Igloo

I was still living in my very first apartment when I saw an impossible thing that changed me; a teardrop-shaped vapor-bubble, which hung in the air at the foot of my bed one night. I never have figured out for certain whether the portal was real or not. I saw it, interacted with it. It spoke to me, not like humans speak to one another, but it definitely communicated. At that time, I lived with a roommate who was almost always out. I was alone with her cat most nights, reading absurdities and facts mingled together like one huge hybrid beast that formed my arrogant worldview on the never-ending web. I was always online, by the way. I was looking for some gem of knowledge, searching out those elusive opinions about me, the ones that justified my character. I sought to crown myself, like I was Lady Proper. As if I knew who I was.

It took an impossible portal to show me who I really was, that I wasn’t so unlike those I regularly ran over in my quest to be infallible. Growing up, the people I looked up to had ironically rejected my reasoning every single day. So, I wanted to be right. I wanted people to see me being right. But my ‘rights’ were prohibitive to real, living people, benefiting none, not even those imaginary victims in my head for whom I supposedly intervened.

Late at night my phone screen seemed to play tricks on my eyes in the dark. Sometimes I thought I saw a pattern that outlined my grandmother’s face, made of the layout of sentences on the page. Sometimes I thought I saw the screen jiggling, vibrating. I took sleeping pills a lot because I knew I wouldn’t have the discipline to walk away from the screen at bedtime. It was easier than using willpower.

I saw the portal hours after I had come in from a snowstorm. My hat was soaking wet, my bags of groceries dripping, my face too stiff to clearly yell at Munchies, who was on the refrigerator again. “Et-ounn,” my words were distorted. Bad kiee!” He ran off and I put my groceries up, complaining to myself in ancient Freeze-mouth, “Damn laee ona bus! Oh!"

During the ride, the woman had turned back toward me in her seat. Our chat in the chill was friendly at first. I was smiling. Laughed. Sympathized when she wiped a tear, saying she missed her late husband. I gave her my condolences, and we moved on.

Then the woman used a term that I considered inappropriate; looser. She referred to her neighbor as a looser because he always pulled into his driveway late, blaring his car speakers. “Wakes me right up then I can’t get back to bed. That’s why I take sleeping pills now…”

This was clearly my cue to ramble on about how I also took sleeping pills. She would have been the first person I told. Instead I declined.

I withdrew.

“Are you okay?”

I was silent, staring at her frantic face. “Did I… Did I say something wrong?”

I didn’t bother to tell her, remained silent, turned my gaze.

“I think I’ve offended you somehow? Please tell me…”

She was desperate to know what she had done to anger me, but I punished her with silence. And I felt she deserved it.

She eventually turned away, turning back a few moments later to say “I didn’t call the cops on him or anything that drastic. I didn’t report him or anything. I didn’t harass him.” She smiled, like it was an attempt to soften me. “I just woke up then took a pill. I don’t take sleeping pills all the time, though..."

She had absolutely no clue why I was furious with her. Finally, I stood at my stop and uttered over the seat to her, “That word is a horrible word. It gives off connotations of a caste system, a harsh, competitive world. We should be equals. Looser? There shouldn’t be winners or losers!” I took a step into the aisle.

She turned to me, “I agree. But. I. Was just describing my feelings about him…”

“You should be ashamed.”

“I. I’m not a mean person. Maybe you misunderstood me,” she said, her words chasing me to the door. I kept going, did not look back at her. The bus took her away baffled, staring out.

I was enraged at her failure to immediately apologize to me. I was sure that I was right, and here was yet another person denying me recognition for being correct! And I was furious with her attempts to defend herself. In my apartment I mumbled, “She really thinks words don’t matter! How freaking blind can someone be! I hope she runs into some jerk who calls her a whore! See if she thinks words don’t matter then.”

That night, while the snow fell ever more and the next day’s business openings were under a statewide cancellation, I laid down on my bed in the dark. The heater was pumping as I fell asleep. When I woke, I heard only the kitchen clock ticking. Opened my eyes, feeling very warm and dry. My nightlight illuminated the hovering form at the end of my bed. “Melinda?” I gazed, thought it was my roommate. It was her height, so what else could it be. It was behind the center of my foot-board, just five feet from my dresser. The fan overhead was turned off. The stillness around me made me feel like I was but an image inside a painting. My closet door was cracked and my clothes strewn over my little bookcase. The drapes hung with the weight of the sea, sealing out all beams of the eerily empty street’s silent lights.

“Melinda?” No answer. I sat up. Held the covers over my shirt for warmth, and I was so drowsy, “Who are you?”

