Introduction
So it begins, she thought to herself. Another journey down another path, searching
for what she was never sure she would find.
Her stomach growled accompanied by a clenching in her stomach, letting
her know that it had been several hours since her last meal.
Such was the life of a business traveler. She tugged her carry-on bag behind her,
wishing she had had time to purchase a new one before this trip. The wheel had been broken for so many weeks,
months, she had lost track of when it had last functioned properly.
Sighing, Larissa queued up behind a long line of travelers
at the only coffee stand in this wing of the airport. It was a Starbucks this time, so she knew
what to order and knew what to expect.
With some of the smaller shops in airports the coffee was either too
weak or too strong. With Starbucks
strict standards, she knew she’d get what she was looking for.
She felt her phone start to buzz in her pocket. She stood in the line trying to decide if she
would answer or not, and in making up her mind inadvertently let it go to voice mail. She would check it as soon as
she was out of the line, as soon as she found a table and had a few bites to
eat. Her stomach clenched again in
protest of the line. One of these trips
she would learn to pack snacks in her case.
She inched her way towards the counter, listening to the
other travelers. The mother, trying in
vain to convince her child that he was too young for coffee. The teenage girl who had never ordered at
Starbucks before and wasn’t sure what she wanted. The savvy businessman who knew all the lingo
and could speak coffee as if he knew no other language. She looked around while she waited and caught
a glimpse of her reflection in the metal surface of a pillar.
She stood a little straighter at the sight of her
reflection. This body was so different
than the ones she was used to. It was
always a bit strange to see herself, though she recognized herself instantly,
she often forgot what this one looked like.
Larissa gazed at her reflection, taking in the short legs,
her wide feet stuffed into the cutest comfortable shoes she was able to
find. They were not very cute, black
loafers. Matte leather, so they would
not attract notice. Her eyes traveled up
her body, taking in her thick waist and her large breasts, barely held in place
by the bra she had to special order from England. She shook her head. Why Americans could not accept large breasted
women was beyond her. She ended her
perusal of this incarnation with a study of her face.
She loved her face.
The rest of her body was always a shock to her, the shortness, the
roundness, but her face was beautiful.
She had the perfect lips, when she held her mouth closed they formed the
classic lip shape that people had been trying to copy for thousands of
years. She preferred to keep her lips
slightly parted and always glossed. She
liked to watch men as they watched her breath.
They were always spellbound by her perfect lips.
Until they reached her eyes.
Her eyes were a piercing green, an unnatural green many would say. They would accuse her of wearing contact
lenses. Her eyesight was perfect, just
as the color of her eyes. Her face was
framed by thick tresses of dark auburn hair which made her eyes stand out even
more on her pale skin. She knew the wavy
curls made her look exotic in most cities in America, though often she would
not garner a second glance abroad.
Unless someone noticed her eyes.
Then they would stare, trying to make eye contact to see more clearly
into her eyes.
Larissa smiled at the reflection, and moved up in line. She reached the counter, placed her order and
moved to one side to wait for her breakfast and coffee to be served. She didn’t bother trying to meet anyone’s
eyes, she did not bother trying to make any connection with anyone there. She knew where she was going next and that
would take all of her strength.
Her order came up and Larissa made her way to an empty
table. She ate a couple of bites of the
breakfast sandwich before she pulled her phone out of her pocket.
Three missed calls.
Three voice mails. They were all
from her mother. Larissa had a good idea
what they were all about. Her mother
rarely left her alone for more than a day, usually calling three to five times
a day. Larissa would ignore these calls,
choosing to only respond every few days to her mother’s demand for
attention.
Her mother rarely called three times in a row, though, and
would never leave multiple messages. She
had learned that Larissa would only respond when Larissa was ready, and leaving
more messages generally made the time frame for response longer. Larissa put the phone to her ear, waiting for
the first message to begin playing.
“Larissa, it’s mom.
Look, there’s been an accident. I
need you to call me right away.” Larissa looked at the phone, and pressed play
on the next message.
“Honey, it’s mom again.
