Chapter Four
Day One
Mira had been here before. Countless times, in fact.
In her mind, over and over, it was always the same – she had her books, and her thoughts, and could never escape their gravity, always merely at the threshold of broaching some new change.
She didn’t know what it was. It was like the world had a veil cast upon it, enshrouding everything where the material world crossed with the aspects of her dreams… and she knew if she encountered these dream figures – if she pulled back the veil – she would see whether dreams could leave the domain of wish and travel into the world of solid things, where they would have to become real… or if they would reveal themselves to be as wisps… ephemera that were only ever illusorily here; only ever potential.
But today, it was like some unseen force pushed her up to him. When she was a child, she had gone bungee jumping and the attendant – high up in that tower that seemed to loom over the whole world, where together they seemed lost in the clouds – had said she was the youngest person he’d ever seen there when she told him she was seven.
She wanted to jump, and had a great deal of conviction. And she knew, when she approached that ledge, that she had to just do it – there was no way to reason herself into more confidence. She didn’t have time to think about it at all. Hesitation meant death, something… maybe buried in her genes… told her.
Death of the body. Death of dreams. Death of self. To her, it was all the same.
And yet, as she stood in front of Damian, and as the words – “Hi Damian” – left her mouth, it was as if an infinite series of cascading possibilities washed over her, incomprehensible in the enormity of the possibility they presented. It seemed as if anything could happen.
Her heart raced.
She knew she was looking behind the veil. And your dreams are behind the veil… and dreams can be anything. The words surrounded her, at the edges of her awareness.
Good… Terrible… she didn’t think anything terrible would happen. But what if she loved him, and he died?
She felt as if she were standing before a colossus. A monolith of the world of feelings she had suddenly become so invested in, but had never truly known, except as phantasms that tantalized at the edges of her mind, playing with her thoughts so that she raced this way and that after her dreams... the wholeness of her heart bounding after them, tumbling over them, and rolling in the valleys and fields of her soul as it sought to drink up the phenomenon of their ephemera with its entire being and be lost in their evanescence, to be carried away to places she could not go.
In that moment, he had hurled his pen across the room, but Mira knew she had been pulled into his orbit. There was no escaping the social gravity. And she didn’t want to, she knew, as he excused himself apologetically… she had stepped off the ledge, and this was her, falling further, saying, “You’re in my acting class, right?”
He could say anything. Anything was possible.
And then he said, “You know, you seem like such a nice person.”
And her heart sang. And she didn’t know why.
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