The Girl Who Believed in Everything

Once, in a land far away, there was a girl who believed in Everything. In her world, mice could talk and fairies floated over her bed at night, whispering secrets to her in her sleep. In her dreams, she flew with them, gliding from rooftop to rooftop. No one in her family knew it, but her dreams took her to far away places where magical streams ran through meadows, carrying healing powers in their waters.

The girl knew nothing else, and cared for little else, until one day, she woke up, and the fairies were gone. She could feel their absence, like a cold wind through leaky windows. In their place was an unknown fear. She was left alone. She was sure of it. She could do nothing for days but lie in bed and weep.

What the girl didn’t know was that the fairies had been involved in a game of hide and seek, and the girl, whose name was Sophia, happened to wake up just as all of the fairies were hiding. The one who was not hiding and was it had turned her back and was counting.

But because the girl did not know this, and believed that the fairies were gone – or worse, were just a figment of her imagination to begin with – she stopped flying in her dreams at night. She not longer traveled to far away places or to the magical stream or to the meadow. She lived in the world that she saw by day and came to believe that this was all that there was.

Sophia grew up. She married, had a family, and did some semi-meaningful work. She longed for something more, but what it was that she longed for was vague and, she felt, out of reach.

Then, one day, walking to school with her son, an elf appeared. Just like that. They were walking down their usual route through the neighborhood, and Charles stopped in his tracks.

“Mommy,” he said in a small voice, because he was only 6 years old. “What’s that?”

He was pointing to a hedge next to the sidewalk, only a few feet away from their neighbor’s driveway. The elf was snickering and there was no lying about what this was. She’d seen elves in her childhood dream world, and there was really no other way to explain it than by telling the truth.

“It’s an elf,” she said plainly, though she was clearly shaken.

The boy cowered behind her, and she looked around to be sure no one was watching. Thankfully, the street was empty.

“What’s your name?” The elf asked the boy. It was quite a handsome elf, with a little turned-up nose and a neat, ironed-out suit. He was a mere 6 inches tall.

“Charles,” her son answered, very properly, his mother thought to herself. For mothers are often monitoring their children’s behavior like this.

“What’s your mama’s name?” he asked, looking at the woman.

“Sophia,” she said, and the elf put his hands on his ample little belly and laughed.

“So it is you,” the elf said.

“Yes, why?” she said, looking around again but unable to squelch a rising joy that bubbled through her whole body. She thought for sure she was losing her mind, but was almost willing to do so in order to continue the conversation.

“We thought you didn’t exist anymore,” the elf said.

“We?” she asked.

“The elves and fairies,” he said.

Tears welled up in her eyes. The fairies.

The elf conveyed the whole story about the game of hide and seek and how, when the game was over, the girl was gone. At first the fairies thought that she was playing the game with them, and they sought after her for many days, because they feared she was lost. But then several months passed, and they decided something terrible must have happened and they mourned for many years.

By now, the boy’s eyes were as big as turnips, and he was looking back and forth from the elf to his mother, registering this conversation. He, of course, knew about elves. He played in the forest with them at night when he was asleep. He had only asked his mother to see if she knew, because she never spoke of them, and he thought for sure she would say they didn’t exist. But here he was wrong. She did know. How come she never told him? He wondered.

The woman told the elf to tell the fairies that when she went to sleep that night, she would pay a visit to the fairies.

The boy laughed and clapped his hands, and the elf bowed to her, promising to bring her message. And then he was gone. The woman knew this was the way of the elves, though it still surprised her, and she found herself wondering if she had just had a terrible hallucination, and she looked down to he son to be sure.

“Where did he go?” Charles asked, looking up at her and putting his little hand in hers.

“He went back to the fairies,” she said, thinking she must be mad for saying such a thing, but how else could she explain what just happened?

That night, the woman went to bed with a great sense of anticipation mixed with dread. What if she had made up this whole thing, and her son was going along with it, because he was six years old, and that’s what six year olds do.

