Clear Blue

by Elamimax

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Ending

It gets better

 

“What happened?” Aria asked as she helped me up out of the sand for the second time. I looked at her, my hand in hers, and paused for a second. I wanted to shrug it off and say ‘nothing’, but that felt disingenuous. Dishonest. I looked out at the sea for a moment. There was a conflict here. In me. In me being here. It couldn’t go without addressing. 

“I think I have an apology to make, Aria,” I said, not letting go of her hand yet. She raised her eyebrows. I made sure she knew I wasn’t reflectively saying sorry. “I have not been… treating you fairly. Or any of this, really.”

“What do you mean?” Hard as it was to focus when her eyes landed on mine the way they did, I forced myself to struggle on through to the next sentence. Fiend. 

“I’ve been treating this, all of this, as a dream, of sorts,” I said. “I have allowed myself to coast, to go from moment to moment, without taking any of it too seriously.”

“Your attack at my house seemed serious enough, Nova,” Aria said. 

“I mean, that was about me, still,” I said. “But you? The world around you? You being a mer– Marina? A world without money or government policing? That doesn’t exist where I’m from. And I’ve just been letting it float past me, like a paper boat in a dream. Because that’s how I’ve been taking this. Like a dream.”

“You mentioned something along those lines,” she said. “Tell me about your world, then, that this one is a dream of.”

“It’s… wild. Impossible. Full of weird inventions and people and machines you can’t imagine.”

“You’d be surprised at how much I can imagine,” she said with a little smirk.

“There are machines that allow people to fly without the use of magic. There are machines that turn old stones into fuel, and sand and silicon are turned into thinking boxes fueled by lightning that allow people on opposite ends of the world to share their thoughts and ideas almost as fast as they can think them. It’s… mostly used for funny pictures and vitriolic, hateful arguments. There are machines of war, and I don’t want to talk about those, but there’s also advances in medical technology that let us keep our loved ones with us much longer.” 

The more I talked, the stranger my world became to me. Looking at it from the outside, it really was very strange. It felt alien, almost. I talked for a long time, describing my world. My old job. My difficulty with my studies. The inequalities I was hoping to do something about and the material conditions that got us there. My fears. 

“Very well,” Aria finally said when I trailed off. “I will admit. I had trouble imagining some of those.” She giggled slightly. “Are you still afraid all of this is a dream of yours?” My hand in hers, she started to walk down the beach. She had her legs back, walking barefoot in the sand. 

“Not really,” I said. “I feel like it doesn’t really matter anymore. I’m here and I’m me, and if this is all a dream and I go back – don’t get me wrong, I would miss you, this place, both, terribly – then I will still be me. If there’s anything I’m supposed to learn from this, I think it’s that things can be better.”

“What do you mean, supposed to?” Aria said. “Why do you think you’re supposed to do anything?” She squeezed my hand. “You’re not supposed to do anything.”

“But–”

“This is not like those films you described, Nova,” she said. “This isn’t a story. There is no message here for you to take away, to learn. You are living your life to the best of your ability. You are still trying to find the optimal way to live.” Aria stopped for a moment and looked at me. “I will do you one better,” she said. “Let us pretend, for a moment, that this is a story. That you are a character, who has gone through a journey, in order to impart meaning, or a message. Something to learn, as heroes in stories are supposed to.”

I blinked and nodded. A strange thought, but fine, let’s go along with it. 

“Is the message for you, the character, or for the audience?”

“Uh…”

“It does not matter whether this is a fiction or not,” she said, and started walking again. I walked next to her, keeping pace and breathing deep the sea breeze. “It doesn’t matter if this is a dream or a story. This is your life. You are happy here, and, if I’m frank, I don’t feel very fictional. Food in my dreams does not taste as good. I don’t dance as much in my dreams.” She squeezed my hand again. “Though it was up until now that only in my dreams I would see someone as beautiful as you.”

I nearly choked. Every single time I let my guard down, she came at me with a line like that, and it floored me completely. The only thing I could do was squeak slightly. She noticed, of course she did. She bit her lip in a self-satisfied smile.

“Have you considered,” Aria pressed on, “that this is real? That the life you had before was a bad memory? That you were stuck there, somehow? Deeply asleep? That when you saw the painting, you were forced to wake up?” She looked at me again. “You are here. You are now. You are Nova and nobody can take that away from you.” There was a sigh, and she took my other hand, too. “There are two possibilities here. Either you do not have the ability to imagine me, in which case this is real. Then you were, perhaps, transported to another world through some magical means, for which I am deeply grateful, and you are here to stay. The other possibility is that you are able to imagine me, in which case you can do it again, and I will wait for you.”

I looked at her for a moment, still blushing “But… why?”

“You know,” she said, “for someone from a world with such wondrous magic and technology that has allowed you to expand the scope of your imagination, you can be remarkably dense. Come on.”

