Things can change very quickly. One day, you’re in a magic show with a guy who can make real his imagination, and the next, you’re homeless and questioning everything that you ever believed to be true. That had been Alia for most of the past year.
Out on her own, Alia wandered through many small towns in southeastern North Carolina. This is a stark contrast to her early life where every minute of her day was supervised and planned as she was treated by different doctors in various mental health facilities in North and South Carolina. She likes to move around freely, to do what she wants, even if it meant that she has slept under the stars some nights, in homeless shelters other nights.
She thought about getting a job, but that would mean she’d have to settle down and have a permanent address, and she wasn’t quite ready for that. Besides, it would be a terrible distraction from her real mission. She has to sort it all out, the visions that she receives when she stares full on into the brightness of the sun. The visions emerge from the rush of yellow and white that inundates her pupils and bathes her mind in a warm glow. She doesn’t know this, it’s not apparent to her or anyone else who has studied her ability or mental illness, depending on who is characterizing it, but her brain is soaking in the sun’s rays, the warmth, the energy. As it changes, Alia’s brain glows inside of her skull. It looks like a golden blob of brain matter, giving the woman a natural radiance; until she is not sun gazing and it returns to its normal darkness inside of her skull.
Alia was mostly occupied as she wandered, too busy to worry how she was perceived by the many strangers she encountered as she moved through her days and nights. Some saw her as a crazy homeless lady, others as an aloof and beautiful nomad moving through with a smile for anyone with whom she made eye contact, though she spent considerable time with a look of concentration that broadcasted her inner work of sorting her visions into the parallels of reality that had become apparent to her. She knows that in one timeline she is married; in another, she is a fugitive freedom fighter resisting a totalitarian government that uses advanced alien technology and human beings with abilities to control the greater populace; in another, and this is the one that she had assumed was her current reality because the details of it were extremely similar to the existence that she had experienced, in another, she sees a future where aliens come to abduct what she assumed was the vast majority of the dark-skinned population of Earth and she is powerless to stop it and resist her own abduction.
These were her thoughts as she crossed the Cape Fear Memorial Bridge onto Eagle Island headed northwest toward Navassa. And once she arrived there, she stayed at the first homeless shelter. It wasn’t pleasant and she learned there that it was not a good idea to sleep overnight in any shelter.
They had welcomed her with big, kind smiles into the building that looked like an old warehouse and she surveyed the rows of cots that covered most of the floor space as employees showed her around. When they left her at her cot, she smiled around at the people in her vicinity. Most ignored her, or waved politely. But then the sun set, and a fight broke out in the corner of the large room, and Alia couldn’t ignore the sobs of a young man who curled into the fetal position on a cot next to her, and a woman on the other side of the room yelled and swung widely at a man that she accused of trying to touch her.
Alia slipped out of the shelter before the sun came up; she knew that she could find a peaceful place to sleep under the stars and eventually settled in a small park where she found a quiet and dark spot to curl up. She chose to sleep outside anytime she could, but when the weather forced her into a shelter, she didn’t sleep at all. This was true in Elizabethtown, Hope Mills, and in Fayetteville where she felt an earthquake for the first time in her life and her fortunes were destined to change.
Alia was on the campus of Fayetteville State University, wandering the brick walkways and buildings that made up the campus. She enjoyed the rural setting and it was strange to see a campus full of people who looked la. ike her and who did not look at her as though she didn’t belong there because her skin was brown. Some stared at her because her clothing was not the most flattering; she wore mismatched pieces that she managed to find for free and everything was usually very ill fitting. But Alia is beautiful in anything and most assumed that she was a hipster type that does indeed exist in predominantly black communities, but admittedly in small numbers. There was an overall welcoming sense on the campus that made her extremely happy to have wandered the way that she had. It should be noted that Alia had never seen the campus of Fayetteville State in her life, or any parallel iteration of her life, and she wondered if this would be the point where her current timeline diverted completely from the shockingly similar parallel reality that she had confused with her own. And then there was an earthquake that seemed to confirm that her life was unpredictable and she would be lucky to have any direct insights in the solar parallels that were relevant to her actual life. She had never experienced an earthquake before; as far as she was aware, earthquakes didn’t even happen in the southeast. It was impossible for her to ignore or deny that the quake had happened as most everyone else on the campus did in the humid, but mild evening; Alia could feel the subtle rumble of the ground that would hardly cause a panic in earthquake-prone cities. She wanted to be concerned but no else seemed to be shaken, and she quickly forgot about it almost as soon as she felt it.
Alia blended in with the activity of the campus that seemed to be gearing up for the end of the the school year. She attended an outside gathering of friends and no one seemed to notice her as out of place. She sat with them until they all wandered away, and then she found a dark spot near trees where she slept soundly until she felt the sun hot on her face.