The glow of my nightlight entered the translucent mist. I watched the form expand, creating a hollow space inside itself. It pulsed with faint light, and I saw that it was empty. I stood. My feet were warmed by the ceramic floor, an oddity that I’ll never forget. I inched toward the intruder, sure that my eyes were playing tricks on me, that this was someone who I couldn’t quite see. “Hello.”

It just pulsed. And I watched it do nothing for almost five minutes before it occurred to me that this thing was no person, and that despite that- or because of it- it was harmless, safe, and protective. I reached out, touched it, and it bled vapors onto the ground as it blossomed open like a flower, which hovered there. I touched the disk and it seemed fixed in place, so I sat down on it.

That tuffet spun fast for a round or two, causing me to lurch back and pull my feet in. Then its petals folded upwards, closed quietly around me.

Inside seemed like a fairy tale wardrobe where a child might sit curled up, as was I. Then the walls began to expand. I heard distant sounds, felt a warm breeze. Stood up on a rugged wood floor and looked out of a window at the forest. I was inside a room. It was without electric light, with a dull blue cast throughout. Empty except for a mat on the floor and a box of clothes. These had never been my things.

I took a step and the floor waved under my foot. Then another, it waved less. It was like jelly but solidified with every step as my conscience became fully integrated with this realm. I opened the creaking old door, which was a shade of brown so plain it made the door seem to drag open more slowly still. No one was visible in the hallway. But I heard crying, went to the sound.

I stood at the door of this girl, watching her cry with her back to me. She wore French braids. “I was just saying that I had a crappy day. Everyone uses that word. I wasn’t even on offend-mode when I said it. I was just expressing myself honestly, not hostilely. How could she call me hostile? She hates me. That’s how.”

I didn’t understand where I was until I saw myself in a picture on her wall. But the picture was moving, and my image stood up from a fine polished wood floor and grumbled within the frame, “She’s so mean to me sometimes! I just said that my teacher was a fake. How can that word be so wrong? I was only trying to express how I felt. Why would Grandma think that saying ‘fake’ is so evil? How could she get so mad over that.”

I now knew that I was inside some vision-maker that wanted to show me things, related things and different sides of the same coin. I now remembered why Grandma was mad. She had strong opinions and thought that anyone calling any person a fake was intended to mean that they thought they were better than the accused, as if better by default. In another picture on the wall I watched my grandma yelling at me where I stood as if she could see me there in the blue, her face filling up the landscape within the frame, “Fake is a bad word! It means that you reject all people who don’t behave as you do! It’s not appropriate to call someone a fake! Now go and write me fifty lines on why you must never! Ever! Say that word again!”

So that’s what I was doing in the first picture, writing lines unhappily, knowing that my personal character had been attacked and defeated over a mere word. How had I forgotten this incident? It had been twelve years before, when I was half my own age and honest.

The girl crying on the floor before me turned toward me but didn’t see anyone and wiped her eyes, “So mean. Her stupid beliefs make her hurt people she doesn’t agree with. Do my emotions get no poetic license? Am I not allowed to say ‘crappy’ to describe my feelings? My own damn feelings! I thought I could trust her enough to tell her anything, to tell her everything that I’d never say to anyone else. How could she do this, making me write lines like I’m some little kid! Like I’m not autonomous! Like I’m the only person in the world who has to get permission before I use a word. Can one word define me? I wouldn’t do this to her!”

It seemed the girl on the floor was the teen version of the woman on the bus. I was in some place where the past meets the present with similarities, reminders. Perspective and clarity. This portal was like a magic gift of understanding. I pondered objectively, amazed that I had come to be inside of it, wondering what the odds of that were, and realizing how fortunate I was to witness my own wisdom unfolding before me. So surreal.

I watched the crying girl walk right through me, complaining, “We were alone. No one heard me but her. It’s not like I embarrassed her in front of her friends or the whole uptight family. How can she elevate a word to a higher status than her own granddaughter’s feelings? I would never do this to her.”

As I listened to her feelings and was reminded of my own original feelings, the ones I had before it became important for me to feel important, I realized that it was cruel of me to hold my personal ideals above the free and genuine expression of another person. That woman on the bus was not being sarcastic. She wasn’t just trying to be a show-off. Contrary to my suspicions the woman was not trying to spread inequality. She wasn’t making competition worse in reality, only in my hysterical perception.

