therealljidol week 26: the goal is zero

[j0ydivided]

You don’t know what pulled you to the Night Market to begin with. A desire to step outside of yourself, maybe, to be someone else for just a night.

You knew the rules, of course. Everyone did. Don’t go into the Market, but if you must, turn your clothes inside-out and carry something made of iron. Don’t meet anyone’s eyes, don’t offer them your name, and don’t eat or drink anything. Your mother had told you, and her mother had told her, and so it was passed on and down, and you knew to be careful. You knew how to see through glamour, to avoid being caught, ensnared by them.

You knew the rules, or you thought you did, and that was the problem.

Faery fruit, and faery wine, neither offered freely, but purchased, by you, with your pocket full of spare change.

"I thought..." began someone -- a friend, or the woman who ran the stall? Someone mortal, someone like you, offering a warning, as you brought it to your mouth. An apple would have been fitting, but you’d opted for something else. You don’t remember what, though you can try to guess. A handful of blueberries, maybe, with the bloom still on them, or a peach, cherries or a slice of melon -- something cool and sweet, not crisp at all. You bit into its flesh, felt the flavor wash over your tongue, and that was the end of it.

A year and a day, of faery servitude.

None of the stories warn you, that a year and a day is exactly as long as they want it to be, and no longer.

What was your role? Were you some lord's plaything, made to dance, here and there, for his amusement, meant to tell the story of your life, over and over again, til he was bored of you and set you free? Were you to inspire the fey themselves, with your too-bright eyes and mortal heart, entertain them with the fact that you had a soul? Or was your role more mundane, something else, something they could not lower themselves to. Were you some cleaner, busy sweeping up at market's end, the bits and bobs of things left behind--tatters of lace and ribbon, the pits of the fruits that others bought and ate, shreds of dreams and laughter, pieces of other mortal hearts, broken into shards of glass by the fey?

You can't remember now, though you try. You were everything, you want to say, and yet at the end of it you were nothing, because they took everything you had to give and left you not even memories in return.

When you woke up, outside the market, the lingering taste of the fruit in your mouth, you knew something was wrong. The old stories talked of how the world had passed those left in the Market by; how they would come to and find that it was centuries after they'd been gone, kept out of time, with their youth and beauty stolen away.

You were kept out of time, too, and the mortal world moved on without you, but the changes are slight. Different fashions, different cars, but it cannot have been more than five years. They hadn’t wanted you after all, not the way the legends said, but you still wanted them.

They took something from you, something fundamental. Something, you feel, you will never get back. There's a dull ache where your heart should be, as though it was shattered, as though the shards you cleaned up were of your own mortal heart. The real world is dull and gray, compared to the Market, but you cannot find your way back.

They take you once, the legends said. And if you leave, they'll never take you again, and nothing will satisfy.

You never believed them, or you wouldn’t have paid fifty cents for your doom, but here you are, caught in the mortal world again, unsure of how to return.

“You can spend your entire life looking,” went the stories, those you never really listened to. “You’ll never find your way back to the Market again.”

You’d hate to admit it, but they might have had some basis in truth: the Market is not where you left it. Nothing is. The boundaries have shifted quietly, until you wonder if you are in a city you dreamed, not where you lived, because nothing is quite where you remember having left it--not that you remember anything, at all.

There are resources, for those that have been taken by the Market. Support groups, for friends of those imprisoned as well as those released.

You avoid the knots of friends, those that have only a feeling that someone they loved was stolen away, that their loved one, once returned, was a changeling. They are all wild-eyed accusations, accusing anyone and everyone of being touched by the fey, unable to discriminate between those that have and those that only wish they were.

Not that you attend the other groups, either. They're all sad: the leaders trying to acclimate everyone to a new time: have you reconnected with your families? Are there any success stories?, while all of you sit around and fidget, unwilling or unable to admit that you would go back, if you could, that you would give anything to be back in the Market.

"I still dream about the fruit," says someone, at the first meeting you attend, his voice soft and low. "I drop the coins into her hand, and I look into her eyes as I bite into the apple, and it's the best thing I've ever tasted. I've been out five years, and it's still the best thing I've ever tasted."

"It's seven," says the group leader. "Seven until you're free," and her voice is too bright, too chipper, as though she is trying to convince herself.

"Seven years," repeats the man who dreams of apples. "Only another two to go, I guess."

"Mine was a bunch of grapes," says a different woman. "Eight years on, now. I hate grapes, but I don't dream of the faery ones, either, and I don’t want to go back."

Nods, around the circle, and you stood up and left.

