Viridia

I didn’t normally walk on the boardwalk at night alone. Not because it was dangerous, but because being surrounded by so many jovial merchants, kids laughing, and lovers on dates typically left me feeling sad and lonely, like fulfillment was evading me and me alone. The smell of the funnel cakes always made me nauseous and it would linger in my chest, saccharine and cheap, until I felt like I couldn’t breathe, reminding me of my general aversion to joy. The radio host on the station they blare over the speakers has a voice like a dial tone and it would loop in my head like The Hum. I still know it like the back of my hand. The air smells like cotton candy and gum that’s been pressed into the pavement with sneakers and the best places to see the water are crowded with cigarette smokers and tourists. I hated the boardwalk. I really did. In my experience, it was just an exhibition of joys- a set up to remind me that my mind is a rabid fiend looking to taint everything golden. Sometimes it felt like it existed just to remind me that no joy survives in my mind, and to taunt me with the idea that I may be the only one. I never wanted to be there. Ever. But, if ever there was a time I couldn’t stand the mere idea of crossing through that godforsaken stretch, it was that night.

I’d just been harassed by some of the regulars at the sweaty local co-ed gym who adamantly claimed to be under the influence of my attire…and they got pretty nasty. I left in tears. The last thing I needed was to enter another sadistic liminal space. That night, however, I knew I was meant to be there. It started with an unexplainable tingling in my bones, a hysteria in my aura; something beckoning me to walk that way. I brushed it off at first, reasoning that it was just delirium as a result of the 3 and a half hours I had just spent at the gym…but the thing about omens and inklings, I suppose, is that you can’t really ignore them.

Minutes after I thought I had decided to walk the other way- I saw an auric green light. It wasn’t coming from any of the attractions or street lights. In fact, it almost looked like it was coming from another realm entirely. It hovered over the water, and I questioned whether it was really there, whether I was the only one who could see it. Then I remembered the inkling…the feeling.

“Is this why I was being called to come here?” I thought to myself.

But I knew the answer. Somehow, I knew this green light- it’s essence felt all too familiar…and I knew it was her. The girl from my dreams.

I met her in a night-dream, not a daydream. Though, as soon as my eyes fell upon her in the astral, I must admit, I asked the gods why they wouldn’t allow any other form of consciousness to imagine such divine beauty, as I swear her eyes alone could bring peace to earth. Then I thanked them for creating her. But, I never thought I’d come face to face with her, or that she was anything more than a figment of my imagination. She was real in my dreams and that was more than enough for me. I never knew anything better. The first time I met her, she never introduced herself to me with a name, just an energy. She kissed me in the aether and left her pure essence on the skin of my soul. I felt it when I woke up, aligning with my collarbone in the physical world. Later on that afternoon, a green butterfly landed on that very spot.

And that was only the beginning. Shortly after, she began to show up every night. Revealing more and more of herself to me. Despite linear time not existing in her world, she would be roughly same age as me if she were corporeal. She told me she was a deity in a realm of elves, but that she left because she wanted to follow her heart more than she wanted the power that would have come from remaining there. She’s been protected by the gods ever since, but floating in her own realm in the aether- out of reach of the lords of her world, and out of touch with the others like her. I realized, as I got to know her, that she was also very lonely. It took me by surprise because I’d always seen my loneliness as a side effect of my failures, but she was etheric immaculacy. Never could she fail in any true sense of the word. We bonded over our loneliness, and for a while, I did believe that it was the most significant thing we had in common. Until eventually, we fell in love.

I know, it’s painfully stereotypical of me as the depressed girl to fall in love with an elemental ghost…but in spite of how agonizingly lonely I am sometimes, I was never desperate. I’d resigned to my loneliness. I was comfortable. I didn’t fall in love with her because she filled my void, but because together, we created a whole new chasmic utopia. One where love and pain, imagination and rule, desire and contentment, fantasy and reality harmonized…and for better or for worse, nothing about us besides our love was real when I opened my eyes.

Until that night. Nothing could have prepared me for it. I saw her liquid emerald aura and my heart felt as though it was ready to implode. The green butterfly that had landed on my collarbone the night after we had first met multiplied into millions and took refuge in my heart.

“Could it be?” I thought- and it was.

