living as leaves

As a baby, it had not been as difficult as Arianna had imagined for her daughter Elise to travel. It was usually the case that all Elise needed to live happily was to be steadfast in the knowledge that there would always be a warm pair of arms to pick her up when she was bored, a sturdy hand to hold hers when she was afraid, and the sound of ringing laughter to accompany her she played. 

Although it peeved her mother and father, Elise at that age cared not for who cared for her as long as someone did. Nevertheless, this made traveling with the child easy for Elise’s mother as during their trips together, Ariana could often leave Elise in the hands of some nice old lady while she ran her errands. 

Ariana would be regretful later to become so complacent in her daughter’s care the first time that Elise recognized her father’s face during one of their trips. In the middle of a bite of pancakes at a favorite family restaurant of theirs, Elise dropped her fork in an instant in favor of scampering off her chair and scurrying away from her mother. 

Confident in her ability to run without meeting face first with the ground, Elise didn’t hesitate as she crossed the restaurant by herself and stumbled into the feet of a startled young man. To Ariana’s absolute horror, Elise screamed, “Baba!” 

Flummoxed and scared out of his wits was an apt description to describe the face of the boy at the mercy of her daughter. The boy raised his hands in the air immediately while scanning the place wildly for help. Doing the math, Ariana supposed it was a fair enough reaction for a fifteen year old though she would be remiss if her twenty-eight year old husband were to react in the same way to a child. 

As Ariana rushed to pick up her daughter, Elise was already starting to tear up the longer that she couldn’t understand why the young man rather than pick her up to spin her only stared at her at a loss. From her mother’s arms, the four-year-old intently eyed the person in front of her, desperately waiting for him to suddenly jump up in realization and reach for her in recognition. 

However, to Elise’s disappointment, throughout Arianna’s stream of apologies, the person with her father’s face would only ever so often offer Elise an empty smile meant to mollify her while he talked to her mother. Elise was not mollified. That person eventually walked past the mother-daughter duo to take a seat at a booth further into the restaurant. 

Feeling helpless, Arianna held her daughter’s face into her neck as the little girl cried quietly in despair. Arianna quickly paid for their meals and left. In as soon as a few hours, Arianna had made arrangements to return home as soon as possible where when they arrived Elise’s father immediately picked his daughter up the moment she crossed the threshold. 

In the years that would follow, Arianna would take care to avoid places where a run-in with that younger version of her husband might occur. While Elise would eventually be old enough to understand that different versions of her father existed in the universe, until then it was better to avoid any confusion that could lead to emotional turmoil for her daughter. 

Even to herself, Arianna preferred not to think too much about the person who existed on a different plane than the one that their family usually found themselves in. Even she who understood the differences between the man she married and the child she once knew could, like Elise, become lost in the uncanny similarities between them. Yet, this was not her husband and this teenager would grow without her to lead a life that was unknown to her, for better or worse. 

Arianna was fifteen when she first met Lionel Hu. 

Frequently exposed to threats and tears born out of her parent’s faux marriage, Arianna often sought escape in her neighbor’s apartment at the foot of her family’s apartment complex. While her parents were always trying to coerce, gaslight, and manipulate the other too much to pay attention to her, Mr. Hu, in contrast, enjoyed spoiling her with fresh fruit and cinnamon tea on the daily. 

Her neighbor was kind man who had lost his wife not too long after his wife had given birth to their son some years ago. They had been a responsible sort who had dated throughout high school and college but had still waited nearly a decade after their schooling to settle down for children. 

An ill-timed accident took a sledge hammer to their well thought-out plans and a significant chunk out of their combined savings before they fully realized their dreams for a life together. 

As a result, raising his child alone and with limited resources, her neighbor had taken to enlist her to babysit his three-year-old Lionel for the awkward time period when the child left daycare and the man finished work. The logistics worked well enough for Arianna so that she happily acquiesced to watching over the small boy while his father remained busy. 

Lionel Hu was an easy toddler. All he really needed was snacks when he was hungry, attention when he wanted it, and music to listen to while he played. The only temper tantrum this child knew how to throw happened when his father stayed at work longer than was expected which Arianna found more cute than an annoyance. 

When Arianna told her mother about this one afternoon where they were miraculously getting along, her mother laughed hysterically, claiming that Arianna herself was nothing like the young Lionel Hu and only knew to scream whenever she was happy, sad, angry, hungry, or even tired. Ariana didn’t believe this slander but that was beside the point. 

Two years later, Arianna would meet Lionel Hu for the second time. 

Despite her later attempts to pinpoint the time when she first began to travel, to Arianna’s eternal embarrassment for her own headlessness, she could never quite decide what was first time she crossed the realms of existence. For her, there would only be the moment when she realized what she was capable of. 

Arianna learned that she was a Traveler when she was seventeen years old, two years after she met Lionel Hu for the first time. 

Motivated to escape the latest drama of her parents incited because her father was packing his bags for whatever reason, Arianna had hurried down the stairs as she’d done hundreds of times. She hadn’t looked around for Mr. Hu or his son before she allowed herself to throw her body lengthwise on the bouncy sectional which was always properly stocked with a soft blanket and four furry pillows.  

Footsteps then had alerted her that there was someone home. Hard, steady thump thumps. Mr. Hu, then, Arianna had thought. Unconcerned, Arianna hadn’t turned around to look while the swish of water running began in the kitchen. 

One of the reasons why it took Arianna so long to realize that she could travel was the mechanics of the whole ordeal. Although one would expect to be able to tell when one crossed wold-wide planes of the universe, in practice, the most accessible planes were the ones that were infinitesimally different from one another. 

For her, the difference that sparked her attention to her abilities was this. 

When Arianna had started singing spontaneously from her spot on the sectional in that moment, a crash was soon heard in the kitchen as result. They must have not heard her come in. 

“Arianna?” 

It was a teenager, a boy her age who spoke to her as if he was familiar with her. 

For all that she could be careless in crossing the street and oblivious in seeing what was right in front of her, the Arianna that watched that boy washing dishes in her neighbor’s apartment that afternoon was decisive and steadfast in the course of action that would determine her fate. 

Calmly, Arianna smiled wide despite the fact that the boy couldn’t see her. “Yeah, it’s me.” 

As an adult, Arianna would embark to teach her daughter to develop the same as-you-go attitude as it pertained to their unique capabilities. Without the ability to live a normal life, the mother and daughter pair would always be leaves who followed the wind that would take them where it would. 

“Will Daddy travel with us too?” Elise asked one time. 

“Maybe in another life.”