you’ve broken it already? I’ll have to give you something else to remember me by.” She walks to her desk, piled high with trinkets and treasure. She looks back. You were wrong. You do recognize her, “What are you smiling so much about?” she teases.

“Actually…I change my mind. I want to stay.”

“But what about your friends? Your mother? Your home?”

But you just keep smiling, disbelieving.

She hugs you once she pulls the glass out of your skin and mends the cuts with her magic, soft gentle fingers on the nub just below the elbow. You nearly fall asleep right there in her arms, but you can feel a fire that’s burning in your blood.

“That world will wait for me.”