In the World I Created

Days passed in the world I’d somehow created with a language so difficult for me to understand.  The Kind Being’s name was Carmen. She was patient and I learned a little more each day, not just words, but also about her world. We walked among the masses of people to go to a little tightly packed store to buy food, to sit among hundreds to listen to sometimes jarring, sometimes monotonous, and often overwhelming music, to walk around a building and stare at old objects that were significant monuments of their history, shrines of worship to their achievements.

Aside from my friend’s name, the first word I remember saying and understanding was “water.” It represented the clear liquid that everyone drank and bathed in and seemed to be a core tenant of their existence. It looked very pretty in a clear glass. It smelled and seemed the same as what we drank, so I figured both were water, just waters of a different color. 

Not right away, but eventually, once she knew what to expect from me, I came with her to the building I’d entered at first. Another new word, very difficult to say, “library,” and inside there were the things that had so captivated me and that I knew instantly I loved: “books.” Carmen was pleased that I could spend an entire day flipping through books even though I couldn’t read a word. Slowly, day by day, she taught me to read. Each book became a portal to a world. 

It was a world where there were more Glowing Ones, or white people, than anyone else, so I got used to them and most were not dangerous. I was one of the black people, although there was a great sensitivity about black people and most wouldn’t actually say out loud that I was black. White people were overly nice to me, going out of their way to show that they didn’t treat me any differently from anyone else, and often going to the other extreme and giving me special treatment. It was a curious thing. I asked Carmen about it. She said there had been a bad history involving slavery and abuse and what I was seeing was guilt.

“It’s my experience,” said Carmen, “that carrying around guilt doesn’t do anyone any good.”

Days, weeks, months, years passed. Spending so much time at the library, I had plenty of opportunities to try to find the entry point to return to my own world. I would stand at exactly the place where I could see the colored glass design I’d imagined, then turn, and place my hands out, step up with my feet. Nothing. Was there no way back? 

I wondered about my family. They all presumed I was dead and had carried on with their lives. I wondered if I would ever see them again and, when I did, what sort of shock it would be.

As much as I wanted to see my family, I didn’t have much desire to go back to the endless library in colored glass I’d come from where I was a prisoner. It was no home to me. I was curious how I’d been able to create a world and if others could be created out of colored glass,  but not curious enough to want to leave a place I was growing to love. 

And one day, sitting around in the apartment on an evening with nothing to do, I suppose she realized I had enough command of the language now, Carmen asked me to talk about where I was from and how I got there. I’d felt the question heavy in the air many times before, so I’d already thought about my response.  

“I don’t know where I come from,” I said. “It’s a world of quiet and everywhere is like what you call the country here with very few people, green trees, and birds playing. There is a place where the children go to learn, a library of colored glass stories. When it was my turn to go, we were attacked by our enemies. We call them the Glowing Ones. I had to make my way through the woods to get to the Library and I wouldn’t have made it if Grent, the guide taking me there, hadn’t given me a bag to carry that had provisions, and I wouldn’t have found the Library if an all-colored Welchefarbe hadn’t found me and brought me there. There was a being at the entrance who called himself Guardian and locked me in a room where there was colored glass, so I made something I’d imagined in my mind many times before. Something I’d dreamed. I don’t understand, but it’s very possible that I created this world.”

“If you created it, how would everything, even the language, be so foreign to you?” Carmen asked.

“I don’t know. I don’t understand how creation works. Do you?”

“In our world, we have God who created everything.”

“I might be God.”

Carmen spit out her Sprite with laughter. “Most people would think that’s either heretical or ridiculous to say.”

“Whatever that means,” I said.

Carmen sat back on the couch. “What a crazy thought! That we were created by the imagination of a child from another world. Wow!”

“How do you know you weren’t?”

“We’ve been around for a long, long time, honey, much longer than you have been alive.”

“So? What is time to a being who creates?”

Carmen was quiet and then asked, “Do you want to return to your world?”

“I don’t know. I like it here. I like books and there are no books in my world.”

“It’s strange to me that you don’t have written language. I can’t figure out how a group of beings can exist without one.”

“That’s because it’s all you know.”

“If you created this world, how could you imagine a language?”

“I don’t know.”

We sat in thought for a few minutes. It was dark outside the apartment building, yet we could hear the pulsing whoosh of the traffic as we sat on the worm gray couch. The glow of the lamp was like a warm ember around us, protective in the small room where we sat safe, warm, and comfortable, protected from the outside world.

“I’m thinking about your story and I have a question,” Carmen finally said. 

“Yes?”

“So, you come of age and it’s time for you to go to the Library to learn like your brother and sister did and you are guided there by this guy named Grent.”

“Yes.”

“And just before you are attacked by these beings you call Glowing Ones, Grent gives you a bag to carry with provisions inside.”

“Yes.”

“Doesn’t that seem odd?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, doesn’t it seem a little too convenient that Grent gave you what you needed to survive just before he was taken away.”

A chill ran through me. This was what had been bothering me, but I hadn’t figured it out. Yes, how did Grent know to give me just what I needed, in a bag too small for him, but just the right size for me? 

“I think that ambush was planned and it was part of your right of passage to end up in the woods and have to find your way out. And I also think the attack of the Glowing Ones wasn’t real,” added Carmen.

“You may be right. But why?”

“To confuse and manipulate you. To make you hate the Glowing Ones. To test your character. There are all sorts of possible reasons.”

I thought about this conversation over the years that followed and as time passed, I wondered which world was the real world and which was imagined. Did I create the world I was in now or did it create me? 

I remember when Carmen showed me books of maps for the first time. I couldn’t believe how enormous her world was. She showed me a globe and explained the concept of a planet and other planets and moons and stars and a solar system. It was dizzyingly huge. 

Once I knew enough, I went to college and learned even more. I fell in love, got married and lived far away in a place not unlike where I grew up with trees and birds and a lake out in the country. I had three children of my own and instead of going to the Library when it was time, they went off to college. One of them loved the stories I told about colored glass, so she learned how to make stained glass windows and made one for me as a present for what they determined was my fiftieth birthday. She sent it to me in the mail from college, so I was alone when I opened the package. I gasped. It was the room in the Library with the bed and the table and the little place to shower and the cabinet of glass panes! I held it up to the wall and it stayed in place when I stepped back. I put my arm inside and soon I had entered it and was standing in the room in the Library. And there was Guardian. 

“Well done!” Guardian said.

Next: To Make Things Right Again

This is the seventh in a series of stories. Following are the previous installments starting with the first:
1. The Library
2. Listen, Move, Hide, Repeat
3. A Necessary State of Alarm
4. Anches
5. A Question in Colored Glass
6. How a Lifetime Friendship Began