For all her life, she’s known she comes from a different place, a different universe. She knows that she lives between two planes of discordant realities. She can exist among normal people, move through their spaces and talk and act like them, but she herself is something more, something transcendental, and something supernatural. Maybe something a bit monstrous, it depends on her mood.

             When she is young, the household staff complain of constantly having to shoo her out of the oddest of places, like the belly of the ancient grandfather clock in the main living room, or from the large pools of the marble fountain in the front yard. If they would ever bother to ask, she would just tell them that being in the clock allows her to watch, untouched, as time passes before her, since her people have this control over time. Or that the fountain’s water is just a pure enough blue that if you were to lay in it and open your eyes, you could truly see what the sky looks like in the plane of existence she comes from, wobbly and an array of hues that hint at infinite depth, but they don’t ask her.

As one could assume, she finds herself conflicted much of the time. Not because she is a lonely child and her affluent father is so often away on long trips. Or because her mother is so fraught with the ideas of his affairs that she can only muster the energy to sit by the tall windows that overlook her garden and the sea behind their home. No, she doesn’t really think of her parents all that much. They are creatures of another, lesser developed dreary existence that she doesn’t bother herself with outside of occasional observation. She finds she is conflicted between the sea and the sky. The endless expanses of blue of both capture her soul, and she can’t decide to which she belongs the most to.

            Sometime ago, after sharing her truth at a family reunion when she is seven, her distant uncle had told her it must all have boiled down to a fascination with the color blue, since her father had once hoped for a boy and had painted the nursery and bought blue toys for it, and then never returned to change it when she was born a girl. He said the whole matter was nothing more than the product of a little girl brought up in a blue room, but she doesn’t think that’s right. She knows she’s more than that. Her uncle’s insight simply stunted by the simplicity that he would amount to. Humans, she thinks, are limited to the small plane which they live and the tiny ideas that encompasses. 

            She thinks it must be because the sky and the sea are the only things that transcend the two planes that she lives between, aside from herself. The house her family lives in sits on the edge of a beach, and so she often clutches her dolls and stares out across the waves to the small seam on the distant horizon, where the sky and the ocean must actually come to meet, and realizes that it must be a physical place, and even more, a passageway. She assumes that must be how she ended up here, by using that opening to push her way through, though she can’t remember why she would have done so, perhaps by accident. Must have been so, since she misses it so much and feels it pull on her mind almost constantly

            When she is ten, her father holds a rare event at the house where all his boating friends gather around their family’s private dock. On this night, her father had brought his new girlfriend to the party. The girl is asked to mingle by her mother, and then to report back, but she really only goes to breath the salty air and feel the rush of the water against her toes as she listens to whispers of how young this new girlfriend is. Humans, she thinks, worry about the most useless things. 

            Eventually, her father introduces the girlfriend as Vivian, who works for yacht selling company. Vivian is tall, slender and sleek. Her hair is so blonde it seems white and blinding, and it is long and glossy around her shoulders. Vivian wears clothes that hang like they were made for her, and she wears big shiny jewelry and daintily holds a tall thin glass filled with a light bubbly liquid. The girl finds herself in awe of this new woman. Vivian is the most beautiful human she’s ever seen, which is almost enough to be captivating. She wonders if Vivian also came from her universe, and decides she wouldn’t mind if that were so, and asks Vivian if she’s ever been to the place where the ocean meets the sky. Vivian laughs with an ugly sneer and calls her a child, so the girl puckers her lips like her mother and calls Vivian a name she’s heard spat from her mother’s lips, though she doesn’t know the meaning, and her father seizes her by the arm and drags her back to the house before she can savor the dumb look on Vivian’s face. In the tradition of all her father’s visits to their home, he spends a short moment screaming at her mother, who screams back, and then he disappears back to his party. Her mother retreats to her chair near the windows and sobs and scowls down at him through red rimmed eyes, and the girl climbs into the grandfather clock and waits for it all to pass.

            It’s when she’s fifteen that it finally happens. It had been years since her father moved to Malibu with another new woman, someone who’s shimmery clothes and glossy appearance no longer draw the girl’s attention. They don’t speak often. Last week on the phone he told her that he didn’t want her to come and visit. He said it wasn’t the right time, that he was still moving in, and maybe she could come in a year or two when he was more settled. She hung up shortly thereafter. The maids overhear the conversations and sometimes try at awkward attempts to comfort her, but they always seemed off put by what little reaction she provides for them. If there would be anything good about a place like Malibu, it would be that it also sits on the ocean. But since she has that here, and has no more patience for her father than her mother, she thinks that it is all the same.