She took the lead and began the walk up the beach towards her house again, refusing to explain what she had meant but leading me by the hand the entire way. The coarseness of her fingertips was something to hang onto. It was real. I felt like, if I had imagined her, her fingers would be impossibly soft. It was the imperfections that made everything slide into contrast. Maybe I’d been oblivious to those imperfections before, but they were there. Her house had cracks in it by the window. There was a slightly unpleasant smell coming from a net by the beach. A perfect dream wouldn’t have those, and a nightmare would be more, well, nightmarish. This was the inconvenience of the real. 

Only when she called for me did I realize I’d lingered on the doorstep, looking around. When I came in, Aria was rummaging through the cupboards, retrieving cups, plates and knives. “Uh,” I said.

“We’re going to go have dinner if we’re to continue this discussion, Nova,” she said. “I am not further entertaining the idea that I might be fictional on an empty stomach.”

“Dinner? Where?”

“Town square,” she said. “It’s late enough in the afternoon, and someone will likely have started making food. We can help.”

“See,” I said, “this is why this whole thing feels so…”

“Nice?” she offered.

“Idyllic. Perfect. Impossible.”

“Because you are allowed food when you are hungry?” she asked as she led us out, nudging the front door open with her hip. “That seems a low bar.”

“Yeah,” I grumbled, “it does. But that’s not how it works where I’m from. If you are unwilling or unable to work, you end up in the street, and have to beg for scraps.”

Aria frowned. “But… people give them food, right?” I didn’t answer. “I take it back. Your world wasn’t a dream. It’s a nightmare.”

“There are people trying to make it better,” I mumbled. “People looking after each other. Communities, stuff like that. But it’s hard.”

“I imagine,” Aria said, then paused, putting the plates down on a bench by the road. “Look,” she said, “it’s not that we do not work. We do not all wait around for good food to come rolling down from the hill and washing up on the shore. We work for our part, here. As best as we can. With grace.”

“Yeah,” I said, but then shook my head. “But what if I can’t? What if I’m not good enough? What if I don’t work hard enough? Who decides how much food you get?”

“No, that isn’t–” Aria said, sighed, and sat me down on the bench. “You are still doing the best you can, Nova. If you do what you can, you are doing your best. If you do less, it is because that is what you’re capable of.”

“But what if everyone just thinks I’m lazy?” I asked.

“Lazy,” Aria said with deadly seriousness, “is a word parents use to encourage their children to do something they’ll enjoy anyway, like playing with their friends. There is no such thing as lazy, Nova. Everyone does their best. That’s how we’re built. If you do less, something is stopping you from doing more. That’s all.”

“Wait… what?”

“I said my piece,” she said, took the plates and got up again. “Come on. I want to help with the preparations for the evening meal.”

“But…” I said, keeping pace, “then what does it mean to ‘do your best’?” 

“It just means you re-examine previous barriers and try to find a way past them. It doesn’t mean you overcome them. Just that you try again,” she said cheerfully. “The world is a lot brighter when you realize you’re always doing your best. Sometimes you’ve just gotten so good at it you don’t realize you are now able to do more than you previously thought.”

“Huh.” We made our way down to the fountain again. There were people setting up tables and chairs. I had thought the previous night had been a festival of some kind, but the town dinner was just a nightly thing. “It all just seems too good to be true.”

“If something seems too good to be true,” Aria said, “raise your standards. You’re allowed good things, Nova, and to enjoy them.” 

“The idea of being here,” I said, quietly, “the idea of being allowed to be here, to stay here, it feels like an impossibility.” We put the plates down near where the large grill was being assembled. Aria nodded, then exchanged a few words with one of the men setting tables. 

“We’ll be helping in just a second,” she said. “There is something I want to show you.” We walked down to the pier again, and down to the edge. I wondered briefly if she was just going to show off her tail in the afternoon light this time. I could only imagine. “So… yesterday I showed you to my family house, yes?” she said. 

“Yeah,” I said. “It was beautiful. I’d like to see it again.” Looking over my shoulder at the town, I hesitated. “I’d like to eat something first, though?”

“Oh, of course,” Aria said. “That’s not my point. My point is that you always said you wanted to swim. How was it, being able to swim without having to hold your breath?”

I blinked. It had been amazing. The freedom of the water. The weightlessness. It had been how I’d remembered it. “It was perfect,” I said. “I’m a little jealous of your tail, but I’m really glad for the underwater breathing thing already.”

“So,” she said, taking a step closer to me, “did you think that my ability to walk on land is a one-way thing? That I am able to stand on two legs because I’m special?”

“I hadn’t really thought about it…”

“Nova,” she said, “you are quite silly. Can I touch you for a moment?” Her eyes rested on my face, like a caress. 

“Yes,” I said. I had an idea of where this was going.

“It will be intimate,” she added.

“Yes.” 

She took me closer to the water’s edge, rested both her hands on the sides of my face, and pulled me closer just as she stepped off the pier. A moment of weightlessness she didn’t even seem to notice. I’d had an idea of where this was going. I was wrong. Her lips touched mine just as we hit the water.