If you don't recall what fruit it was, how can you dream of it?

You try to remember. Not that it does much good, but you can try, anyway, to recall past whatever magic has been laid on you, whatever the agreement was, the terms of your servitude, to focus and think and reflect, realize--what, exactly? What your role had been; how you had spent that missing time, if you had spent it, if they hadn’t taken five of your years, just to toy with you, vaulted you forward in time without so much as a second thought.

There was someone, you think, but if there was, you haven’t a name or a face, only the barest hint of a feeling, that you mattered until you did not, and all because you bargained away your freedom for a piece of fruit.

If you had a name, or a face, something, anything, you'd know: the one you miss was mortal; you dream of someone attainable, someone else caught by the Market, and you need only wait.

You have nothing, or worse than nothing: only the feeling that there was someone else, once; that you were important to someone, once.

You would cry, if you still knew how, wail in frustration, but along with your heart they have taken this, too, and the grey of the real world saps away whatever anger you feel: this is not real, and so it cannot matter at all.

The soft grey of the city saps away your joy as well as your anger, and your dreams, until you sleep only rarely.

When you do dream, it’s soft around the edges, the lines blurred.

Could this be memory? you wonder, as you awake in the morning, the taste of the fruit lingering in your mouth, something familiar in dreams, unrecognizable in waking life.

Dream: that you were loved; that you were desired, that if you could find your way back you would prove yourself as being deserving of that love; achieve the fairy tale ending you desire.

(You are not certain, what that ending would look like, only that it is what you are supposed to want, and so you do, because it is easier to give into should than it is to find the energy to ask questions.)

"I want..." you start, but even as you begin, you don't know what it is you desire.

A night without dreams, maybe.

A day where you do not long for what you cannot have.

An acceptance that seems beyond you.

This is the first year.

You give in, after the anniversary of the day you found yourself standing on the corner of an unfamiliar city, shifted, and you seek the services of a seer.

If you were slightly more resolute, slightly less worn around the edges, you would not find yourself here, staring at a pack of crisp-edged cards and asking for an answer that you are not sure you want--but you are not resolute; you have been softened by time, by pain, by sadness, the edges of you worn away as sure as the lines written onto your face, and this is the only way you have to know.

"Does he love me?" you ask of the cards.

She shuffles them from hand to hand, the movement of them fascinating to watch, quick and sharp. She doesn't ask, are you sure you want to know, but spreads the cards on the table, face down.

"Focus," she says. "Think about your question."

You don’t know what you’re asking, exactly. You don’t have a name, or even a face, just a vague feeling, a sense that somewhere, there is someone...

“Focus,” she urges again. “I’m getting a reading…”

What am I doing? you think, as she flips the first few cards. They’re only ordinary Bicycle playing cards, something that could be purchased at the grocery store. There’s no mystery to them, no magic.

She flips the final card, studies it carefully.

"Ah," she says, after a moment. "I see."

She picks up the cards, shuffles them together again, while you wait patiently for her to speak.

She hesitates a moment -- just a moment. "I was in the Market too," she says, finally. "Did you eat the fruit? It takes your memories. There's no way to get them back. You're better off, going to one of the support groups, versus trying to find your way back there."

You want to say something else, something tart and biting, how would she know, but she offers you a tentative smile, and tells you: "It gets better, eventually. The dreams stop, eventually. Three years, some of 'em say, or seven, and you'll be back to normal..."

"Do you dream about it?" you ask her, and your voice sounds strange in your own ears. You rarely speak these days. This is the most you've said to another human being in a month, maybe two.

"Not anymore," says the seer. "I escaped three years ago this spring."

It's the little note of pride on the escaped that makes you tip her. You didn't escape, didn't claw your way out -- but she still has hope for you, and you can admire her for that.

At least now you have an answer, anyway.

When the dreams don't stop, when you find yourself spending your free time studying maps of the city transit system, trying to match what you knew what it is now, when you find yourself staring at the pyramids of fruit in the organic grocer, the colors of them sharp and jewel-like, even in the harsh fluorescent lighting -- that's when you go back to the support groups. There's one for fruit-eaters that meets once a week.

"Hello," you say, shyly, at the meeting. "I'm..."

You don't remember your own name. It's been two years, and you thought it would come back, but it hasn't.

"Molly," you say, after a beat, because it's what you've been calling yourself, in your head, anyway. Molly always was your favorite doll, growing up, and it dates you, a little, but there's nothing wrong with that, not really.

"Welcome, Molly," says the group leader. "What brings you here?"

