I was at this party a couple of years ago, maybe a few months before Z disappeared. I don’t remember. I think it was summer. It must have been summer because I remember humidity and mosquitoes and that nighttime heat haze. One of those house parties at a friend of a friend’s and I wouldn’t have been able to pick the house or the friend’s friend out of a lineup afterward, because all the houses look blue-grey-brown in the light and on certain streets they all look the same, one blending into another, and sometimes the friends of friends do, too.
This house had those cool string lights out back. The hard-core ones with proper lightbulbs that look like they’re on loan from some French café.
I was getting some air or something, I don’t remember why I was outside. I remember being in the yard looking up at the sky and trying to remember my constellations even though I can only ever pick out Orion.
I was alone out there. Maybe it was too humid or there were too many bugs or it was late enough that there weren’t that many people left and everyone was inside. I was sitting on a picnic table that was too big for the size of the yard, just kind of staring up at the universe.
Then this girl—no, woman. Lady. Whatever. This lady came out and offered me a drink. I figured she was a grad student or an assistant professor or somebody’s roommate or something but I couldn’t guess her age. Older than me. Not by a lot.
It’s funny how that works. How for so long a single year of difference matters and then after a certain point a year is nothing.
She gave me an opaque plastic cup identical to the one I’d abandoned inside but with better bourbon in it, on the rocks.
I accepted because mysterious ladies offering bourbon under the stars is very much my aesthetic.
She sat next to me and told me that we were the people that the narrative would have followed out from the party if we were in a movie or a novel or something. We were where the story was, the story you could follow like a string, not all the overlapping party stories in the house, tangled up with too many dramas soaked in cheap alcohol and stuffed into not enough rooms.
I remember we talked about stories, and how they work and how they don’t and how life can seem so slow and weird when you expect it to be more like a story, with all the boring bits and everyday stuff edited out. The sort of stuff Z and I used to talk about.
We talked about fairy tales and she told me one I’d never heard before even though I know a lot of fairy tales.
It was about a hidden kingdom. Like a sanctuary place and no one knew where it was exactly but you found it when you needed it. It called out in dreams or sang siren songs and then you found a magic door or a portal or whatever. Not always but sometimes. You had to believe or need it or just be lucky, I guess.
It made me think of Rivendell, someplace quiet and away to finish writing a book in, but this hidden kingdom was underground and had a seaport, if I’m remembering it right. It probably did because it was on something called the Starless Sea and I know I’m not misremembering that part because it was definitely underground, thus the no stars. Unless that whole part was a metaphor. Whatever.
I remember the space more than the story that went with it but I think the story part had to do with this hidden kingdom being a temporary space. And how it was meant to end and vanish because vanishing fairy kingdoms are a thing, and the place had a beginning and a middle and was moving toward an end but then it got stuck. I think maybe it started over a bunch of times, too, but I don’t remember.
And some parts of the story got trapped outside of the story space and other bits lost their way. Someone was trying to keep the story from ending, I think.
But the story wanted an ending.
Endings are what give stories meaning.
I don’t know if I believe that. I think the whole story has meaning but I also think to have a whole story-shaped story it needs some sort of resolution. Not even a resolution, some appropriate place to leave it. A goodbye.
I t
hink the best stories feel like they’re still going, somewhere, out in story space.
I remember wondering if this story was an analogy about people who stay in places or relationships or whatever situations longer than they should because they’re afraid of letting go or moving on or the unknown, or how people hold on to things because they miss what the thing was even if that isn’t what that same thing is now.
Or maybe that’s what I got out of it and someone else hearing the same story would see something different.
But anyway, this hidden kingdom was kept alive in that magical fairy-tale way and in the same way that it would sing to people who needed to find it for sanctuary purposes it started whispering for someone to come and destroy it. The space found its own loopholes and worked its own spells, so it could have an ending.
“Did it work?” I remember asking, because she stopped the story there.
“Not yet,” she said. “But it will, someday.”
We talked about something else after that but there was more to the story. It had, like, a whole cast of characters and felt like a proper fairy tale. There was a knight, maybe? I think he was sad? Or there were two of them, and one of them had a broken heart. And some Persephone-esque lady who kept leaving and coming back and there was a king and I remembered before that it was a bird king but I’d forgotten what kind of bird and now I swear it was an owl. Maybe. Probably.
But I forget what it means, what it meant in the story.
It’s weird, I can remember so much of it now. I remember the lights and the stars and the opaque plastic cup in my hand and the melting ice watering down my bourbon and that pot-mixed-with-incense scent coming from the house and I did find Orion and two different cars went by playing that song that was everywhere that summer but I don’t remember the whole story, not exactly, because the story didn’t seem as important as the teller or the stars in that moment when it was being told. It seemed like something else. Not something you could hold on to like an opaque plastic cup or someone else’s hand.
If I’m even remembering it right. I don’t know anymore. I’m pretty sure I remember her, at least.
I remember we laughed a lot and I remember I’d been upset or sad about something or other before we’d started talking and afterward I wasn’t.