Enthralled: Paranormal Diversions (Wicked Lovely 5.50)

I didn’t expect to like it so much in here, in the in-between. So dark, so quiet. Maybe there is no sense in trying to find any time. Any place. Just leaving might be enough.

If you stay here, you become lost. And no one can find you.

I like lost.

Wherever I am, in the corners of my mind, in the edges of space, wherever it is, I lie down to rest.

There is no time.

There is no me.

And then something happens. A light here, another there.

Is it them? Are the Beautiful People coming to find me?

No.

I’m alone.

I’m standing in the stars. I’m standing on top of the Globe, I think, and then I look down and see it’s the moon under my feet. Or maybe the sphere. I can’t tell if I am tiny or enormous, and it doesn’t matter because I’m really outside, under the stars.

I stand there for a long time, trying to find the right words for what I see. Spending minutes, hours, years perhaps, choosing each one.

Infinite.

Bright.

Beautiful.

And I remember: I should think of the Beautiful People, if I want to find their time and escape my own.

Their time. My time.

The real gift is to have any time at all.

And suddenly, in the clarity of the starlight, I can see how things really are. The Beautiful People are real and they are not real. They lived, but they are not who we have made them out to be. The Beautiful People were not beautiful. Not any more or less than any other people throughout time and space. They reached out their hands sometimes and not others. They were kind like Laura and Elio and cruel like Mia. We made them beautiful because we needed to believe in them. And we wanted to believe they would heal us. We—I—wanted to believe they would love us.

And I see that my father chased a memory when there was someone real who loved him right there in his imperfect world. Me. He shut down and folded in, and his body became small because he had let his mind become even smaller. As I have done.

It will hurt, I see, to try to open up again.

I am stronger than he was.

I take one last look at the stars.

For a long time I feel only the pain. Then other things nudge at the edges of my mind. The feeling of my face pressed deep into the rug. My fingers clasped tightly around a glass sphere.

The sound of a voice at the door.

“Are you there?” he asks.

Elio.

His voice is rough but soft, as though he’s been calling for hours. And in all the distances traveled tonight, the one I think of now is the one when Elio reached out his hand and touched me.

The room is dark and quiet and still. I stand up and walk to the door. I let go of the sphere. It doesn’t make a sound as it falls onto the thick rug at my feet. But there is a sharp snap when I crush it under my heel.

“I’ve been Outside,” I say through the door.