"I ate the fruit," you say, and you are surprised at how quickly the words come out. "I -- don't remember what. I can remember paying, and I remember the taste of it in my mouth, but I don't know what kind it was. I dream about it every night, and I don't remember what it was. Was it a plum? A handful of blueberries? A piece of melon? I knew better, but I ate it anyway, and I..."

The group listens to you, as you ramble about the fruit, about the temptation, without saying anything -- without judgement or hesitation.

"I almost want to find my way back to the Market so I can figure out what it was," you finish. "I've forgotten everything else, but I almost feel like if I went back, if I found it -- everything else would come back, too."

"You can't go back to the Market," says the group leader, her voice level. "But we can talk about how to deal with those feelings."

You sit down, and the man next to you pats your knee.

"It gets better," he says, and you want to believe him.

This is the second year.

Someone recognizes you, on your way to your dull office job.

"Sarah!" yells a woman's voice. "Sarah Reese! Hey, Sarah!"

You don't think she's talking to you, until she grabs the sleeve of your coat. "It's Molly -- remember me?"

Something slides into place, something from before, and you blink a little. So this is where the name had come from.

"We worked together," she continues. "At the hospital? How have you been?"

She is all nervous smiles, edges and lines laid bare by anxiety, and you think uncharitable thoughts, about how you don't really remember, but --

Something breaks through. A practical joke; covering someone's desk in Post-Its, the look on his? her? face later, you and Molly giggling conspiratorially in the break room later on, after you had, solemn-faced, helped remove every last sticky note, never letting on that they were your doing.

"Molly," you say. "How have you been?"

She doesn't ask where you've been, and you don't tell her that your temporary ID, what they gave you at one of the support groups, with a note saying you don't remember who you are, has her name on it.

Another piece of the puzzle.

You don't dream about the market, that night.

If you were a little braver, you'd go looking for yourself -- type "Sarah Reese" into a search engine, and look for photos of you, before, see if anyone missed you, in the time you were gone, if they noticed you'd been gone at all. You're not brave, though, and the temptation to find your old life, your before, while great, is not enough to pull you in.

You check the wall at the group meetings -- the wall of missing persons. You talk to the group leader for these meetings, ask if anyone has come looking for you.

"We get so many people," she says, apologetic. "I can't say..."

It's a start, though -- you can begin to place yourself in time, where you must have ended up, and you have Molly's number, punched dutifully into your phone.

You can't remember much, but her face rings a bell, and the city is a little less gray, now that you know someone has recognized you.

This is the third year.

Things start to become familiar.

You go to get coffee one morning, and as you wait patiently in line for your cup of drip, you have a sudden change of heart, order a mocha instead. It tastes rich and familiar, not at all the ashes and dust you expect, and something whispers through you: this used to be my favorite...

There are other things, too, but this at least is a start: you can remember what it was you once loved, even if you are still on unfamiliar ground.

Year four, then -- when you begin to remember who you were.

The problem with Fey magic, you realize, the problem with having eaten the fruit, is that it doesn't only affect you -- it affects everyone that might have known you. Some are more resistant to it than others -- you were able to remember Molly, because she is one of them; she recalls you, because they could not charm her into forgetting -- but most people are not.

Those that are, they come to the support groups for those taken. They learn to deal with their grief, with the idea that they will never see them again -- that no one else will remember that they existed, or that no one else will believe that the one who died, the changeling, was not the right one all along. Their grip on reality is firm, but they can't help you.

You finally screw up the courage to look for yourself. You type your name, the name of your city, into a search engine, and --

Nothing. No matches that are you, anyway. There are others, with similar names, but they are older or younger than you must have been, when you were taken, or else they look nothing like you -- different hair, different skin, distinct markers that set them apart as being not you.

You'll spend a week or two, looking, but eventually you have to give up. You can't spend your life chasing after an impossible dream -- and that, more than anything, is what finding your old life must be.

The city seems a little grayer, a little grimmer, in the days after your failed searches -- but you won't let this bring you down. You can't find the Market again, you know, even if you wanted to, and so you hug your arms over your chest, as you go a'roving, and keep your eyes on the pavement, your thoughts only on where you are going, not where you have been.

The dreams start again, after the failed searches, too. There's a little twist of the heart, each time you realize what you dreamed about -- the memory of the fruit.

Everything else tastes like ashes, mostly, and dust -- but you persevere, and you eat anyway, and that has to be enough.

Year five comes and goes, and you wonder if you will ever be truly free.

It's spring, and the city has come alive, all green and bright, when you realize that the ache in your chest has gone.

