As he aimlessly shuffled paper around his desk, he knew she
would tease him if she knew how accurate her description of his job was, he
wondered what she really did with her days. He knew that she worked, of course
she did, that was what all the ranting and raving, stressing and regular bout
of depression that he didn't know how to handle were about. No he didn't mean
what she did physically but where her mind went, when she was holding a conversation,
waving her arms around, making tea, doing her job and operating at 100 miles an
hour in the way that only she could, one of the many reasons that he loved her
so much. He knew that she was a trapped
spirit encased in a physical human body; spirit bound only to the earth and
sometimes to him; part of her though would never belong in this world, it
escaped to her world of imagination, of fantasy of play where she could be the
eternal child that they both knew that she was but never acknowledged.
He pondered to himself what it was really like inside her
head, and whether even if he caught a glimpse whether, that would bring him any
closer to understanding her, or whether it would leave him with a burning
desire to run away as fast as he could. Cold chills ran down his spine as he
considered whether given the chance he would really want to explore that side
of her. What was worse was knowing that he would never have that choice.
It was odd though the way that he only really knew her when
she was sleeping, like he was the only one she trusted to drop her guard in
front of, to fall asleep in his lap trusting that no harm would come to her during
sleep. He could count on one hand the number of times he had seen her smile in
her waking days but lost count of the millions of times she had smiled; her lop
sided dimple smile while she was sleeping, free from the worries of reality.
She was a talker, god only knows everyone knew that, but she spoke to keep
others on the edge of her walls, her self-constructed boundaries; to keep from
having to answer the difficult questions, as a form of defense to keep the daemons
at bay and yet when she slept she spoke more freely, of things he didn't have
the creativity to imagine; adventure, daring, riddles and labyrinths and more
regularly these days of tea with the king. He wondered what that meant to her and why it
seemed so urgent when she spoke of it, even mimicked it in her sleep. Who was
the King and why did he visit in her sleep, taking her for tea? He had
questioned her in the fog between sleep and awake and he remained frustrated at
her inability to explain or understand what he was asking. If he was honest he didn't
know himself and whether it mattered as much as he thought it did.
(519)
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