The Heart of the Mystery
"Does it need a purpose? [...] Maybe it's just enough to know that there's something marvelous still in the world, that all the mystery hasn't been drained out of it by those who like to take a thing apart to understand it, then stand back all surprised because it doesn't work anymore." -Charles de Lint; The Little Country
He stood in the corner of the room closest to the door, as he always did, and she, as she always did, stared raptly at him.
She hadn’t noticed him at the first few book readings that she had gone to, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t been there, but she had noticed him later. And then every reading after that; he had never missed a single one, and he always stood in the exact same place, the last to enter and the first leave. No one else seemed to notice him coming or going, his movements languorously graceful and silent, like some kind of, and she knew it was cliché but she couldn’t help that it was true, big jungle cat.
It wasn’t surprising that she hadn’t noticed him the first few times; not only did he move with a strange quiet surrounding, he was largely an unnoticeable sort of guy. Dark hair hung in front of his eyes down to the tip of his nose, only his chin and full mouth showing completely, with hints at the curve of his cheek when he moved his head slightly. Someone that, on a college campus, was just like every other post-teen pre-adult student attending. Accept he wasn’t a student. She never saw him around when she walked to class, and once she had noticed him, she had kept her eye out for him. It was impossible that she had missed him; the college’s campus was just too small. Neither was he a professor; she had enquired with all her friends about a professor matching his description and nothing had turned up.
So she attended every reading hoping to catch him, as he had caught her attention, but it never happened. No matter how long she waited by the door, or in front of the door, or behind the door, he only showed up once everyone, including herself, had seated themselves. And he disappeared as soon as the author had read their last word, when it would have been impolite for anyone else to leave, and she was forced to sit through meaningless questions. No one seemed to notice his tardiness or his rudeness; in fact, no one noticed him at all.
And, he in turn, noticed no one else. As soon as he entered the room his eyes attached to the reader and stayed on that person the entire time. She shivered when she thought about that attention being on her for just a moment. She had never discovered the color of his eyes, but for some reason she imagined them to be startlingly green, the same color as a panther’s orbs. She had been entranced not by his looks, which merely bordered on handsome and never quite managed to cross over, but by how he reacted to the works being read: he seemed to feed of them. She knew that was a weird way of describing things, but there it was. As she watched him watching the reader, he seemed to breath in more and more deeply with every word, and although she couldn’t see the rest of his face, she would watch as the jaw and lips got slowly less and less tense, until they both curved gently, all strain gone, washed away by the soothing sound of words infused with human emotion that only a voice can give them.
And then one day he simply disappeared, between one reading and the next. Gone as though he had never existed in the first place. When she enquired to her professors, as a last ditch effort, as to who he was, she was surprised to find that none of them remembered having seen him at any of the readings. How was that possible? Most of the Literature and Writing professors on this campus attend the majority of the events. How could they not notice someone who came to every reading and just stood in a corner? How could not a single one of them have seen him?
It was, she decided after thinking about it for a long time, and still attending every reading in the hopes that he would show up again, one of those mysteries of life that was never solved. And maybe it was better that way. She had never quite grown out of the belief that magic was real, and part of believing in magic was believing that part of what made them magic was the mystery. Personally, and she never told anyone because she knew they would have scoffed at her, she believed him to be a Fae that had survived the technological revolution by feeding not on beliefs anymore but on stories. They nourished and sustained him and the reason he had left was simply because he was in the mood for different fare. She still looked for him though; one never knows when he might get a craving for this college again and, this time, she would make sure to meet him, because she wanted to know if his eyes were as green as she imagined. More importantly, though, she wanted him to know that someone still believed and looked for his kind. Looked and still saw.
But she wouldn’t ask him who he was or what he was. Because, although she did want to know, some things just weren’t meant to be explained. And her gut told her that he was one of those walking pieces of poetry that, if taken apart to search for the deeper meaning, would become less than it was to begin with. And if that was done, there was nothing anyone could do to put the heart back into that poem, or that mystery.
Created: February 2009
Last edited: 9 July 2009
Notes: I seriously have no idea where this came from. I was going through some of my old stories and, there it was. I don't remember writing it at all.