Elf

Elf

"Why don't I belong here?"

"What the hell are you doing?" I asked the monkey, seeing him pull a fish from the water and place it on the tree branches.

"Saving it from drowning," she replied.

Anthony de Mello, "Birdsong."

It was a dream... he thought when he woke up that morning, a bit frightened and lost. He only wondered why he didn't remember it. Maybe it was the window; they say if you look out the window right after waking up, you forget your dreams. Had he done just that, unconsciously...? Perhaps, or perhaps he simply didn't want to know where his thoughts had wandered all night. But he had no time to think now; he should have been in class long ago. He hated his school; it was like hundreds of thousands of others, but it was a place where he felt particularly uneasy. He didn't quite know why.

He didn't feel at home anywhere, not even in his own home. Something kept telling him that everything wasn't quite right, that there were some mistakes that shouldn't have happened. By some strange twist of fate, all events don't occur at the right time. As if fate were toying with him brazenly. As if everything were different, alien. Not his, not for him, not because of him, not according to his will, not according to his plan. This state of affairs was suffocating him, choking him, and destroying him, preventing him from breathing or spreading his wings.

***

Dream. I'm escaping, I've already left my world... I penetrate into another, in which those faces I know so well keep passing by. Some enormous bird slowly transforms into a beast, its or hers constantly staring at me... Suddenly, I find myself above a cliff. It's beautiful all around, and on the horizon I see mountains that touch the sky as if they were one with it. Closer to me, flowers, thousands of them... I look down... a woman holds my hand and prevents me from jumping... I breathe, but I choke on air, I try to break free, but I'm powerless...

***

Snippets of conversations from the people around him reached him. The hall was busier than usual, despite there being no reason for it. This didn't particularly grab his attention. He was lost in his thoughts again; none of them were specific, and if someone had asked him what he was thinking about, he probably wouldn't have answered. In fact, he acted as if he were waiting for something. He didn't know what for, in fact, he didn't even realize he was waiting. His suspended state was interrupted by a figure that appeared in the corner of the corridor for the fraction of a blink of an eye. He saw her through the people passing by. Her face, though he'd never seen it before, seemed strangely familiar. He'd never been good at remembering faces, but this one stuck in his mind immediately. He could picture every detail of her, every twitch of muscle beneath her smooth skin, tensing in a shy smile. And those eyes, with a hint of sadness.

Before she disappeared among the passing people, she seemed to say something, something that sounded like "believe."

But what? The rush of thoughts haunted him even more than usual.

As usual, the only thing that remained was that each question, instead of an answer, raised hundreds of new doubts.

***

The dream.

That face... still her, I can't stop thinking about it, I see it so clearly, there's something about it that terrifies me and something that makes me feel safe at the same time. Why is this particular face so different from ordinary faces? The ones I see hundreds of every day? Why don't I spend even 30 seconds on any other, and this one, even in this dream, won't leave me alone. She bursts in without asking, and yet she doesn't try to throw her out...

I have to find her. I'm running now, but I still can't move. My feet sink into the sticky, swamp-like sidewalk, every movement takes a thousand times more effort than usual and brings less effect.

***

Another day, routine, mechanically performed activities. A pattern repeated endlessly and without pause. The same movements, the same thoughts. The scene played out practically everywhere, making it all the more depressing. He left the house, passing gray, dilapidated apartment buildings that grew uglier by the day. The roar of old cars spewing kilograms of oxides, dioxides, trioxides, sulfides, potassium hydroxides, and other junk. He could almost feel it clogging his pores, slowly suffocating him.

A week had passed since he'd seen that woman in the hallway. He was slowly losing hope of seeing her again. Everything seemed to be returning to normal. Then he saw her again. She was standing in a gray coat on the corner of the street. In fact, it didn't even feel like a chance encounter. It seemed planned, as if they'd agreed to wait at a traffic light at the intersection of Piłsudskiego and Polska Streets. She seemed utterly different from the surrounding reality. Like some comic book artist's mistake, accidentally inserting someone who inspired optimism and peace into a gray, sad image. He approached, and the words began to flow. Questions that had always been lingering in his mind, unable to be articulated, now flowed from his lips, forming a coherent, logical whole. What he didn't know became clear. And the answer lay there, at the corner of Polska and Piłsudskiego Streets, in the person of a woman he'd never seen before. Incidentally, this is a rather unusual place to change one's perception of reality. Normally, such things happen very rarely, and if they do, they happen under extraordinary circumstances, at life's turning points, in the face of danger, or after a conversation with a burning bush. In his case, it happened before a pedestrian crossing. A rather silly place, but it's completely irrelevant.

