It began with a door, a door in my bedroom wall that should not exist. The day was cloudy, gray and dark. My spirits hung low with fog, that day the door came. Silently fading into existence, its frame a shining opal, knob a sapphire eye. I reached out to it, as if in a dream. My fingers brushed the carved white wood and as they skimmed the cool surface, the door drifted open. I stepped through and came to this place. This beautiful, quiet place. And simply I stood here, for how long I don’t remember. Time wasn’t quite so real, it was more like a passing thought, drifting by on the purple wind. When I went back to my room I believed I had imagined it, but whenever I looked back, the door stayed in the wall, and this place was always behind it.
I came often in those first days, excited by this magical world, thrilled as I gazed out into its vastness. I would leave it, go about my day, but every night I checked to make sure it was still there waiting for me. I started coming more and more often. It became my refuge, a place I could hide when the world shone too brightly and shouted too loud. I sat on this ledge, until I was calm again, waiting for my breath to settle with the wind. Some days I never wanted to leave at all. I wanted to stay, letting my feet dangle over oblivion and breathe out the world I came from. Each day it became harder and harder to walk out the door, back to the bright world beyond.
One day, as I breathed with the blue winds, I looked back over my shoulder, and the door had gone. Now I can stay forever, I never have to go back to the world that rattles me around like dice in a cup. I can stay. I must stay.
I will stay. Why would I want to leave? I am safe here. I like it here, I really do. The floor is smooth and cool, made up of shiny, glass tiles. The tiles stop a few feet away from where the door once stood, dropping off all around me, a great cliff. Below and past the line of the floor there is nothing but empty space. It is the only circle of stability in a vast empty white plane. But it remains still and quiet, like me now. I suppose there may be a bottom to this great empty place, unseeable so far away. I like to sit on the ledge, letting my feet dangle and sway. Clouds of purple and blue float past, taking with them all the forgotten things. Blue hair bands swirl through the mist; missing rollerblade wheels tumble by; pennies and nickels drift and are devoured by clouds of pink. Bones of long-dead things clatter through the air sometimes, but they are few and far between. Occasionally there is a chair on the circle of glass, plain brown wood, rickety and old, sometimes a bed, tattered but soft. Both forgotten like everything else. Like me I suppose. They come and they go like everything else, swallowed and dropped by the clouds. I stay.
Sometimes I catch the things that drift by, but usually if I reach out I just let the beads and the buttons slip through my fingers. It is so quiet here, there is noise but it is all so far away. If I listen I can hear people talking through mist, chattering away about nothing at all, there are other sounds too, birdsong and cars, but I don’t usually listen. It’s not meant to be here at all, it just filters through. A background murmur for everything else. It’s pretty, it’s safe, but it’s lonely…
I’m lonely. I was lonely before, I think, but I was never alone like this. I could stay here forever, in the quiet safety of the forgotten things. I want to. Don’t I? I could be forgotten, I wouldn’t mind that. Would I? Would I?
Would I?
I would.
I would mind that.
I would care.
I don’t want to be forgotten like a penny in a couch.
Not yet.
Not now.
“Not yet,” I call into the silence of this place. It’s the first time I’ve spoken here. The silence doesn’t like it, but now that the words are out I can feel more building up in my chest. If I open my mouth now I think I might scream. It doesn’t want me to yell. I can feel it, I can feel anger starting to rattle around in its depths. It wants me forgotten, it wants to keep me here with the buttons and the bones. It wants to swallow me up in those pastel clouds.
A laugh bubbles up inside. It can’t take me, it won’t make me stay.
“I won’t be forgotten!” I shout out into the clouds. “I won’t be forgotten!”
They begin to shake and tremble. I never knew how solid they were till now as their colors start to waver.
“I won’t be forgotten!”
The clouds shudder and crack like I’ve hit glass with a bat. As the clouds fall apart, stars pour through, a tidal wave of bright and sharp and real. I see a thousand worlds that this place wants to steal from, but it can’t have me.
“I won’t be forgotten!” I’m standing on the edge of the precipice.
“I won’t be forgotten!” Staring out at all the stars.
“I won’t be forgotten!” I open my arms wide, grinning out at the shine of the world.
“I won’t be forgotten!” I shout as I leap off my circle of stability. “Not yet!”