You'd grown so used to it, over time -- to the idea that you would always be missing something, though you could not know what. You'd grown used to the idea that the shards of glass you'd swept away were those of your own broken heart -- so used to it that you did not realize, at first, what the buoyancy was, the spring in your step.

"The closer you get to seven years free, the closer you get to remembering everything," says the group leader, soothingly, as you talk in your halting voice about how strange it is to feel again. "Soon, not everything will taste like ashes and dust. Soon..."

Soon, you know, the spell will be broken. Whatever curse the Fey had left on you will lift, and you will stop dreaming of the Market.

You still do have dreams about the fruit, after all. Not every night, not even every week -- but once a month, at least, you wake up with the taste of it in your mouth, when everything else is still mostly flavorless.

"Someday soon," says the group leader, at another session, "you'll cease to dream of the Market at all. That's why you have to keep fighting, why you have to keep pressing forward."

You don't search for your true name anymore, to see if anyone has remembered you, but your single-minded fixation on the Market has come and gone, too, and you consider this a win, in your sixth year free of the Fey.

You almost forget the anniversary, when it comes. The seventh, unremarkable except that you are to be truly free.

It comes with little fanfare. You dream about the Market, the night before it comes -- not a memory, but a true dream, where to find it again, should you so desire...

Others have talked about the dreams, in group -- how they feel real, how they feel as though they can be followed, as though were you to go to the part of the city that the dream urges you toward, you would find your way back into the Market.

"You can't go back," says one of the men in the group. "If you follow the dream, you'll find the gates all right -- but you can't go back. If you go back, they keep you, forever. We've seen it before."

You listen, and nod in all the right places. "Of course you can't go back," you echo, because it's the right thing to say. You're supposed to want freedom, even if the longing for the Market still threatens to overwhelm you, some days.

"You'll rot in there," he says, and rubs his wrist absently, as if remembering an old wound. "I nearly did."

"I won't follow the dream," you say.

You are true to your word, and you don't follow it, but it doesn't much matter, because it follows you.

You're walking home from work, after dark. You normally would have left long before the light faded, but there was something wrong, and you had to stay well past the usual time.

It's late enough that none of the buses are running, anymore, as you walk home.

If you were smarter, you might have taken a cab -- but that would have meant admitting to yourself some painful truth you are still not ready to face.

Down one block, then another. Businesses, here, all of them quiet, shuttered for the evening.

A quarter mile to go, and then --

You smell it, before you see it. The scent of almonds, cinnamon, toasted sugar, with some odd wild note underneath it -- the scent of raw magic.

The Market.

You're drawn to the gates like a moth to flame. There they stand, between a dry cleaner and a shop offering shoe repair, in a part of the city you rarely visit, and never after dark.

Tall and silver, whorled and knotted, they stand open and waiting for you to pass through. Unguarded, because it is what lies inside that should be guarded against.

You walk to them. You can't help it; it's as much instinct, impulse, as it is any active desire of yours.

Come in, the gates seem to beckon. Enter. You remember here, don't you?

A rush of feeling, nostalgia and horror blended together into a potent liquor, sitting in your stomach like a stone. You know what awaits you, in the Market. The fruit -- the stall manned by some mortal woman.

You have fifty cents in your jeans pocket, from when you visited the vending machine at lunch.

It would be so easy, whispers something. Give in, and...

You take a step forward, toward the invisible line that divides the Market from the mortal city.

In fairy tales, curses are broken through deliberate actions. The passage of time is not enough -- Sleeping Beauty would never have woken if it weren't for "true love's kiss" or the removal of the thorn, whichever version of the tale was the right one.

There is always a choice to be made, something to be done.

(She might not have slept, the princess, if she had been able to overcome temptation.)

You're nearly into the Market, clothes right-side out and carrying no iron, when you snap to it and realize where you are.

You hesitate a moment.

"No going back," you say, finally, and wrench yourself away; walk the rest of the way home in silence.

You begin to remember who you are, after that.

The dreams stop, once you refute the Market, as neatly as though a switch has been flipped.

Food has flavor, savor, again. You remember who you are.

This is the seventh year -- the beginning of the rest of your life.

When I read "the goal is zero", my mind went to workplace accidents, but also to the concept of addiction.

In addiction therapy, there is the idea of a relapse -- that eventually, you will slip up and end up using again. The goal is zero for relapses, too.

I wondered, a little, about the concept of Faery, and how it is that the Fey must keep their captives ensnared. I thought about curses, and the simple mechanics of addiction -- and the combination of the two is what led to this.

Thank you for reading.