Speaking In Riddles

The world of this tent is starting to make a bit more sense to me. It's starting to relax, to work properly like a real place should. It doesn't feel anymore like it's shifting beneath and around me or actively breathing in and exhaling out. It doesn't feel like a living thing anymore.

For the time being at least.

Maybe that's her doing, her presence here acting like a kind of anchor for the shift that I'd experienced. And that would probably make a whole lot of sense on a whole lot of levels but more than anything it would explain what I'm witnessing right in front of me.

"Hello?" she asks with a smile as she slips into her chair across the table that I swore wasn't there in front of me when I sat down, "Can I help you with something?"

Sometimes people ask questions that they already know the answers to. They phrase them like a question, they sound like a question, they rise up in tone and tremor like a question does at the end. But they aren't really questions. They're not even rhetorical questions.

What they are is an assertion, a proof, that they already know more about you than you want them to so there is no sense in lying.

In the case of this woman she's asking if she can help me with something when she already knows why I'm here. She's pretending to be surprised by my shock but I would hardly be shocked if she was in any way surprised. And she's waiting, patient, for me to find my voice as I marvel at her.

Which is hard because in the moment before she stepped into my view I lived a thousand different lives in the blink of an eye. I'd gotten a sense of them all, all of their contradictions and all of their differences. I'd understood what they were.

All of them were me. All of my different potentials. All of them were my consciousness, tied to a billion different forms on a billion different words that exist in a multitude of a space that is without dimension or time.

Only possibilities. Stretching out as far as the eye can see.

The woman in front of me had much in common with that. She smiled as a young woman and winked as an old one. She crossed her withered hands and twiddled her supple fingers and then she cleared her throat as she settled into who she was meant to be in this world, in the world that I'd been born into.

Dark hair with a flash of grey. Eyes that were on the edge of cloudy but with a clarity that spoke of sight beyond the physical. Crinkles in all the places that spoke of bemusement and none present in those parts reserved for malice.

She was here, in all her wisdom, to help me.

"I'm here to..." I said, starting and then failing and then trying again, "I'm not sure why I'm here."

"That's not true," she told me quickly, certainty in her tone, "You're absolutely certain why you're here. You've been waiting to be here for a lifetime and yet you chose the opposite path too many times to count. Over your lifetime nearly every choice you've made has taken you a step away from here. When you should have turned right, you turned left instead. When you should have kept going, you halted your steps.

“But finally, in spite of perhaps your best efforts, you arrived in my abode anyways.

"You, gentle child, are exactly where you are meant to be now. Maybe for the first time and maybe not. Maybe you are always precisely where you are meant to be and can only ever be where you are meant to be. But I suppose the question is, do you feel at peace?"

I laughed, barely even registering that I was doing it, "Can anyone really say that they are? Isn't that what life is? Never feeling like you're at peace? Always reaching for something just out of your grasp?"

Her brow furrowed, a flash of sadness playing behind her eyes.

"Do you really believe that to be true?"

"I don't want to," I confessed, wondering why the words were coming so truthful and so honest and so free in front of this stranger, "But I've never known it to be any other way."

The woman paused for a moment, then turned quickly to reach out of sight. She turned back to the table with a slim and flat object beneath a dark silk handkerchief. She slid it onto the table, smoothing out the fabric and worrying at the edges of it while she spoke.

"We can only know what we know. We can only know what our eyes and our ears and our hands and our tongues tell us, or so we are led to believe.

"Maybe things are different though. Maybe we are limited by the breadth of our experience rather than freed by it. Maybe what is red to us is red to someone else, but we'll never know because we can never see it through their eyes.

“If we did get that chance maybe we’d find that red is blue instead. Or maybe we’d find it to be another color? Purple? Pink? Light Blue?

“To know would require looking through someone else’s eyes for real. It would mean occupying a different body. It would require something that cannot be provided. Right?

“And yet imagine if it were, because if it were a possibility. If we could separate the mind from the body and give it a different perspective. Well maybe then none of the colors would be the same.

"Maybe, just maybe, we would see a whole different rainbow."

For a limited time you can join my Patreon for only $2 and get access to over a month's worth of new pages of My Second Chance as well as SEVEN FULL STORIES with a new one every month! Join here: https://www.patreon.com/SophiePert