Eliza's Flight Confirmation

Confirming…Eliza…Confirming. As Eliza sat in an airport for the first time, she remembered little of the dream of the night before; the words, the feeling of a great static distance, and the rain. She had been in something like an airport then, too.

Although it had been raining in the dream, it was not raining now. There hadn't been a cloud in the sky when they arrived.

She looked up at her mother, whose profile, from her angle, was juttingly framed in a grid of grey-lined ceiling panels. 

 Her mother’s head turned every few moments, tracking the environment with an affectation of awareness. Every time the loudspeaker put out an announcement or ad, her head and eyes froze against the undercurrent of something she was defenseless against. She had been taken by the voice and spirit of the robot. A moment later and her eyes and head resumed their movement. 

“Mom?” Eliza asked. Her mother’s eyes followed the bored bagelman’s fifth sugar-packet adjustment.

Eliza sighed. She was not going to repeat herself. She stopped doing it a long time ago. She didn’t take it out on others anymore though, even inside her own head. She just did her own thing. So she got up and began walking to the bathroom. 

Although she was old enough now to go to the restroom alone in an airport, her mother gave a startled “Where are you going!?”

 She was afraid of losing things, Eliza thought. That’s one reason why the robot can get her.

“We’re going to be late for your visit to your father, don’t you want to see him?” A mixture of emotions passed through her mother’s face as she landed temporarily back in the moment. Then they were gone, like a womb of baby snakes curling back together into a ball within.

Do you!? she almost said. It was the ghost of an old thought that was probably being coaxed out by the presence of the robot. Instead, she nodded. “It’ll just be a minute. I won’t be late.”

As she walked onto the tile floor of the restroom, she saw her reflection approaching in parallel tandem. She almost looked away. Instead, she walked closer and took a closer look at her face. She felt suddenly, she knew irrationally, very angry at the robot. You’re Slime, a voice in her head barked. She didn’t bark in real life, where the robot didn’t exist with a body. 

She started her old pattern, her old ritual, which she hadn’t done in over two years. She ran her hands through her hair, cocked her hips sideways in a little hop, and smiled at the mirror like a happy little ballerina minus the trained dignity. She was going to continue with it, but a large woman strolled behind her to the exit. Eliza felt punched by the look on the woman's face. So instead, she looked down and started washing her hands. She didn’t want to use her most recent ritual, because…well she didn’t know why.

She sat on a toilet with her pants on and leaned against the toilet paper dispenser and closed her eyes. She thought of the dream again. Like all dreams, it was difficult to to recall, even if she put in the effort. She still remembered the voice and something to do with rain, but the details escaped her. Maybe there had been no other details. She would probably never know. Accepting that, she gave in, and found herself beginning the new ritual, the one that she had discovered a year ago. 

It was an inside ritual. At first.

First, she closed her eyes and went to her heart. It was the place where she was supposed to feel good. There, following a wordless call, she found the hidden door. The door that hid the power of the colors.

She put her hand to the doorknob. It wouldn’t budge. She put her whole body and both hands into the unforeseen struggle, but the doorknob barely turned at all. It had always opened effortlessly before. She had no idea what the difference was now.

Standing there inside herself, she became suddenly more aware of the darkness, the heavy and almost visible gas outside of the door. With a small jerk of shock, she interpreted it as the spirit of the robot; drifting and dark-yellow and heavy. Why was it here? She stood within the body of the gas and she thought thoughts and felt feelings in simultaneity with it: I’m miles away. I’m miles away. I’m miles away… Her legs and arms felt heavy. She felt sleepy, and then confused about her own reasons for even being there.

As if in response, there was a slight static shock on the doorknob. Tendrils of yellow and red electricity ran along the lines of her finger tendons, and then in a spiral up her arms. She felt stronger. Giving it another try, she open the door an inch. There was something holding it back. 

She stood there and looked at her hands and the doorknob. What were the colors? She didn't have a clue.

As she looked at them, the red and yellow lines became currents that arced up the channels of her limbs, grew in size, and coruscated almost blindingly as they pooled in the destination of her lower belly. She felt a wave of cold fear underlap the same area. It was so strong that would have overcome her, had it stayed. Yet it vanished with no warning, and as it did, she gave a cry and pulled on the door. Invisible resistance gave way, and the doorway stood open before her. Breathing hard, she waited in expectation.