"This whole world... all of this... you feel like it's not really yours..." she said to him.

*I don't know what's truly mine... thousands of feelings arise within me every day. I don't know which are truly mine. Do you know why that is? Why don't I understand anything, why I feel so strongly that I don't belong?

-I know almost everything about you, I've been watching you for a long time.

*How do you do it? Apart from that time in the hall, I've never seen you.

-So you saw me then. I was never really there. I dream of you.

*So why is it all so strange?

-You're an elf, like me. We perceive things differently, everything hurts us more, we're less resilient and more sensitive. That's why there are so few of us left. Most of us long for a world that's long gone and can't be found in humans. They're cruel, possessive, and selfish. And we'll never be able to adapt to that. Humans will always hurt us.

* You know it sounds too unbelievable to believe.

"I know, close your eyes and give me your hand, I'll show you everything

." He did as she told him, then he saw the forgotten poets. A village plundered and burned by barbarians, and humans, though were they really?... they all had faces he'd seen before in dreams. Some of them were happy, others weren't. But they all had something in common, that strange, sad look...

They fell silent.

The silence was almost oppressive, the kind you never get in a city. Normally, you could always hear cars, buses, people rushing somewhere, children screaming, dogs barking. Now there was nothing but silence. Reality and the answer to his questions turned out to be far more incomprehensible than he could have ever imagined. In one split second, he had to completely change his way of thinking, had to believe in something that was impossible. And at the same time, something that seemed so convincing it couldn't possibly be true.

* Are there any other elves?

" "They are; in fact, you might have met many of them already." Only those who most resembled humans remained, those who were able to give the impression they were. Some did it so well that they even convinced themselves they were.

I'm the one telling them the truth.

* Is that why you were interested in me?

- Not really, there's something strange about you, I'm almost certain you would have discovered you weren't human eventually.

* So why?

- I have to go.

* Wait...

He didn't let her go. He grabbed her hand and looked into her eyes. They both learned something about each other then. For a split second, the sadness in her eyes vanished, a new feeling blossomed in them. Then he let go of her hand, and she vanished. She simply walked around the corner, and when he reached her, she was gone. Just like when they first met in the school hall.

***

The day after their meeting was the same as all the others; nothing seemed to have changed except for what was happening inside him. For the first time in years, he asked himself questions and found answers. Before, he had often run away from his thoughts, hiding like a small child under the table when a stranger comes. He disliked many of his own thoughts. He was fed up with many of them and wished he could never have them again. That day, he decided to talk to his parents. If he was an elf, then they had to be too. It was logical—two and two equals four—there was no other way. He explained everything carefully, described his encounter with the woman. He left nothing out. His parents took it quite calmly. They told him they needed to think about it.

The next morning he woke up and didn't know where he was. He didn't understand anything and felt dazed. The walls of the room he was in were snow-white, seemingly completely innocent and apologetic for not letting him leave. A moment later, a figure in a white coat appeared in the doorway. The stupor had subsided enough that he realized he was in the hospital. The doctor spoke first.

"Hello, my name is Artur, I'd like to talk to you.

" * I know very well who you are. You have an ID. Artur Lipiński, a psychiatrist. Why am I here?

"Your parents brought you here. I'd like to talk to you for a while. Will you tell me who you are?

" * What does it matter? Krzysztof Ernst, father's name: Waldemar, mother's name: Klaudia, PESEL number: 8410143434, born in...

- You know very well that's not what I mean, it's all in the files. I want to know who you really are.

* And to you, I'm not just a collection of files, a series of data. You provide your service to number 476, and you get 5 PLN for it. Is that enough for you to really want to know who I am? I can't change that anyway.

- What are you trying to achieve?

* You build systems, arrangements, paragraphs, protocols, tables, schedules, regulations, prohibitions, orders, regimes, and other such nonsense, losing yourself and others in them. Forgetting yourselves and your own humanity, why do I, an elf, see it so clearly while you are blind to it? You avoid listening to yourselves. Creating mirrors in which you see nothing but the reflection of something that isn't really there.

- So you consider yourself an elf?

* You're an elf too, I see it in your eyes.

- Ugh. If I weren't a psychiatrist, I'd probably even believe you. Don't worry, we'll cure you soon.

***

"Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I have good news. Your son has been cured. He no longer considers himself an elf.

" * Oh, that's so lucky. We don't know how to thank you, doctor,"

said the mother, slipping an envelope into the doctor's hand.

"Goodbye."

* Goodbye

***

A dream... he thought when he woke up in the morning, a bit frightened and lost. He only wondered why he didn't remember it. Maybe it was the window. Apparently, if you look out the window right after waking up, you forget your dreams.

The end...