Casual Apparitions (2) Insanity is a curious thing. It is defined as repetition of the same action with the expectation of a different outcome. The thing is, if this is so, then we are all insane. Me, you, your teachers, your parents. We do the same job each day and hope this will be the day we start enjoying it, we get into relationships and hope this will be the one to last. We go to sleep and hope this time we will wake enlightened. So are we not all, in some sick and twisted way, expected to be insane? Is insanity simply… Optimism? *** “Do I look okay?” It was Saturday, and I was stood in front of my full length mirror with a critical hand on my hip. Behind me, LilyWhite was placing with my hair, teasing it up and letting it fall back over my shoulders. Somehow the rule about imaginary friends touching tangible things had never applied to me, which meant we could maintain contact quite easily. In the interest of transparency I will describe LilyWhite for you, because she is a very remarkable looking person. Hair that fell in perfect waves around her face and to her waist, dyed in every hue from pastel green to rosebud pink, laced with scraps of fabric and feathers. Her skin was white to the point of translucent, figure thin to the point of skeletal. She used to be called BirdBones, but hated that name with a passion. Her eyes were cloudy, milky and pink. They were also huge, giving her the air of a permanently startled deer. In comparison I looked positively bland. My red converse, blue jeans, oversized white jumper, it was all so stereotypically teenage. Add to that the fact I wasn’t wearing make-up, and my backpack was practically falling apart, and it was all LilyWhite could do to convince me to leave the house. Not that she was doing this for my sake of course. She, unlike Far, couldn’t leave the house. She was far too shy, and I had only starting seeing her again when I returned to this room. Leaving her had been among my very few chief regrets, and now she wanted to hear about the mysterious boy for herself. “You look lovely,” she mumbled “Very quirky girl next door." LilyWhite would say that, I had to remind myself on a daily basis that we can’t all be resplendent in peasant dresses and heavy black boots. Besides, she would have said anything to get me out of the house, for a 17 year old she was surprisingly motherly at times. Heaving my bag over my shoulder, I slipped downstairs and outside. It was early, with dad already at work and everyone else sleeping. I had my supplies (consisting of a notebook and pen, my ipod, a flask of strawberry lemonade and three nutella sandwiches) and thanks to some careful thought on my part, knew exactly where I was going. I’d also concluded that Far was the least helpful person ever and hadn’t been all too sorry when he declared he was taking off. He would be back after-all, he always came back. He always tended to leave upon noticing LilyWhite was around, apparently because “her ghostly countenance made him uncomfortable,” but much more likely because they had history. LilyWhite, for her part, blushed furiously whenever his name came up and promptly vanished into my wardrobe if I ever pressed the subject. Once outside I turned left and began the long walk down the street, snaking in between the lamp-posts standing to attention on either side of the road. I passed identical gardens with identical husbands lounging, and identical long-necked, ratty-haired wives sitting in front of identical TV’s. It was a sorry enough sight to get anybody down, but I was feeling pretty good, like I was breathing freely. Then I reached it. The last Good Place. It was little more than a circle of trees, a patch of charred ground used for years as a campsite. Set away from the rest of the woods, it had been abandoned in favour of corner shops and swing-sets, and was now impossible to get to without scaling branches and dodging nettles. In the middle however, it was an island of safety. My favourite place. I steeled myself as I climbed high into the tangle of branches. Curled against the leaves I was completely invisible, ready to drop down into the small island of clear ground. I was hesitant though, so much depended on what I might find should I look. Then I saw the hopeful eyes of LilyWhite, and envisioned wiping the cool smile of Far’s goddamn face, and it leant me strength. I was not disappointed. Leaning against my tree was the most beautiful boy that I have ever seen, even to this day. Of course, I was above him so my view was compromised, but even so he was lustrous; radiantly so. Pale figure folded gracefully against the bark, one hand resting in a mop of white hair. It is important at this point to acknowledge this, for it was utterly unique. His hair was not bleached white-blond, nor was it was not slightly grey, or slightly yellow, or slightly blue. It was best described as an absence of colour, pure and simple and clean. The effect was jarring, but divine. It made you want to touch it just to assure yourself it was real. In any event, he seemed perfect. I couldn’t help but give a stupid teenage intake of breath, the result of which was the mystery man glancing up with a look of confusion on his perfect mystery face. His eyes were the kind of grey I could write about forever, but suffice to say they had the same lack of colour to an even more dazzling effect. I was finding it just a little difficult to catch my breath. “God, this is embarrassing. I seem to have made the acquaintance of a sentient tree. I apologise for the leaning, I guess we know each other quite intimately now." His voice was a breath of wind across violin strings. I dropped down from my hiding place and landed a little closer to him than was probably socially accceptable. We stood like that for a little while, the top of my head at the level of his lips, our breathing in time. It sounds awfully romantic I