She was surprised to wake the following day to the commotion on the campus. It was visiting day for new students and there were families and groups of high schoolers being led by current students. Alia managed to hitch a ride with a family that had just finished a tour. The adults were glad to offer Alia help because she seemed pleasant, if not out of sorts. She smiled and sat eagerly inside their car, and despite her smell – Alia didn’t shower regularly – the family smiled and laughed with her, happy to have made her acquaintance.
“Are you from around here?” the mother asked as she turned in the passenger’s seat to look back at Alia who shared the middle seat of the minivan with the two teenage children; the son who was entranced by Alia, and the daughter who turned the volume up on the music in her ear phones and repeatedly made rude gestures to complain of their new passenger’s smell.
“Sure!” Alia said gleefully, “it’s all close enough.”
“I just wish I could do what you do, you know?” the woman said wistfully and she stared into nothing as she imagined a freedom like Alia seemed to enjoy.
“Ah, you wouldn’t survive a day!” the husband said as he drove the van and he made eye contact with Alia in the rearview mirror. “It always sounds so romantic and fun, I did it after college. Roamed as much as I could, and it was spectacular, rougher times back then, don’t know if a pretty girl like yourself could have survived it. But in today’s world, women can get out and learn self sufficiency just like I did. You gotta want it, though, or you won’t last long. Tell her Aliyah!”
No one in the family pronounced her name as she was used to hearing it, with the long A at the beginning, but she didn’t mind at all. She felt that she had found the four people who could see her away from the coast and to the Piedmont where she knew her self-imposed solitary journey would meet its end. She had resisted the urge to delve into that similar future where she reconnects with the couple Ivan and Clay; she wasn’t sure how much of it she could trust. The trajectory of that future always seemed to overlap superficially, like how she knew that she would meet and love the magician, but that possible future hadn’t shown her the actual events that transpired between them as they happened. Who knows what life she was driving toward?
“Well,” the wife said eventually, “I don’t know how far you going, but you are welcome as long as we’re on your way.”
“That’s good,” Alia said. “I’m making a new start somewhere.”
“You can live with us!” the son said eagerly.
“Shut up!” the daughter said swatting at her brother, being sure to hit Alia with her elbow.
“I think I’ll be alright,” Alia said.
The family was full of questions as they made their way west and when they reached Salisbury, NC. They loved her so much by the end of it, even the daughter because she was full of stories about experiences she had in the various cities and towns they had passed through; she didn’t even have to make any of them up, they had all happened or would happen, or were probably currently happening to her in some parallel of reality. The daughter listened to Alia through one ear, captivated that the beautiful, young and bohemian woman had managed to lead such an interesting life.
At the family’s house, they ushered her inside with their luggage and Alia was honestly surprised at how easily they managed to get her inside; there was such a bustle of activity and excitement. Alia swore that she was lifted off of her feet and she felt that her eyes were playing tricks on her, but she thought she saw a swirl of red energy around the family in the commotion, like they gave off a glow or warmth.
“Let me show you my room!” the son said excitedly.
“You have to meet my friends,” the daughter said nonchalantly.
“We can have dinner and a movie night!” the father said hugging his wife. “It’s so good to have the whole family together.”
Alia smiled at their enthusiasm. It did feel good to have a family and a beautiful home in a suburb like she had seen in pictures and shows. She wondered if she should stay there and have the life that she was denied because of her seeming misfortunes.
And then she did. It’s been like a haze, like a dream, but, Alia has been here for a couple months now, in the home of a family that she calls her own, and she goes shopping with her sister, and to the movies with her parents, and she gives her little brother advice about talking to girls. It’s as though she walked into another parallel of existence, the ideal and amazing one that she had never been privy to, and she would stay there forever.
No medication, Alia thinks this morning when she wakes in a room that she shares with her new sister. Not for months, over a year. Alia sits up in the bed and smiles on this Saturday. Her sister would wake and they would have breakfast with the family. Alia would go for a walk and then meet her mother at the farmer’s market where they would discuss their big weekend meals; the late Saturday dinner on the patio, and then the big mid-afternoon Sunday lunch.
No medication. Alia rests against her headboard and a smile takes over her face. It is everything she could have ever asked for.
No medication. Alia raises her hands in front of her to meet them in prayer and she is shocked at the glow of red that follows them, like a visual echo, like a real time slow motion showing her hand reach its destination at each point in space that it moved through.
Since arriving in Salisbury, she has caught visions of the red echo and it startles her. The one thing she had not told her new family was that she had been institutionalized for most of her life and she was normally on at least two medications to control her perceived psychosis, but Alia thought that she had been managing fine since she made her daring escape with the magician. In Salisbury, though, with no medication, occasionally things slip, and everything moves with the red echo. It is cause for alarm, until her sister wakes and then Alia just wants to be happy.
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