Home will wait

Did you realise what you were doing?

…

Did you intend to destroy it?

…

People like you make me-

‘Just wanted to touch…’

He had claimed to be sick so that they couldn’t transport him to a cell. Begrudgingly left in a little room, he was kept company by lilac and pink walls and a tiny bed. Had they intended this as a poke to his masculinity? If so, it was an amusing punishment; He was used to being alone, it felt comfortable. He’d hid from his many brothers when they’d sought him out to play at age 8 and he’d clung to his isolation at 15 when they’d needed someone to shout abuse at, in order to diffuse their pubescent aggression. Often, he’d sought refuge in Ila’s room, the forgotten female child in the family. Ila belonged nowhere else except in her bedroom, which she had only adopted for two years before fading away. Her petal easily crushed by the toxic- masculinity in the house, meant people never visited her space in the years that came after. Remembering someone was one thing, but feeling it was another. However, he still felt her absence and knew that his brothers did too, they just muffled it much deeper inside of their hearts.

He thought of Ila as he stared at the room he was stored in presently. She would have liked lilac and pink…probably. Swiftly a wave crashed over his thoughts; that assumption was a stereotype that he was adorning her with, for truly she never got to grow into any sort of personality. Still, the colours might appear sickly to some but kept him in good company.

The small frame of his body moulded comfortably into the bed, barely making a moan as he clambered on and huddled beneath the paper sheets. What would happen now? How long until he was met with a room of criminals for endless days? Was this his preview into a quiet enclosed space that he would have to call home forever? Having been in love with solitude all his life, it really was the other men that bothered him. What if the person he was shut away with wondered about him? How long would these dismal questions rattle in his mind? Although he usually enjoyed the chatter of an inner monologue, he longed, right now, to silence it. 

As minds do, his disobeyed him and wandered to the very reason he was confined… 

The memory of the swirling creature warmed him. It had screamed life, it had screamed importance, and he’d craved it from the second he saw it. It was like an invitation into a world meant only for him. It had felt like heaven and pleasure and the best sex ever had when he’d realised that it was tactile in reality and not an illusion. So he’d trapped it.

They met underwater on a laborious swim. It was far from land and he had dove down, the further he got the more the pressure revitalised him from his state of psychosis. He hadn’t eaten in days and to be frank, hadn’t wanted to consume any more time on earth awake for what felt like years. But then he saw it. It had saved him, therefore it was meant for him. 

He’d let it live in a tank in his home. The long, thin, creature of creatures. It was like an never-ending string of tiny living beings. Imagine small spiders linked together, giving birth but staying connected, the old and the young forever. Swimming in long elegant loops holding hands with one another. It was the truest expression of individuals acting together as one colony. Separate beings, separate organs, separate roles but an attachment forever. He loved that. The devotion to survival and the need for everyone to thrive. They lived together and they died together.

It had swelled in the tank and spilt out of it; Spewing out of the glass encasement and venturing around his bedroom. He’d dropped his freshly purchased latte on the day he opened the door to it suffocating his computer and glowing iridescent. When he’d entered, it stuck itself against his bedroom wall and quivered. Were they afraid of him?

‘It’s okay, you’re okay, you can look around the room if you like’

The creature stilled. It’s bioluminescent structure glowing red and hardly moving, stuck to the wall and ceiling, having recoiled.

‘I’m sorry the tank is so small’

The creature recoiled again, this time at the sound of his voice. He put his hand out to touch one of its snake-like vines but it skittered away from his reach. Why was it so afraid of him? He had spent months by its side, watching it grow. He saw it as an ally, a friend. But the fear that it was exuding felt like that of a scorned child, prematurely assuming there is a slap coming. In that moment, he thought of Ila, left to cry for hours and sneaking into her room to calm her, singing softly, a lullaby:

‘Hey little one, things will be bright soon, the stars will be gone and the night will go too, let’s wait for the sun, with our eyes closed, hey little one, let yourself doze’

During his song, the creature had quietened from a burnt red to a cooler amber. He sang some more. The creature dissolved out of its rigged structure and started discovering the wall, moving again in a fluid motion. He smiled, singing louder and louder. The creature glowing brighter and brighter, testing its limits; Amber to gold, copper, yellow, and then blues, pinks and greens. It was like the ocean was dancing for him. It swirled and swirled, circle after circle against the wall in front of him, the colours brightening the room, absorbing the space. It was magic. Within it, he saw light and love and opportunity, this wasn’t real life, or at least not the lonely world he had known, it was something else. And, as if on cue, at the end of the song the creature engulfed the room in light and he fell into endless space.

He’d awoken, days later in the middle of the ocean, the authorities waiting for him on the shore. They charged him for theft and ecocide and villainized him as though he were a terrorist to the earth. 

They told him he had destroyed it. That he had gone away and it was left to die in his room. They had studied it from afar for years, wondering about it’s magic, but no one had ever come close to it in the way he had. They’d been trying to investigate who had captured it for months but they discovered the truth much too late. He told them that was not true. That the creature had summoned him, grew with him and then transported him into the ocean back where they’d met each other.

But they said it was dead, the pulsating glow drained. Found in pieces in his bleak bedroom. He could only assume that when taking him away, it had also taken its own life. Did the creature intend to do so?

Is this what happens when you are found somewhere you don’t belong. You decide not to carry on in an alien world?

He thought of this as he awaited trial. He thought of the warmth of the creature when he sat shivering in the cold of the sheets and he thought of it’s slithering company in the silence that poked at him. He wanted nothing more than its presence and to thank it and ask it how? How had it known that he too did not feel like he belonged? That it knew that he belonged in a world joined together by endless water and that's why it put him there. That he longed to feel connected to something just like the creature was. Something more akin to him than the everyday people in his everyday life. That in the human world he was lacking.

He wondered whether he too would destroy himself, once he was confronted with congested space and no chance of freedom.

As the night turned to day these ponderings dissipated, chased away by a new dream; He imagined the cool water, the gentle sift of the waves and the lapping of the lazy sun that shifted between clouds. A foreboding and lovely home the creature had spun their web in. A web of silk and love that was offered to him when he was transported. He wished to return there and, In the depths of his mind, the interlocking limbs caressed him and whispered: Home will wait.