‘Lost in thought’ would be one way to describe it. ‘Lost in worlds’, however, would be singularly more apt. ‘Thought’ implies abstraction; her worlds were anything but.
She sat in a café now, her eyes fixed upon a gash in the wall and seeing, not the gash, but over the edge of a world’s waterfall. She gazed into the water; watched the spray fall like scattered stars into its depths; caught her breath; fell.
It was such a peculiar way—and a peculiarly comfortable way—to get to the little village but she loved it nonetheless; the mere thought of a society living in an air pocket undersea tickled her fancy immensely. Better yet was the fact that no one else would find them: who, after all, would consider throwing oneself over the edge of a waterfall?
The waterfall was ensorcelled, of course, but who could know that? Dropping oneself into the waters was like falling into a bed of liquid silk, for the water caressed more than it soaked. It gently pushed her along towards a rocky door, edges worn smooth and flat, embellished only with a brass doorknob tarnished green. She grasped the handle, warm in her palm, and pushed.
It was a heavy door, but it swung open—it would never fail to swing open—and the city sprawled in front of her, lights twinkling a familiar greeting. It was night; she rarely visited during the day lest she come across the city’s inhabitants. She preferred exploration in isolation; solitude allowed her to wander through the empty streets, to quietly poke her head through windows and dabble with the city’s fixtures without disturbing or being disturbed. It was the spectator in her, perhaps; the curious child in her that would toy with everything given half the chance. An audience rattled her; their stares made her feel as though she should perform—or worse, cease her play and ‘behave’. Behaving was so dull! She was so dreadfully well-behaved in real life—courteous to a fault, apparently, though she didn’t see it—and to be so palpably uncivilised, even in an imaginary world, was liberating.
She skipped along the road, brushing her fingertips against the walls. They were, without a doubt, the most interesting walls she had ever fashioned—she always had to remind herself that she made them up—pebbled, mottled-blue, almost rubbery to the touch. Her fingers touched a door and she ducked inside, forgetting in her contemplative glee that people did dwell in the homes of her imagination, even if she didn’t see them.
The house was empty. This was rather good luck. She darted around the room, digging her toes into the shaggy carpet. The underwater trip was fun but, for some reason, it left her socks soaked. She made a mental note to fix that and stood, stock still, in the centre of the room. Something had chimed.
The house sings to itself, she thought suddenly. What kind of house sings to itself?
She listened again. Yes, there it was: a tinkling sound; wooden pins raining against the thinnest pane of glass. But there was no glass in her little city—was there? Surely not. No. The chimes rang through the room again and she followed the tune to the kitchen, where—mystery solved!—the brass taps dripped water in unmeasured whims, playing scales on a xylophone of hollow sink walls and metal pipes.
It was a cosy kitchen. Whoever lived here—he; she knew that the inhabitant was a he—lived alone. (The entire building felt of he; a masculine, gritty he. Not that Spartan décor (or the lack thereof) was an inherently masculine trait—not in the least. But there was an austerity to the house that simply didn’t feel un-he.) There was a kettle, bottle-green in colour, bubbling merrily at the fireplace; a loaf of bread nestled in a paper bag; a knob of cheese twisted in a square of cloth. Her eyes danced; it was so comfortably conventional; so literary in every form. It should be written.
Yes, she would write it. She had almost forgotten. She sipped her coffee out of deference to café form and convention, lip curling slightly as the lukewarm, sugary dregs hit her tongue. Her hand fumbled in her bag as she took another sip (she really must remember to drink her coffee before it cools) and triumphantly fished out her diary to scribble.
She uncapped her pen and plunged into the water again. Her pen refused to write. Biting back clucks of irritation, she let the currents drift her upwards and broke the water’s surface. She floated awhile, dallying between returning to the world (to catch a bus home; she reminded herself that the last bus would come in fifteen minutes) and flitting back to the cavern to finish writing. Just a little paragraph, she told herself. Just a little drabble!
The ink spidered across the page. It read:
There are very few things in the world that smack of ‘coming home’ quite like an open fireplace, a loaf of bread on the table and a hard knob of cheese nestled in muslin. And Sebastian—Batty, to his friends, who insisted that it was quite the apt nickname—was of the firm belief that every adventurer should come home to such a cosy scene.
She blinked. Batty. She didn’t know anything about him at all; only that he had a penchant for picturesque, rustic table settings. He would, no doubt, spend his nights smoking a pipe and staring contentedly into the fire, thinking very little of nothing at all. And, once evening truly fell, he would drain his glass of… whisky, perhaps, put out his pipe and trundle off to bed. His bedroom, she was sure, was very modest: a bed with dusty blue sheets, a lamp on a rickety bedside table and a pitcher of water on the basin in the corner of the room. She would duck upstairs to check but stumbling across Batty would be awkward to say the least. Her phone buzzed and she realised with mild irritation that she had managed to bring it with her (she so hated it when she brought tidbits of reality into her daydreams!).
She zipped through the water, broke through the surface and settled on the shore of the silken waves; no, settled on the cushions of the café’s chair. How intangibly tangible reality felt! How solid, yet so lacking in solidity, the chair felt under her fingers, like one was simply sitting in the setting of a film’s café rather than a café itself. She half expected to walk out and see the scaffolding of the café’s walls. The whole place was irrevocably flimsy, lightweight, almost non-existent.
The cup of coffee, too, felt light in her hand and she peered into it. Had she managed to drink it all already? Miracle of miracles! She hated drinking, actually; hated the sound of liquid gulping down throats. Hearing people chew repelled her. People were such messy beings; their habits conflicted with her—admittedly overdelicate—sensibilities. It sounded mad; she knew it did. One had to ingest food to survive, but did one have to chew it with such irritatingly loud abandon? (She recalled, idly letting her mind drift, that ‘mastication’ was always mentioned in lists of ‘words that sound dirty but aren’t’—in her mind, loud mastication in public was just as disgusting as the more risqué word it had the tendency to evoke.) She shuddered.
‘Excuse me, ma’am.’
The quietly concerned words jolted her from her reverie. ‘Yes?’ she said, consciously rearranging her facial muscles to look approachable, pleasant, congenial.
The speaker—the barista, she recognised him from last week—looked relieved all of a sudden. Was her facial expression prior to readjustment so terrifying? ‘Is everything all right, ma’am?’ he continued.
‘Oh, yes; fine; thank you,’ she said hurriedly. ‘Fine; fine.’
‘Coffee all right?’ he pressed on.
‘Oh, everything’s fine,’ she repeated. ‘Fine; fine. Fine. Great, actually.’ She sounded like a broken record. ‘Everything’s fine.’ She beamed at him. ‘Is everything all right with you?’
‘Yeah; just saw you sitting there looking a bit annoyed. Company policy to check on all our customers to make sure they’re happy.’ He grinned back, obviously bemused.
‘Oh!’ she said, fighting the urge to laugh. ‘That’s… very good customer service. Um. If you’ll excuse me; I’ve a bus to catch. Thank you for the coffee.’
Annoyed? She? She thought she controlled her expressions in public well enough. Apparently not! The cup fell from her hand into a waiting bin (she noted idly that it was different to the other bins in the shopping centre; a different shade of brown and missing a stripe at the bottom) and she decided that she would give Sebastian the ability to control his external appearances. He would be unreadable; his face would mirror what emotions he chose to display. He would be, at the risk of self-insertion and perfecting self-insertion, everything she was, everything she wished she could be… and more. It would mean simultaneously detaching herself and fiercely aligning herself—and that would be an interesting exercise indeed.
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