Escape

I had lived most of my life believing I was alone.

I thought,

“The world is like an old house; all stairways up and down and windows that won’t open, dark wooden halls with secret routes between floors, and lanterns dying out

and there is no one in this house but me.

Life is a game of hide and seek and I can’t find anyone. They are much too far away.

And no one seems to be seeking me. They do not even know I am here!

But I am not hiding!” I said with decision, “I am moving forward, I WILL find a way out.” So I raced from door to door, trying every lock, traversing every staircase, peering up from every balcony, looking for the way out.

“If I can keep moving, and keep myself from crying and breaking down in the middle of the floor,” I thought, “I will find the hidden way out and I will find myself – joy! – standing outside of the house, facing whatever lies beyond. And there will be others there! And maybe, just maybe, they will see me. And I will not be alone. I will belong.”

Or so I thought.

Each day I would find a new floor, a new room, and I searched and I searched for something I had missed. I searched and I searched for that one open door. Nothing. I would turn into bed exhausted, hoping that tomorrow some secret manual for escaping would land in my path. It never did.

I found many keys, behind lamps and underneath blankets. I opened many locks, opening up new rooms and new corridors. But there were more. Always more.

One morning, I came back to my bedroom and I found, sitting beside my bed, a very strange thing. There was a man there. In my lonely house.

He was an ordinary looking man. Sitting on a stool. Leaning over a small something in his hands.

I figured that he also was alone, so I invited him to come with me to open the next door. Together, we could maybe, finally, escape.

He looked up from his hands and said to me, “What are you escaping from?”

“Why, this old cobwebby house, of course! There is a secret passageway somewhere that leads to the roof, or perhaps a key to that door on the first floor. Oh, if you would help me, I am sure we could get out!”

He smiled and replied, “There is no house, here.”

My vision started to blur a little, and I shook my head, “Oh no, I am sure of it. We are, both of us, in an old house. See that portrait of my great-great grandmother on the wall behind you?”

He turned to look, but said he did not see anything other than a few small trees.

“Trees? There are no trees here, we are inside!”

“We are not inside,” he said, assuredly, “we are in a field. Look, there are the wildflowers, and there are the small trees. I think they have just begun to grow.”

This would not do. I could not be helped by an imbecile. I looked back at the portrait of my great-great grandmother, and almost passed out. My vision had blurred again to such an extent that I now believed I saw trees too! They were white and brown and waving in the wind! "What wind?" I thought, "There is no wind in the house!"

“I think I need to sit down,” I said to the man. I sat on my bed, alongside of him. I peeked over to see what he was holding. All I saw was a blue smudge.

“What is that?”

“I’m not sure. I just picked it up.” He replied.

“Where did you find it?”

“Right here, in the field!” He said, with that annoying smile.

“We are not in a field,” I said, a little hesitantly. “I am afraid you are mad.”

“Oh, no. I am not mad. I was once a little confused, though. You see,” he confided, “I once thought I was in an big fancy spaceship and I was the only one there who spoke any English! Aliens were walking around the whole time and trying to speak to me but I had no idea what they were saying! All I wanted to do was escape. I sat in front of the controls and I tried and I tried to understand them, to somehow unlock the autopilot or the escape hatch or something.”

I felt the foundation of my house shifting, and I heard it groan as the ground moved under my feet.

“Yes, and then I discovered that there was this,” he held up his hand with the blue fuzzy object, “right in the middle of my spaceship! And it was chirping! So I picked it up, and began to stroke its back, and rather quickly I found myself in the middle of this field, and not on a spaceship at all.”

I saw the walls of my house cracking and plaster falling in chunks and dust from the ceiling.

The man looked at me and must have thought I seemed bewildered, because he asked, sheepishly, “I, uh, I don’t suppose you have ever been on a spaceship before?”

“Oh… no.” I admitted, “But I think I can understand what it was like. It sounds awful. Frightening. Closed-in. I know something about that.” I looked down at my shoes, now covered in plaster dust, and wondered where I had gotten them from, seeing as I had never known a time without shoes in the house.

I heard a bird chirping. I am not sure how I knew that that was what it was, because I thought I had never heard a bird before, and didn’t recognize it the first time I saw it. But when I heard this little bird in the man’s hand, I knew what it was.

So, I looked up again. I saw no walls, no ceiling, no portraits, no staircases.

There was the man, on his stool, with his bird, and myself. Around us were trees, above us was a blue sky, below us was a green and flowering field, and between us was the wind. It whipped across my cheek and tingled down my spine, it turned and whipped through the delicate plumage of the bird.

And I sank to my knees in the field. I felt the solid, damp dirt, as I hit the ground. I looked up and saw clouds, I looked out and saw dandelions and daisies, and I looked in and saw peace.

The man set the bird on the grass, where it hopped a few times before taking flight, off into the endless sky. The man knelt beside me, gently picked a white daisy, and then lifted it up and tucked it behind my ear.

My hair dances softly in the breeze. And I am not alone.