Before I could even make out the shape of her calm peridot eyes, I identified her by the feeling she gave me. From aether to entrails, my entire being felt as though it had been hit by lightning, and my heart had been put into a cosmic forge, and for the first time, everything around me was laced with joy. I forgot where we were, or that anyone else was around, but I’m sure if I’d remembered, I’d have had nothing but love for the entirety of the boardwalk in that moment. Love permeated every part of her and I with a marvellous force and a power that could only be described as magic. In that moment, nothing else existed. I walked across the

dock to the water in which her essence was reflected.

“Mari.”

She spoke my name and it felt like kisses all over my body. I wanted to speak her name to her too. To feel it on my tongue.

“I…still don’t know your name.”

I replied.

She became introspective for a moment and looked somewhat sad, then laughed. Her laughter had an elven lilt.

“That’s because I don’t have one.” she said, with a voice as as sweet as daisies.

“Why not?” I replied. I was confused, don’t deities typically have names?

“Where I’m from, we get them when we fulfill our purpose.”

I remembered her talking about the importance of one’s purpose in her world. I also remember her telling me she didn’t know what her’s was. Suddenly I became sad, and worried for her.

“What if you don’t fulfill it? How will you even know when you’re doing it?”

She shrugged.

“I don’t know- but hopefully I’m correct in believing that following my heart will get me closer, because that’s why I’m here. I’m following my heart.”

She reached up from the water with a hand of green aether and touched my chest.

“This is where she wants to be.” she said with a tender wink.

In that moment, I wanted nothing more than to touch her back. To hold her. To kiss the lips I only knew as phantom pains, and she could feel it, too.

“Will I ever be able to kiss you? For real, I mean?” I asked.

“I guess that depends. Would you choose love, regardless of what you may lose?”

I looked around me at the boardwalk. I was finally beginning to appreciate the atmosphere here, and recognize it’s beauty.

But then I looked back at her and my heart felt as though it was being caressed by her gentle hands, like they were weaving jade electricity into my soul. I focused on her eyes and as usual, got lost in their depths, falling without fear into their aventurine pools of stillness. There are no other waters in which I‘d rather swim.

“I’d choose love a million times over…for you.”

“Then leap.” she said.

“What?”

Was she really asking me to jump into the canal?

“Leap.”

Our eyes locked completely.

“Will you catch me?” I asked, apprehensively, but already knowing the answer.

“In any realm.” she replied.

I hesitated for a moment. I thought about all that I’d be leaving behind. A cozy apartment, enrolment in the college “of my dreams”, bars, malls, concerts, regular life? Not to mention, what if she doesn’t catch me? What if the currents get me instead?

And then I realized how little any of that mattered. Joy does not exist for me here in the material world, in the absence of love. And I’m tired of trying to create it in places like the boardwalk, when it exists everywhere with her.

I took a deep breath and meditated on her aura. Eventually the green light felt like it was taking over my entire body, and my mind too. There was no her and I, in that moment. We became one. I felt my thoughts integrating into the emerald aether around me and then I leapt into the water. Within seconds, I heard the people on the boardwalk shouting:

“She’s glowing!”

“Is that a mermaid?!”

“That’s toxic waste! Let’s go before this becomes Chernobyl!”

My aetheric lover and I just smiled. We could both feel it all around us. We were entering the space we wanted to be in, together. The energy started moving things in the physical realm and food trucks and debris were flying in the air around us. A streetlight flickered and combusted. At this point, I’m not sure if there were any patrons left, or if everyone had fled the boardwalk, because all the screaming I’d heard at one point was subsiding.

And that’s when I realized, her and I were floating, and we were almost in the same form. I reached for her hand, and she put it in mine, and I felt it, like somewhat of a solid spectre. Then everything outside of us became still. It took me a minute before I realized- we were no longer at the boardwalk. We were enveloped completely in her light…and her hand was slowly becoming solid in mine.

In unison, we leaned in to kiss each other and I could feel her electricity creating prickles in the air around us.

“Viridia.” she said, panting, with her lips millimetres from mine.

I could barely take the longing.

“Viridia?” I questioned, curiously.

“My name.” she replied, smiling.

“Well, congratulations on finding your purpose, Viridia.” I whispered to her and winked.

“Congratulations on being my purpose, Mari.” she quipped back with a smile.

Then our lips and tongues met for the first time, and our bodies did too. Over and over and over again…and we loved like that for eternity, enveloped in green light.