LJ Idol Week 22: Hiraeth
The woman looked at her from across the desk and folded her hands together. Behind her glasses, the woman’s eyes were kind.
“Do you know why you’re here?” the woman asked.
Krista rolled her eyes. “Because my mother signed some paperwork,” she said, not bothering to hide the bitterness in her voice.
“Do you think you’re only here because of your mother?”
“Of course. This isn’t exactly a four-star hotel, is it?” Krista waved her hand to indicate the shabby, plain room they were in, before slumping back in the hard chair.
“Why do you think your mother put you here?”
“Because she doesn’t want to deal with me. Because she doesn’t believe. Because she thinks I shouldn’t either. Because she thinks I’m crazy that I do.” Krista couldn’t help but roll her eyes again. She had always known this is where she would end up.
“What doesn’t your mother believe?” the woman asked, and Krista knew that question was coming, but she didn’t care.
“The same thing you don’t believe,” she said, now narrowing her eyes at the woman. “The same thing everyone here doesn’t believe.”
“We here at Pineview believe in reality,” the woman said.
“Just because you don’t believe it doesn’t mean it’s not real,” Krista said. She crossed her arms over her chest.
The woman leaned forward. Her eyes were no longer kind. “And just because you do believe it doesn’t mean it is,” the woman said. She smiled then, as if that solved the whole problem. “Is there anything else you want to talk about?”
“Not with you.”
“Our session is an hour long.”
“Then I’ll just sit here.”
“Suit yourself.”
-
Krista sat in her small, almost claustrophobic room. The tiny twin bed almost filled the entire space. The only other item in the room was a tiny chest of drawers, containing the extra Pineview-ordered hospital pants and shirts that the residents were allowed to wear.
Krista wasn’t naïve though. She knew the rooms - from the paint to the carpet to whatever was hidden behind the walls - were designed to impede magic. The therapists and the administrators and the nurses would all tell you to your face that magic didn’t exist, but everything they did was to stop it.
They designed a building that made it impossible to do magic within its walls. They made you attend session after session after session about how you weren’t living in reality but how you needed to be. Even the books and the magazines that were allowed out in the common room were about the most boring, banal existence one could have.
The real existence, her mother used to say, one grounded in reality.
But Krista’s mother had always been a monster. Just because magic in their family somehow skipped her, she had spent her life denying its existence.
How many times had she told Krista she was crazy? How many times had she told Krista that she needed to get help and stop living in a place that wasn’t real?
But now she had finally done it, sentenced Krista to this awful place when she had caught her trying to brew a potion in her room.
She had almost made one perfectly too. She had been so close. She had felt it in her bones. But then her mother had come in, and her negative energy had made the potion explode, and of course it was Krista’s fault there was now a scar on her face that made her even uglier than she had been before.
“I can’t deal with her anymore,” Krista had heard her mother tell the director of Pineview. “Please take her. She’s too insane to be unsupervised.”
But Krista hadn’t cared. In fact, she was glad to be rid of her mother. And she also knew, no matter how hard people might try, they could never take magic away from Krista entirely.
-
Krista’s mother called them dreams, usually in a mocking voice. The therapists at Pineview called them dreams, too, the few times they brought them up.
But they weren’t dreams. They were just a gateway into the world in which she really belonged.
Krista’s first therapist had asked her when they had started, but how could she answer that? Did one know when they first walked? First breathed? First slept? They had been in her life forever. She grew up there, every night of her life.
It didn’t have a name, the place she went to when she closed her eyes, but it was the most beautiful place she had ever seen. The skies were bluer, the sun shone brighter, the grass was greener.
Krista always awoke in her own little cottage, one of many that formed an arc around the huge green park area in the middle of the town. Her cottage was colorful and cute and always the perfect temperature.
She only had to think of what to wear or what to eat, and it would appear.
Her guardian in the magical world was named Kenna. She didn’t remember when she had met Kenna, but Kenna had been there her whole life. She taught her how magic worked, taught her how to cast spells and brew potions, and also taught her that in the daylight world there were people who wouldn’t believe her.
The daylight world didn’t operate on the same plain of existence as the magical world, Kenna had told her, and thus magic didn’t work the same way either. It was possible to do magic in the daylight world, of course, but it was harder. It’s why Krista had not yet perfected her magic in that place. But once she did, Kenna said, the spell trapping her in the daylight world would be broken, and she would be free to live entirely in the magical world if she wanted.
Of course she wanted. It was all she had ever really desired.
-
Krista waited until it was completely silent out in the halls of Pineview before closing her eyes. She hated being torn out of the magical world by people coming to check on her in the daylight world.
She opened her eyes again to find herself in her little cottage, lying in her king-sized bed with the purple blankets and the piles of pillows. Her outfit here was much more comfortable - cute little shorts and a tank top and fuzzy socks on her feet.
Kenna was already outside when Krista opened her front door. Beside her was Jenna, Krista’s best friend in the magical world since as long as she could remember.
Jenna was tall and blonde, with green eyes that matched the jade heart necklace she always wore around her neck.
“It is getting harder to come here,” Jenna said, as the three of them started across the lawn. “My father is trying to prevent me from doing so.”
Krista wrapped an arm around her friend. Jenna’s father was almost worse than Krista’s mother, if that were possible.
“They tried to stop me, too,” she said. “But I won’t let them.”
“That’s right,” Kenna told the girls. “You have to keep believing, no matter what. You’re getting closer to your moment.”
“You keep saying that,” Krista said. “But you never tell us what this moment is.”
“You know I cannot,” Kenna said. “You must discover your truth for yourself.”
“I just want to wake up here and stay forever,” Krista said. “That other world has nothing for me in it.”
“You both are getting stronger,” Kenna said. “For now, you must focus on that.”
“What are we going to work on today?” Jenna asked her.
“Telepathy,” Kenna said. “It’s a very important skill.”
-
Krista barely made it back to her cottage before she was yanked back into the daylight world, her eyes flying open as a pounding on the door to her little room back at Pineview was heard.
“Open the door! Now!” barked the command, and Krista sat up, swung her legs over the edge of the bed and got up. She didn’t want to give them any reason to come in, or they might suspect she was still visiting the magical world at night, and that was one thing she couldn’t let happen.
She opened the door to see a man she recognized from her first day at Pineview as the one who had assigned her to a room.
“Yes?” she asked the man.
“You have a roommate.” His voice was gruff, hard. She glanced behind her at the tiny bed and the tiny dresser.
“How are two of us going to fit in this room?”
“Not my problem,” the man said.
He reached out and grabbed at something - someone - Krista couldn’t see before pulling a girl in to his side.
Krista stared.
The girl was about her age, much taller than her, with blonde hair and green eyes, and a jade heart necklace around her neck that was the exact color of her eyes.
She would have recognized her anywhere.
The girl smiled at her.
“Hi,” she said. “I’m Jenna. It’s really nice to meet you.”
Fiction. Probably.
This was written for Week 22 of therealljidol. I hope you enjoyed it! If you would like to read more entries, you can head over here. If there's voting, it should come Sunday night.