            Her mother had gotten up from her chair some time ago and had made a proper socialite out of herself. Now most nights she puts on a fancy dress with some matching fur wrap and leaves the house at dusk with young men waiting at the door. She isn’t home much during the day either, or if she is, she often doesn’t want to be disturbed.

            Perhaps, had either of them been watching, they would have seen that their “shy” child was no longer simply obsessed with the ocean and the sky, she was communicating with it. They would have known that she wasn’t just watching all day, she was listening to it whisper her name on the soft sea breezes and twinkle at her with every rise and fall of the sun, like a warm beacon to show her the way.  They would see that she carries one sided conversations down on the beach, or that the waves seemed to tug at her ankles with a strange amount of force. As it is, the girl thinks it’s better they remain as all humans are; simple, oblivious, and constantly too preoccupied to see the magic she possesses. 

            The weather is warm on this night. It’s the night of the summer solstice, and her mother departs around nine with a flirty giggle and a wiggle of her bejeweled fingers, leaving the girl alone again in a large house that is both too big and too dark for her preference. Her father hasn’t called again in a very long time. The night sky is clear and the stars shine with a brightness that cast shadows along the ground. The air coming in through the windows is humid, and it wraps around her more like a friendly embrace. The sea is calm and twinkling. The stagnation of this life has festered in her like a swamp for far too long, and it is the loveliest night she’s ever known. She knows it’s time. She goes to her room and picks out a light blue dress she bought patiently in the spring that reminds her of the times she would lay in the fountain and look at the sky and wish for another existence. She puts it on and steps out of the house.

            The air feels good on her skin, and the earth is cool beneath her bare feet. She follows a path worn into the ground to the dock. It’s old now, and it creaks under her feet, but it will hold, she knows. She walks to the end, and smiles down at the water. It’s clear tonight, and she can see the stones resting in the sand at the bottom like secrets. She sits down and kicks her legs slowly, feeling the soft water skim across her toes like feathers. Her eyes follow the moon beams across the waves to the point where the sky comes and to kiss the ocean, and watches as the sea twinkles at her yet again. She breathes deep. She pushes herself to the edge of the dock, and pushes off.

             Her feet plant on the surface of the water, and it curls around her toes like the soft sandals she’d lost two summers ago. She stands for a second, wobbling back and forth, her arms flung out to keep her balance, and begins to get her bearing and feels the tide rolling beneath her toes. She takes a tentative step. Her foot accidentally swings too wide and the water underneath her planted foot squirms like Jell-O, but she stays upright. She assumes her difficulty is a simple lack of practice, and continues clumsily forward.

            It takes a while, but soon enough she is able to walk with ease. What feels like hours pass, but she does not pause. She comes upon nothing else in her journey, no boats, no seagulls, there are no other souls around as she walks. The world begins to feel as though it is pulling in tight behind her and falling away, leaving nothing but the feeling of discovery and the summer mist. She looks at the glittering sky and thinks the sun is very late in rising, but the moon has not budged from its place high in the sky; beaming down at her and wrapping her in soft light. When she finally reaches her destination, she finds it is far more grand than she had thought.

             It appears quickly from the soft sea. One moment there seems to be nothing, just further expanse. Then suddenly before her the ocean bends up sharply to the sky and stretches on in a line as far she can see in either direction, like it’s hitting some unseen wall, and crashes in booming waves that scatter drops of water upward that become the blue in the night sky. Simultaneously, the sky is throwing clouds back down towards the sea that burst apart with each new wave with the sound of loud thunder and settles as a fine fog over the surface of the otherwise still water. She begins to make out a seam in the depth of the chaos of it all, a faint light that glimmers beneath each crashing wave, a winking eye, a twinkling star. She steps towards it, her heart hammering. This feels familiar. She feels like she’s so close to home, whatever it might be. The sea under her feet curls to lift her higher as if by an unconscious command, and then she can stare right into the light. She can hear voices calling her name, much louder now than the faint flutters she’s heard all her life on the coast. She leans in to touch it, and as her hand passes through the barrier, it disappears altogether, becoming the spray of the water and mist of the clouds. It feels cold, but only a bit, and it tingles. She yanks her arm back, and finds her hand there again, completely reformed. It feels no different. She reaches again, slower, and the cold sensation warms into the feeling of slowly sinking into a hot bath, and the tingling is a tickle, not a pain. Resolve solidified, she gives herself to it, let’s herself fall through, and with one mighty crash of the waves and sky, it swallows her whole, and she disappears. The place where the ocean meets the sky quiets and stills, and the girl is gone.