Tomorrow is Crying for You, Pt. 1

I woke up as a fairy in the empty restaurant next to the woods.  I suppose I always knew when I wanted to live in the doll house in the attic that my hopes and dreams beat inside of a tiny heart.  But not until I opened my eyes and found myself crouching in the furthest corner of the kitchen pantry did I know for certain.

            I had been gone for a year—where, I couldn’t say.  But I did know I’d been very ill, and that during this illness some industrious housekeeper within had thrown huge dust covers over much of my memory.  I wasn’t sure I minded.  Something about the twilight endlessly falling over the woods told me that the last good day had been long ago.

            The restaurant, however, I remembered.  Quietly elegant, its white tablecloths, spotless place settings, and crystal water glasses spoke of another time.  Windows ran the length of the entire outside wall:  restless trees and half-lit sky filled the view as far as the eye could see.  In the cramped kitchen, steel gray units and panelled cabinets housed the pots, pans, and other cooking items.  And then there was the pantry, nearly empty, where I now found myself.  I had never seen anyone cooking in that kitchen.  Save one, I had never seen another soul in the restaurant at all.

            In this endless sunset that enveloped the restaurant, no customers ever came.  Instead, my friend Marietta, the hostess, usually sat at one of the perfectly made tables by herself, doing paperwork of a kind we never discussed.  Only the fading light that rippled through those whispering trees dared enter the large T-shaped room.  Why were there no customers?  On my previous visits I’d only seen Marietta in that hushed hour of solitude.  Like so many other questions I must have forgotten to ask her this one, too.

            Now, in the pantry, I stretched myself and without thinking remembered how to fly—I began running until suddenly my wings caught air and lifted me off of the hardwood floor.  From the kitchen I turned down the narrow, artificially lit hallway that led into the dining room.  No one waited for me; not even Marietta sat at her usual table.  Only I existed, passing through, a lightning bug in disguise. 

But while the restaurant was familiar, it was not safe.  I would need to find some other shelter, to clear my head, maybe to sleep and wake up again as something else.  In the lobby I held my breath and squeezed through the narrowest of gaps between the locked double doors.  When I exhaled again I rolled, tumbleweed style, into the magnificent hall that joined the restaurant to the great corridor. 

This corridor, illuminated by glass chandeliers, was, like the restaurant, empty and silent.  The noise of my beating wings sounded too loud in the stillness around me.  As I buzzed along, weaving and bobbing, expecting to plummet to the ground at any moment yet moving forward all the while, I felt vaguely troubled.  My illness had made the many snickets of my mind as dusky as the sky outside, but that wasn’t the problem.  I’d been ill before.  I had forgotten before.  But when I’d woken up the other times, it was to find myself at school and late for a math exam, with just a faint, frustrated notion of where my classroom might be.  I was used to that, even if I hated it.  I was not used to this fairy business.

Uneasily, I wondered if I would ever be big again.  Where would I live until I was?  The doll house in the attic had gone long ago.  As with nearly everything else I cared about, it had been sacrificed for a future that kept morphing into a past I could not remember. 

The corridor seemed miles longer than usual, maybe because I was so little now.  I peered into all sorts of paper thin passageways I’d never noticed when I was big, but they were so dark and uninviting that I dared not travel down any of them.  I needed to solve this fairy riddle first. 

Still, my woolly thoughts seemed to be leading me somewhere, so I pushed out of my mind the math exams I’d missed, the classrooms I couldn’t find.  I didn’t want to think about the times I woke up in a library, with only a few days left to write a year-end term paper I hadn’t even started.  I never knew how these crises turned out, because suddenly they would be over, and I would be here, on my way to the restaurant to visit Marietta.  She never asked where I’d been.  She was my friend.

Finally the hallway widened into a large, silent atrium, with massive stairs leading to the second floor.  I buzzed up the staircase, following its curvature instead of simply flying straight up.  In the much smaller hallway off to the right some instinct, or past experience, brought me to a small bedroom, gently lit by a reading lamp.  I didn’t know whose it was or why no one slept there tonight, but I did know I would be safe here—at least for a little while.

The bed, however, was not an option.  I fluttered over to the tall chest of drawers.  Each drawer had been left open, just the tiniest bit:  I settled for the middle drawer, the one with the thick woolly winter sweaters.  When I was big I’d hated wool and its scratchy, suffocating warmth, but now I curled myself into a tight ball between a snowflake-patterned jumper and a purple cabled cardigan and let out a little sigh.  Tomorrow, perhaps, I would be big again.  Tomorrow I might remember why I kept forgetting.