Her expectations didn't occur: her eyes didn’t open of their own accord from her spot on the toilet. The color didn’t pour out of her body in a vibrating and accelerating wave like it did every time before. It didn’t cover the bathroom tiles, the woman with the loud face, her mother, the bagel man, or the gridded ceiling. It didn’t freeze them into stillness with the power of its color. It didn’t give her the world like a 3D photograph. With an effort, she opened her eyes halfway, and found she was still sitting on the toilet in the faded stall where time passed. She heard the last moments of the water refilling process exhaling itself on the loud-faced woman’s toilet. Her own breathing felt light and stingy.

She closed her eyes again. Her inner self was still there in front of the opened doorway, heavy and grounded as if more of her body was now actually in her mind than it was there on the toilet. She breathed deeply. No traveling or visualization was required.

The gas and her were not in synchrony anymore. She sensed it as if it were a presence next to her.

Being more free of the gases’ influence, she found herself gathering the memory of all the times she had used the new ritual. 

Before she had discovered it, she had been desperate and unhappy. She had given up on happiness, in fact. That was around the time that the ritual had occurred spontaneously.

From the second time and on, when she had consciously used the ritual, she had assumed it was the colors themselves that beckoned to her, in order that she could use their magic. She didn't know their reasons. She had followed their presence like a beacon.

In the moment that she struggled to open the door, her understanding of the colors had changed.

In the same way that she acclimated to the gas and its suggestions outside the door by noticing it, she was involuntarily separated from the hidden assumptions she had about the colors and the ritual. It was impossible to understand, but also simple, and true.

She stared into the white mists beyond the doorway and wondered what the truth was, in there, beyond her desire for the colors.

The moment she thought those thoughts, the gas, which she had begun to lose awareness of, gathered in around her like a group of ill-intent, wishing to cause harm but not be the obvious cause of it.

 She heard its voice, many voices and one, as the same voice of the Hawaii travel package lady in the airport. She heard it speak as if through a loudspeaker. When it spoke, she felt it. When she felt it, the feelings became her own.

She knew that it was going to get her, that she would let it, if she waited too much longer. But she did, anyway. Just for one moment. She just didn’t know what would happen if she walked through that door. The voice howled, and she began to howl.

I’M MILES AWAY. I’M MILES AWAY. IIIIIIII’MMMMMMIIIILLLESS

With an involuntary cry of grief and strain, Eliza broke off the howl and threw her real inner body through the doorway and away from the dragging and hellish influence of the voice.

———————————————————————

Pelting droplets tapped their ever-chaotic discourse over the roof Eliza’s dream airport. She found herself seated, looking up at the almost fully transparent wall of a transplanted greenhouse that played the role of the roof. She looked down and saw a green chair from her kindergarten. It smiled at her like the first play dough face she had ever carved. She turned to look at her mother, and turned again, because she was to her right, not left, this time. She couldn’t see what her mother was wearing, somehow, but her face was like it was in real time. Distracted. She was staring up at the rain droplets. She gave no social pretense of awareness here.

A detail of the dream memory came to her. Eliza…confirm. Eliza…confirm. The voice must have said confirm, not confirmed. 

Eliza stood up and called out into the misty distance. “I’m here! I’m here!” She waved her arms. She didn’t know why.

There was no response. She turned to her mother. “Mom.” Her mother continued to stare. “Mom!” 

She stood in front of her mother. “Don’t you want to see your husband!?” She cried. Her mother looked at her. “Ok.”

Eliza took her hand, looked around at the empty expanse, and began to walk. “Where are we going?” Her mother asked, lost again.

Somewhere  and Why do you care now!? and other thoughts rose up unbidden in her mind and then floated away even more quickly, like paint in hot water. Instead, she said “Stop going away! Stay here with me.” She pulled her mother’s hand and led her purposefully and without direction through the pattering greenhouse mists.

Eliza heard a sound to her right. They turned. In front of them was the same tunnel that Eliza had seen in a glimpse of a spaceship movie her father had been watching when she was small. A man stood in front of the tunnel in a bright orange uniform. “Eliza?” he asked in a courteous and somehow compassionate manner. Eliza stared at him. He could be her father’s brother, if he had one.

She looked up at her mother, who was staring at the ceiling, at the raindrops again.

“Yes” Eliza said. “Yes, that’s me.”

“Eliza, can you confirm that it’s you?”

“Of course it’s me” she said.

He looked at her with her head cocked slightly, not reproachful, but curious. 

Her mother wrenched her hand away and wandered off at great speed, her head craned upward.