know, especially with him being so drop-dead attractive, but in truth I could feel myself trembling. Hot or not, I was alone in an enclosed space with a stranger at his request, I was scared. “Well,” he said, the curve of his lips evident in his voice “You are by far the most beautiful tree I’ve ever met. I do apologise for my previous comment, I can assure you I don’t normally declare to intimately know perfectly innocent forest girls.” I couldn’t help it, I fluttered back. “That implies there have been other forest girls.” “But of course. None have ever actually made the entrance you did though, it begs the question… Did it hurt?” “Did what hurt?” He grinned, and it made my heart do acrobatics. “Falling from heaven.” Oh dear God. I was in a mysterious walled garden with a curiously but not conventionally attractive boy, literally at his mercy, and the first thing he did was use the cutest pickup line of all time on me without it sounding cliché or forced. Damn. I shook my hair in front of my face to hide my blush, and sank to the floor. It was not until much, much later that I realised I had placed my bag on my knees as a barrier between us. Old habits die hard, after-all. I took the opportunity to watch as he folded himself gracefully onto the grass beside me. He sat with his knees drawn right up, his right hand absent-mindedly twisting through his hair. His head lolled on to one shoulder as he looked at me, seemingly waiting for me to speak. "So how did you know this was my favourite place?" He laughed and it was not so much breeze over bowstrings as velvet on skin, as if slowly he was trying to become the entire theatre. When he had composed himself, he stared straight into my eyes. "It was simple really, this is the only place one can go to be alone. It's odd, but this place has no character at all. There are no hollow trees, no long forgotten alleys, no nothing. It's as if this entire town is a testament to generic-ness." I wanted to comment on the fact that generic-ness really was not a word, but I understood the sentiment. I had noticed the second I moved there that there were no escape routes in that town. It was like a default, a template. Everything was open and there was absolutley nowhere to hide. For a girl with a few hundred imaginary friends and compulsion to run away from any kind of contact, I felt the bareness most acutley. Finding the garden had been a godsend. "So you've just been coming here everyday, hoping that someone would show?" I gave him an inquisitive look. That was, from my (very) limited experience, not typical guy behavior. "Oh hell no. I left that letter there forever ago, when I was full of delusions about the idiocy of normality and the romance that was to be found in meeting another outcast. After a few days, however, I realised nobody was coming, and used video games and loud music as balms for my proverbial wounds. I was only visiting today for nostalgia's sake, hence my look of suprise when you fell out of the sky like a better dressed Wendy-Bird." Oh. I wasn't quite sure what to make of that. It meant that he had just given up and been normal like everyone else, and that made my insides boil. I had a horrible suspicion though, that my anger was not the self-rightious kind, but thinly veiled envy. Being normal had never been an option for me, not with my "hallucinations" and occasional gaps in memory. I had an instilled love-hate relationship with the idea of getting better, it was like being offered the ability to walk after being paralysed, but being told you had to leave your ability to see colours at the door. Part of me wasn't sure it was worth it. Then again, part of me was still fighting down a smile at the mystery boy's Peter Pan reference. "Lucky really, what were the odds of us both showing up?" I said it somewhat shyly. "Destiny, darling, has a way of arranging such things..." This guys ability to make me blush reminded me why I tended not to go outside. It was very embarassing. A silence followed. There was no need to fill it. I, of course, did. "My name's Sophia, by the way." "The pleasure is all mine. I'm Jared." I nodded. The exchange of first but not last names seemed significant somehow. It was comfortable, just a little intimate, and it seemed to be deliberate. To give a last name was mundane, ordinary. Looking back, I can see that we were already trying to distance ourselves from other people. It was something I was all too good at by this point, and having someone share in this detachment had a sweetness too it. Lightning laced with honey... Dangerous, but not to the point of being discouraging. Jared stood, brushing of his jeans with the air of someone for whom time stopped. It was only when he turned that I realised what was happening. My heart, as enfeebled as it was, gave a painful little tug. "Where are you going?" He twisted on the heels of scuffed black Doc Martin's. "You, Sophia, are truly extraordinary, but it is a sad fact of #life that over time even the marvel of the stars seem to fade. Why? Familiarity. Get used to something, and the magic is lost. It would be utterly tragic should you cease to see that magic in me. We will meet again, extraodinary girl, but this was merely an introduction. It was not meant to be long." With that he was gone from my garden, leaving a curious abscence of noise behind. I didn't even see the door of the garden swing open. I was once again alone. It is moments like that where one becomes acutley aware of both the large and small miseries in one's #life. I became aware, for instance, that the most interesting (and only) boy to ever talk to me that was actually real had walked into and out of my #life in the space of five minutes. Running parallel to these thoughts was a simple track, already taking comfort in the fact that I still had both my pink lemonade and my nutella sandwiches. Soon I would go home, but not quite yet