The Other World

She had the saddest eyes I'd ever imagined, full of ripples and longing. You think you know what sadness is, perhaps; you think it is the eyes of a starving child. But I tell you there is a deeper sorrow, one born of a more spiritual anguish. What is food or not-food, life or death, when you are alone as she was?

I remember it was a cold, cold night in January, nearly eleven, only an hour before curfew. I had come out to the pond to cry for my own loneliness, which was as nothing to hers. But perhaps that is why I saw her; because I too felt that pain--that and because I was so young, just nineteen. The pond between the college dorms was the only place where I could have my agony out in private, unnoticed and unheard. Ah, I was so young, and my sorrow seemed to demand the grand and bleak setting of the winter night.

But when I saw her, my own tears became insignificant. Her back was to me, but I saw her face even so. She stood at the center of the water and looked up through it at the lighted dorm windows. The pond seldom froze, but there was a light silvery sheen of ice on it, and she stood behind that as behind a window, looking out at our yellow windows from her blue one. Her skin, I remember, was silver-grained and dark. Her eyes were the blue of midnight, almost black. She stretched out slim fingers to touch the ice above her, and smiled a smile half sad, half tender.

I looked at her and loved her. It was a simple thing. She began for me the "other world" of Patrick Henry College, the one that was to dominate my imagination for five years; and in spite of all my attempts to grow up, hers is the world I still long for in my dreams. Hers is the world I still touch. So strange it is to me, that I walked about by day and by night as a young adult in professional clothing, learning all the knowledge that a classical liberal arts education has to offer, and all that a vibrant group of young Christians can teach each other, and yet in some ways that world faded while hers remains---the dream within the reality, or the reality within the dream?

She was at the center of all that went on in that other world, and everything else grew up around her. Within a month or two of knowing her, I became aware of the warm-voiced spirits that inhabit every lamp on campus. There was one, I remember, exactly at the center of the back of the boys' dorm. He was the guardian; he faced the red light that winked in the distance---the Eye of Mordor, I called it---and stood his ground. Sometimes I would go to him and stand, cupping my hands around his warmth and glow, and be comforted.

Some of the lamps were tall, some short. Some died easily, and I mourned them until their lamps were restored. I always spoke to them; I always caressed the low ones, almost thanking them for burning, certainly thanking God for their soft strength against the greedy fingers of night. Ah, so many nights they comforted me, walking solitary and exhausted late at night, shuffling from study room to dorm. They did not know the water fairy; they were there for us, to comfort the students. They could have done nothing for her. She was locked beneath the long blue rills.

So few, so very few, ever entered her world with me. Most advised that I grow up and put such childish things behind. But Stars came with me, when I opened that place for her, and Teo sometimes led me in. He showed me more of the people of that world; he gave me a flock of seven fairies. All through a long summer I cherished them, first for his sake, then for their own. I loved them; they were so real.

They knew of the water fairy, of course, but their task was me. They pricked me on when I would have lapsed into apathy; they sang and danced for me that I might not know sadness. I remember Teo once said that a lamppost we were walking by was really Simile, one of the fairies. She could transform herself into anything. She knew me best. Paradoxus was my Peter Pan; he ruled my heart and forced me to be strong. The others were my children, dear, so dear!

The fairies gave me the gazebo, which was theirs alone to give. I would take off my shoes whenever I entered it. Teo laughed at me, but I told him that it was their rule. I left messages in the eaves of that fragile structure, somehow so solid and full of freedom, and it sang to me whenever I went to it. The water fairy heard and smiled. I played with the willow tree that grew on her banks, and waded in her waters. She never spoke to me, but she didn't have to. I knew that she gladdened because someone was aware of her.

The fairies treated her reverently and spoke of her as if of a distant queen, but they whispered her story to me while I slept. She was sad because she had been enchanted; she would remain at the bottom of the pond in an emerald palace guarded by a dragon made of mud and fire, until a hero came to set her free. Then the pond's waters would become sweet, and all its mud would turn to golden sand, and we would be able to swim in it. The water fairy would take her husband to a magnificent castle now invisible, but really there in the cornfield, and the college would vanish, and the whole place would become once more the kingdom that it had been before her imprisonment by a wicked enchanter.

I told myself this story so often that it grew elaborate. I knew her courtiers and the various spells that held them silent and ugly. I knew her kingdom and knew what joy would come to it when she set a king on the throne and become his queen. I knew that she would wait a long, long time. I knew all her moods; some days she was hopeful, others sad, still others angry, and sometimes still, waiting. Whenever I needed to cry, at night, I went to cry by her shores. She understood tears, and I understood time and again that my sadness was insignificant beside hers. I was one person who felt pain; she was for me somehow the personification of pain, but always hopeful, always steadfast, always waiting, among blue shadows, for her dawn. I drew strength from her and from her world, her people, the lamps and the fairies.

I shall never forgive myself for denying them. One night, one of the last of the nights that I lived on campus, Stars asked me "how the fairies were." Teo had died by then in a terrible accident, and I was still angry with him for dying, so I said, quite savagely "There are no fairies. I don't believe in fairies."

Oh, my dear ones, I did believe in you! I do still. I believe in you, and in the water fairy and the warm-voiced lamps. I believe in the promise of the hero and the golden kingdom, which is as much as to say that I believe the water-fairy will be happy again, someday. I believe that her fingers will not always be pressed against an achingly cold wall of ice. I believe that her dark, longing eyes will spark someday with laughter. I believe that her palace in the cornfield is there. I believe that pain cannot endure forever.

I believe in the other world. Do you hear me, water fairy? Do you hear, my little white palace, my gazebo, my delicate home of dreams? Do you attend to my words, you beautiful aerial fairies, whom I once denied out of my bitter regret? Will you forgive? Will you return to me? Will you remind me once more to look beyond my self, my own sadness, to a larger sadness, and choose hope even so?

My dreams are full of shadows and labors, dear water fairy. I am weary. I go to the forest here to find you in the brook, but it is winter, and I cannot go often. Beloved other world, my other heart is with you, and my other mind is constantly in your fields; I feel your joys, fears, anguish, hope, and my arms are raised with your uplifted swaying trees limbs. I thought I had forgotten, and I wanted to forget. I denied, and I wanted to deny. I thought that I could not see you alone, and that all children have to grow up. But even though all my playmates are vanished or dead or lost to me, I still see you. Child or not, I shall always see you. You are mine; I am yours. You are my picture of reality, only painted sharper and brighter so that I can understand.

Dear water fairy, don't give up. Sweet sprite, lift up your eyes to the stars, from which you were surely born, and have hope. God does not forget us.