I…I know you are probably busy with something. I hope to God you aren’t on a plane right
now. Please, honey, please, if you are
able to call…” Larissa felt her heart drop.
Something very bad had happened.
She pressed play on the next message.
“….Larissa please… please call me…I, I can’t do this without
you…please…”
Larissa looked at the sandwich in front of her, half
eaten. She wondered if she should finish
it now or risk not being able to when she finished the call with her
mother. The tone of the messages was one
she had never heard from her mother before.
Sure, her mother was needy, but never dramatic in this way. She would go on and on about what one
neighbor did to another, but she never called claiming something had
happened.
Shaking her head, afraid of what her mother had to tell her,
Larissa pressed the Call Back button on her phone and waited.
One
Larissa listened to the singing from the room next door and
wondered if her roommate would ever stop.
It was the same three lines of the same song, over and over. She had been singing the same three lines for
more than a month and Larissa was ready to knock some sense into her.
“And who do you think you are, Runnin’ round leaving scars,
Collecting your jar of hearts and tearing love apart” Her roommate wailed one more time.
Larissa rolled her eyes, looking around her room for
something to silence the girl. She had
been warned, when she put in for the transfer, that she could end up living
with anyone. That often people moved out
because they had issues with their current roommates, but Larissa was hopeful
that this situation would be better than the last. And though the girl was sad, and wailed the
same song over and over, at least Larissa could put on headphones, crank her
own music and drown her out. She could
shut her door and pretend that nothing existed outside her room, with her twin
bed, small closet and desk.
Really, she thought, did anything really exist outside of
her room anyway? Larissa stood and
walked to her window. The view outside
her window was stunning. The trees had
just started to turn and seemed to set the mountains and hillsides on
fire. The oranges, reds and yellows were
breathtaking. The color only broken by
the occasional evergreen. The sky was a
glorious blue, clear and cloudless. Larissa
hugged her arms around her body, and swayed from side to side. Her own personal music playing in her head,
rocking her, comforting her. The noise
from the other room faded, the view outside the window faded, as Larissa
reached out with her mind and looked for the one thing she had always
sought.
It wasn’t there. She
got close to where it was supposed to be and felt the void. Her eyes blinked and filled with tears. When would it come back? When would she feel that part of herself that
had seemed to leave when she was a small girl?
When would she feel whole again?
Sighing, she pulled herself into the present moment and turned from the
window. It would not do for anyone to
see her crying at her window. It would
ruin her image, and she needed the façade to work right now.
Larissa plopped back into her desk chair and pulled on the
headphones that were waiting. She
pressed shuffle on her favorite list of music, waited for the song to start and
drown out her roommate. When she was
certain that the song, the music would drown out her roommate, she opened one
of her books and began reading.
Hoping, praying that there may be answers in this book. Or at the very least she would be able to
drown out the sorrow in her soul with the information at her fingertips.
Two
Larissa made her way across the campus to her second class
of the day. This was a class she really
looked forward to. It was her only
elective, the only class she felt free to do what she had always wanted to
do. The other classes, those in her
major, were what her family wanted for her.
The math, the science, proving to her parents that they had raised a
smart daughter. Giving them bragging
rights with their friends as they watched the other children study literature,
the arts and other such subjects.
This elective was different for her. It was a history class, the history of
Europe, and she adored it. The pictures,
the art work, seemed to call to her, to tell her stories that the books did
not. She would often sit and stare at
one page in the book for hours, seeing what had happened on the land that was
presented in the picture. She could see
the whole history of it. When people
first arrived, how they looked around them and decided to settle. When the next generations were born and
raised. The struggles they faced through
weather, war, and other things. The
history of the place would sweep before her senses. She loved it.
It was through this class that she first began to wonder
about her existence. Where she first
began to wonder about the body she was in, it didn’t feel like her body for
some reason. She wondered where she had
really come from, why she was here, so many questions that didn’t seem possible
to answer.
Larissa crossed the quad, the large grassy area at the
center of the main campus. She looked at
the people all around her, many standing around in groups chatting. People rushing to and from classes. So many different shapes and sizes, so many
different tones of skin, hair and eyes.