———————————————————

Eliza looked from her retreating mother to the man.  “Aren’t you going to help?” She asked the man. He raised his eyebrows at her, somehow still conveying the positive manner he had before. She clenched her fists and squeezed at his unwillingness to assist her. A growl of frustrated anxiety came out of her throat as she looked back and forth.

She turned to her mother, who was now a faraway fleck. She began to sprint after her. She turned her head back once, seeing the tunnel and the orange man fade. She seethed and cried and howled. Then she stood taller as a prideful viciousness took her. She would make her come with her. She would have no choice, just like she was given none.

Her mother's outline came increasingly into view as Eliza’s footsteps ate the silent ground. The ground became the grass around what was their first home. Her mother was seated at a wooden bench with her old best friend from their old town. They were at a birthday party. Or rather, two birthday parties. Her sixth and eighth birthday parties rolled into one. There was a piñata and also a little stage with little girls dressed as pop divas. The parents of the children talked and laughed as the children played. The smell of barbecue hovered over the disembodied past. At some point in seeing this, the viciousness fell from Eliza, and only the pride was left.

She ran over to her mother. Her mother’s face hit her like a brick wall. The pride vanished. She witnessed joy, frustrated grief, bitter fear, and volcanic anger strain the symphony of her mother’s facial muscles.

Then she looked at Eliza, and she was there with her, completely, as she hadn’t been in years. “It was better then. It was better.” She sobbed.

The colors of power emanated from their hiding place in her mother and burst outwards to fill in the missing pieces of the neighborhood. The clothing and faces of the parents readjusted. The stage disappeared, and the divas. The piñata hung there, unbroken. Everything stood as it was, as it had supposedly been, in real life. Frozen, and perfect. “Isn’t it great?” Her mother asked her. Eliza looked around, and saw with vivid clarity, in both thought and feeling, everything good that they once had. She felt her heartstrings vibrate with an impossible number of emotions. The sound echoed sweetly for a lost eternity, then faded away. The echo seemed to grab at Eliza for purchase as it slipped away.

Eliza looked at her mother. She looked, and she looked some more. Then, she listened. Then, she saw it. She saw her mother’s mouth move ever so slightly and slowly.

Eliza leaned forward and heard the whisper. I'm miles away.

Eliza looked back at her mother’s eyes. Whatever was left of her own desire for the colors fell away with everything else that had fallen away in the deceptive emptiness past the doorway.

She responded to her mother. “It was. It was great, but it’s over. It's gone.” Her eyes welled with tears then receded, and she smiled at her mother. Her mother stood up, confusion replacing the strain. Then a hesitant smile pulled into place from the corners of her mouth. Her face softened and stretched into a full smile. And as it did, the perfect past around them left. It didn’t vanish, but it sank away into the whiteness of the ground and the air and the sky.

Then it was just them, standing on the white emptiness of the endless greenhouse. She took her mother by the hand and looked at her like the man-who-was-not-her-father had looked at her. “It's over. It's going to be okay.” 

There was a silent burst of shattered glass as far as the eye could see, and the entire greenhouse collapsed. Eliza and her mother looked up as the raindrops careened into them, wonderful and warm and wet. They smiled at each other. Colors rushed upwards from their bodies to fill the empty white sky above. In the gentle sweep of a moment, the mother of all sunsets and twilights smiled down at the complete and endless vista of Eliza’s heart.

A gentle chuckle broke through the mesmerizing picture, and Eliza turned to see the man dressed in orange. He stood there looking at them, the tunnel behind him. “Eliza, confirmed” he said. “Eliza, confirmed.” He nodded at her and opened one arm to the tunnel behind him. He gave a small smile.

That was when she understood. She didn’t know what she understood. She just knew that she did. She gave her mother’s cheek a kiss and began her walk through the tunnel. She heard her mother speak with the man. She looked behind her, and they were gone. She turned and entered the plane.

——————————————————-

Eliza woke in the bathroom, which was now completely silent. She looked at her phone and saw that she had been asleep for four minutes. She hurried out of the bathroom and came to a stop at the sight of her mother, now standing and looking towards the far end of the airport. She walked closer. “Mom?” She said. Her mother turned, and the old emotions filled that face again. Before her mother could speak, Eliza smiled at her and said, “I’m ready to go.” Her mother smiled too, pain and surprise competing in her expression. Before she could respond, Eliza said “I love you” and took her hand. Then, in the near silence of the airport, they walked together towards the flight.