The scene of the realm faded to black. I could hear myself speaking without restraint now, “Words do matter. Looser can be a dark word, but I guess the degree of darkness depends on the context, who’s listening and who’s talking, and who the word might deflate. But I snubbed her then walked away from her resulting regret. I rejected the poor woman. And I define myself as being anti-rejection? I hurt someone needlessly, someone who’s words weren’t even destine to reach any target. It was just between us…” My voice faded.

The darkness opened up to my bedroom and the portal softly dumped me out onto my own floor in my apartment. I looked up, reached for it as its petals closed. When I touched it, it collapsed into what looked like a thousand crushed opals. The pieces never hit the floor, but I felt some of them, vaguely sharp, tumbling over my feet as they dissipated. My eyes turned to a similar sight; snow flurries falling against my window, vanishing the moment they contacted the warm glass.

The next day I asked Melinda if she’d ever seen anything weird in the apartment. She was only passing through to grab a few things in a hurry. She stopped. Turned. Stared at me. Her face tightened like my neck did as she stared at me. “Weird. Like things floating around in the night? Or more like weird dreams where you see your own horrible past?”

“Yes! Kind of. I mean…”

“Look, Selda. This place gives me the creeps. I don’t know what kind of energy you have moving around inside of this place, but. Let me tell you! I can feel it. It’s after me. It's after my mind and my sanity. You can stay here in Hallucination Central, where the central heat pumps out gasses that tenants aren’t supposed to inhale. I have to go now. See you later.”

“Melinda! Wait!”

She slammed the door. Gone.

What did that mean. Hallucination Central? Was this a real thing or some rumor? I asked other tenants in the elevator that day. Most of them just chuckled softly, gripping eggs they'd gotten in trade for milk. Or macaroni they'd be trading for soup. Shopping was impossible.

An older woman said, “It’s probably the cold weather. I think it can have an effect on people.”

But I was so warm inside my bedroom. Even if the cold could cause hallucinations that theory didn’t involve me.

As I was walking back from the candy machine in the lobby an apartment door stood half open in the hallway. The man inside was letting someone in, whispering, “It happened again last night.”

“The sphere,” his guest asked, stepping inside.

“No. I told you. It isn’t a sphere. It’s just hollow…”

The door was shut now.

I had to knock. I had to know! So I tapped at the door. It flew open and he scowled at me, “Yes!”

“I’m sorry. I was. I was just wondering…” I had to know if he knew what I knew, if it was real. But I was so afraid to ask him, with that scowl of his.

“Yes! What! What do you want? I’m busy!”

I lost my nerve, “Sir. I just wanted to know if you wanted to buy a candy bar to benefit the, ah, library.” I held out my six candy bars. It was all I’d eat until the world thawed outside, other than toast and beans.

“I’m a diabetic.” He slammed the door in my face.

I wanted to bawl because I was sure he knew something. I stood there, trying to listen. No one was around. I had to know if there really was a portal that roamed the earth in search of people to enlighten. If so, then why? And why was I chosen? Or was this all random.

Through the door I heard voices that sounded like folded-up matchbooks; flammable, flickering, yet so small to my ears that they seemed as flat as compressed cardboard through the door, “I saw myself…”

“Jon, it was just a dream…”

“No. Listen.”

I pretended to walk on, looking back every few seconds at the old lady who struggled by with her walker so slowly that I had to break my slowest stride to stop short of the stairwell, acting like I dropped my candy. She saw me, smiled, “That’ll rot your ribs, honey. Eat apples. They keep the doctor away.”

“Oh.” I smiled, fixed my eyes firmly on that other door.

I heard her say to me, “And in case you’re wondering about the snowflakes. Well. They vanish when they hit the window because its so warm. It’s almost like the window feeds off of them,” she chuckled, “digests them. They cleanse the window, you see. Keep it translucent unto itself. So. Yes. Portals are real. Made of everything from steel to plasma to photons to thought. They appear as often, or as rarely, as necessary.”

I turned to her now and said, “So you’ve seen it too?”

She was sitting on a bench inside her door, engaged in reaching down to untie her shoes. I heard her grunt, “What’s that, sweetie?”

“The. Portal.”

“What portal? Is that what they’re calling the candy machine now?”

I hadn’t actually seen her make that other point to me. Now I wasn’t sure she really had.

All I knew was that the mythological portal, that tiny igloo, had revealed myself to me and I now remembered being kinder. If it was a hallucination then I needed it, and that’s why I saw it. But if it was real then I saw it because some conscious force deemed it necessary for the happiness of others, of those who I might hurt otherwise.

Whatever the real reason for me seeing it, it improved the world because it improved me. Even if it wasn't real. But it had to be.