I left everything behind. The house. The job. The family—all four of them and the cat. The phone, especially the goddamn phone. Facebook, Twitter account, email, credit cards. Even the car, because GPS can be tracked, can’t it? I left all of it. I didn’t care. I wasn’t sure if my being gone would mean any more or any less to anyone else.
All I knew was I had to go.
Come find me, she wrote. A soft buzzing of insects pervaded my wandering mind.
She was never explicit in her whereabouts, though enough clues had been left for me—like breadcrumbs, or scavenger hunts. Childhood games of Seek & Sought. She wanted me to piece it together, so I did just that. Text messages and Marco Polo’s I’d opened privately, as soon as the rattling of the family car was far enough away. I researched every detail I possibly could before finally disappearing with handwritten notes and laser-printed photos of landmarks folded into my pockets. Origamied maps to some other world.
Some Otherworld.
I told no one but the cat, for what it was worth. The aroma of morning coffee wafted past as I stood at the open front door. His stupid, scarred face reminded me of when he’d gotten into dangerous places he shouldn’t have, exploring a little too far into the neighbourhood’s vast unknown. I showed no concern about my own analogous decisions just then. I met a fairy online, I told him with blunt finality. He tilted his head queerly and dropped his tail to the floor. I wondered, did he really understand, or did he simply want food instead?
I had one picture of her, printed off the internet. I studied it relentlessly. She sat before a crooked mangrove with a deep crimson stripe cut through the bark. Spanish moss hung ethereally from skeletal branches. By their very nature, fairy tales abhorred leaving such evidence behind: distinctive marks in trees, messages on my phone, and photos online. As far as I knew, they existed instead—and all carefully—as glows on the horizon, some mustard-coloured dust in a storybook, or the quick rustling within tall grass. Always the hint of something more. And yet. There she was, eyeing me from the creased paper in my sweaty hands.
Her smile inhabited my mind like tomorrow’s sunlight sifting through today’s rain clouds. The stories she’d told me felt like déjà vu, the unexplained in physical form. She was imagination gone wild, captured in an alien humanity. When she spoke of fairies and fae and woodland magic, she really spoke of her and hers, of the passageways to elsewhere and elsewhen we were only ever meant to miss, and of the mythos of wanting what we could never comprehend.
As an offering, I left the door open so that the cat might disappear himself. I don’t know if he did.
Next to me on the plane, a woman flipped through a home decor magazine. Doors of wood and glass, closed and open, on every glossy page. The sun’s rays digitally inserted to please the eye. She asked about my destination, and, before switching her phone to aeroplane mode, I suggested it was easiest to simply show her the photo of the girl at the tree. But the image was not online anymore, just the 404 error message.. I nearly unfolded the picture in my pocket but didn’t, too afraid of what I’d find. Well, I’m sure she’s lovely, the woman settled on before turning back to her magazine.
From the taxi on the side of a Mississippi highway I travelled by foot. Homes stood towering on stilts, the morning mist snaking through wooden beams. I had an inkling of where to step off the black highway, and birds and insects led the rest of the way, fluttering through intentional spaces. Woods. Wetlands. Estuaries. All of it familiar but not for any specific reason, until I eventually came upon the mangrove bearing its crimson stripe.
An unseen entrance beckoned me, pulled me toward it. Invisible somewhere within the swampy overgrowth.
Papers. Wallet. Shoes and jacket. Enormous amounts of earthly regret. Flakes of skin and shed hair scratched off and littered upon and sunk into the marsh and brackish water. I left the rest of it behind.
You won’t need it anymore, she whispered in my mind as I took my last step.