And the clothing choices!
She stopped short.
Larissa slowly twilled around in a circle, really looking at
the those that surrounded her for the first time. She saw something she had never seen
before.
There were not only the outward appearances of people, not
only clothes, eyes, skin and hair.
Something more was suddenly apparent to her. There were colors that weren’t associated
with the physical people but somehow seemed to emanate from them. She focused on one group of people, squinting
her eyes a bit to see if that changed their appearance.
There were five people standing in a loose circle, chatting
animatedly with each other. Larissa
watched as one girl told a story, waving her hands in the air to describe
something. The colors seemed to shoot
from the girls hands, from her arms.
From the top of her head. She was
enveloped in colors. They were mostly
bright, green, blue, orange and red. The
orange was shooting from her hands, like flames.
The other people seemed to be responding with colors of
their own. Two of the boys were
radiating similar colors, orange and red being the strongest. The colors flowed out of their bodies to mix
with the colors coming from the girl’s hands.
There were two other girls standing in the group. One girl also had colors flowing from her
body, seeming to respond to the story teller.
The other girl did not. The other
girl, standing a bit away from the others, was colorless. No, that wasn’t right. She was emanating a darkness, a moodiness,
grayish black color came off of her.
Larissa blinked a few times and the colors faded from her
sight. She was left looking at the group
as she would normally see them. A girl
talking animatedly with her hands, three of the others responding and one girl
standing apart looking bored.
Shaken by what had just happened, Larissa turned and made
her way to her class.
Three
She sat through the class without hearing or seeing a single
thing. What had just happened to
her? Did she eat something bad for
breakfast? She had eaten her normal
breakfast, yogurt and granola, maybe someone had something to the yogurt?
She looked around the classroom, waiting to see if her
vision would change again. Frightened by
what she might see. But her vision did
not shift. She saw everything and
everyone as she would normally see them.
No colors emanating from their heads or hands. She watched the professor, with his back to
the students, writing on the white board, and saw only what she always
saw. Nothing changed, nothing
different.
Maybe it had been some sort of hallucination. Maybe she was getting a fever or getting
sick. Unsure what she should do, Larissa
decided to make her way back to her room after class. She would tell her teachers she didn’t feel
well. Since she didn’t regularly miss
class she knew she could easily make up whatever she missed. And she knew that her teachers would be
forgiving. They loved having her in
class.
Keeping her eyes on the path in front of her while she
walked, Larissa thought about what she had seen. Colors coming out of people, almost like
waves. The colors responding to each
other, almost as though they were having their own conversation. Shaking her head at herself, telling herself
it was some sort of bad vision, Larissa stopped in the quad again and looked
around.
There were similar groups of people standing around and
talking. There were couples walking, holding hands, there were friends chatting
as they made their way to classes and other activities. Larissa saw a group where one person was
talking animatedly again and studied them, waiting. Nothing happened. They looked like every other group she had
seen on the quad a hundred times.
Suddenly a young man ran up to the group. He pushed one of the other men and started
shouting at him. Larissa watched as an
argument ensued, the young men trying to pull the others apart. The girls who were in the group stepping
back.
Then it all changed.
Larissa saw that the two aggressive men glowed an angry red, with black
and what looked like oil flowing all around them. The others who responded where also dark,
some had red and orange hues, some yellow, but the colors were all muddled and
dark. The girls who had stepped back
were cloaked in gray, almost like wool.
A professor approached the group and Larissa’s eyes
widened. The man was ablaze in deep blue
and purple. She had not seen colors like
those before. He walked up to the group
and started talking to them. They all
immediately calmed down and Larissa saw his colors flow over them. The deep blue and purple seemed to take over
the reds, oranges and blacks. It seeped
into the boys, changing their demeanor. They
all became submissive to the professor.
They disbanded quickly, and Larissa stood, rooted to where
she was, unable to process what she had just seen.
Changing her mind about heading back to her room, Larissa
turned towards the library instead.
Perhaps she would find some answers there.
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