Still, when she drifted off to sleep, she found herself in a familiar landscape. It was twinkling with light, though everything was so dim, it broke her heart. Had the fairies grown old and lost their brilliance? She couldn’t see the fairies, and she felt so alone, she sat down on a log, put her head in hear hands, and wept. Big tears fell into her hands. She cried for a hundred years.

Then, on the one hundred and first day, she felt a tap on her shoulder. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hands and looked around. There was the most delicate little dwarf child on her shoulder. He was laughing, and she saw that when she looked into his face, he was familiar, so much like Charles that she almost cried, “Charles!” But she didn’t speak a word. She followed him to where he was motioning for her to go.

She followed him through a thick forest, where there was no light but enough twinkling fairy dust on the ground to guide them. They walked for at least an hour until they came out the other side. And there was the stream. The magical stream she had come to as a child. Still, all was confoundedly dim. The child suggested that she take a sip of the water, which she did. Immediately, she saw that the child was Charles, and that she knew that she was joining him in his dream, and that this was the landscape he visited every night, just as she had when she was young.

The realization overwhelmed her, and she lay down by the stream, overtaken by emotion and unable to move.

It was the fairies, of course, who came to her rescue. They brushed her face with their wingtips and assembled themselves on her feet and fingertips to remind her of who she was. They took droplets from the stream and dribbled them on her lips and eyelids. They sat on her earlobes as they had so many years ago and whispered ancient secrets into her ears.

The woman began to change. It was very slow, but all of the fairies and Charles, too, noticed it. They all gaped in amazement. Her face grew younger, her chest grew flat, and her whole body grew smaller and smaller until she was a girl of 12. The exact age she was when she lost the fairies.

She sat up and looked around, feeling dazed. When she saw the fairies, she laughed out loud. The sound of her own laugh startled her. She looked down at her body and realized she was a girl again. She was incredulous, and then she remembered that in dreams, weird things like this happened.

Charles hoisted himself up again onto her shoulder, and said that she should follow them back into the forest. There was a great feast being prepared for the return of Sophia. When she got up, she felt dizzy, but couldn’t wait another instant. At the bidding of Charles, the whole assemblage of fairies – which numbered some one thousand, though fairies never stay still long enough to be counted – joined the merry march to the forest festivities.

From a great hollowed out log, not too far into the woods, flute music was playing so enticingly that Sophia and her friends knew that they’d come to the right place. There assembled were dwarves, elves, and the forest creatures she had visited as a child. They all recognized her, of course, because she had not changed at all. And she recognized them for the very same reason.

When Orin, the great father of the fairies, appeared, Sophia ran to him and kissed his feet. When she looked up and saw his face, she froze in place. It was the face of Charles as an old man. She quickly looked around for the dwarf child on her shoulder, but he was gone. Orin began to laugh.

“When humans become lost in the thicket of the earthly plane,” he said, “I find a way to bring them back home.”

He looked at her with the most kindly eyes. When she later tried to describe it, she could only think of the eyes of a great lioness considering her cubs, though she knew there were no words and no metaphor equal to it.

She looked into his eyes, until the sound of the party fell away, and she became Light itself.

When she awoke the next morning, Sophia ran to Charles’ room, expecting him to be gone. But there he was, in a sweet sleep, his covers pulled under his chin, his hair crumpled around his exposed ear.

“Thank you, Orin,” she whispered, close enough to his ear so that her words would be audible only to him – and to the fairies, should they be listening.

She thought she saw the corner of his lip lift ever so slightly, but she couldn’t be sure because at that moment, his eyelids opened, and she saw in his eyes all that she had ever dreamed possible, and beyond that a depth that contained all of the secrets the fairies had been telling her all along as well as other secrets she had never been told.

Charles saw it, too, and in that moment of seeing, there was no age, no sorrow, no separation, only the vast space of Love itself.

Sophia kissed him on the cheek, winked, and slipped away to the kitchen to make them breakfast.