The Key Between Stranger Realms - Day Eleven

On this unordinary morning, I am lost in a way that has become awfully familiar. We are not here. But we are, aren’t we? The routine has been upheaved for the first and final holiday. I sit at the thrifted kitchen table, sipping instant coffee with a sprinkle of cinnamon for a little something special.

I think about past lives or parallels that still call to me after all these months, or has it been years? I am the key between stranger realms, but I have lost the spark, whatever first brought me to that other world. Only flashes visit me in dreams I want feverishly to be real.

Focus, Harmony told me, was what I needed to return. But the last of that wilted and dried in the autumn with the leaves when we were forced to accept the truth of time and mortality.

I think of my companions in the stranger realm. Where have I left them? Or did they leave me, unanimously deciding that I’m not much of a savior after all?

On this rare, wintry morning, I pull on the pink, faux fur coat and forsake the old haunt that has yet to be cleansed of last year’s pain and dread. I meander through the empty streets aimlessly. The back alleys are littered with smoky debris of last nights terrifying ruckus that shook window panes.

I stop only once I reach the pond and its dolorous geese who were too stubborn to migrate somewhere warmer.

“Funny that,” a man, who seems to have manifested from thin air, says as he clutches a sack of birdseed under his elbow and watches the central ripple in the pond.

I expect to spot courting mallards or a diving scoter. Instead, some foreign, polished object surfaces belly up like a capsized boat. I guess that it’s some sort of garbage from last night’s celebrations. The stranger stares at the disturbance curiously and then continues tossing handfuls of seeds toward the hunkering waterfowl.

“You’re not supposed to feed them,” I tell him, pointing to the nearby signage.

“Well, sometimes we all need a little help,” he remarks, shrugging as if wholly unbothered by my scrutiny.

I think of my dusty, cold, cluttered space that can only occasionally be called a home and wonder if the geese know why we must always want for what we can’t have.

“Not a want but a need,” a voice inside my imagination whispers.

I am so suddenly furious about the junk in their pond that I reach to pull my shoes off so I can trudge into the water and remove it.

“I wouldn’t,” the man warns.

As I observe the way he swings his arm in a smooth, swaying motion, I am certain I know him.

“There’s more you don’t want to catch in there,” he explains while we eye the murky, stagnant water like biologists searching for tadpoles.

“Here,” he says, handing me the bag of birdseed.

There is no time to turn away. “What am I doing here?” I wonder, clutching the sack whose weight is just enough to keep me anchored.

He pulls a net from his pocket and tosses it out into the pond, drawing the mysterious object toward us.

“It looks like a guitar,” I utter as the sunlight reflects off metallic strings.

An inexplicable ache blankets my shoulders.

“Swell,” he says, untangling the instrument from his net with practiced hands.

He offers it to me in return for the birdseed. When I reach to retrieve the waterlogged guitar, our fingers touch, and this here and now becomes the stranger realm.

The pond facing us morphs into the swelling sea. We are idling at the mouth of a rocky cave. Palm outstretched, he feeds the swarming gulls berries, soaking his scales in the lazy tide.

“Merry!” I cry.

I remember, of course. He is the merman who saved me from the vengeful knight, that first and not final leap of faith off the cliffside. The lyre hangs on my belt, wounds thick but mostly healed. I do not recall what happened to Justice, the forlorn knight who had finally accepted my innocence, but I know somewhere, somehow she freed me.

“Welcome home,” Merry greets me with a pearly smile.

***

Hello, wanderer!

This is part of an ongoing series. You can start reading here:

xoxo,

for now,

-your friend, lost in dreams about other realms