[995 words]
The first time we meet, an aimless hike leads me to a mountain lake where you and your friends are swimming. The clear water lets me see all the way to the lake’s rocky bottom, lets me observe your lithe body in its entirety, lets me behold the improbable grace with which you and your friends all move. When you call to me to join you, I dismiss it as a joke and reply that I haven’t brought a swimsuit. But you call again, instructing me to strip down as far as I’m comfortable and jump in.
When I do, the cold water shocks me, and for the first minute I tread water frantically. But eventually I adjust, and you beckon me toward you. I join you and your friends in a game that is not a game, a joyous riot of energy and sound with no goal but the enjoyment itself. Dusk surprises me—have I really been here that long?—but somehow we all make it down the mountain before the darkness becomes absolute. When we say goodbye, I sense that our parting is not final.
You call regularly after that, whenever you’re in my area (if a four-state radius can be called an area), and every time I join you. Sometimes you’re singing, other times weaving, other times playing instruments or dancing or sewing or painting, but everything you do is creative, and every time I arrive, you’re with your friends. Gradually, they become my friends too, though the connections are not as instant and automatic as the one when I met you. Nothing has ever been as instant or automatic as the sense I had when I met you.
At last there comes a day when you call and I say no. I’ve long since run out of plausible excuses to call in sick to work, but now I’m out of PTO altogether. I cannot join you if I want to keep my job, which I remind myself reluctantly that I do. You don’t argue, exactly, but you call me chosen one, savior, hero, and you ask me to put all of that above my job. You’ve always called me those names, but for the first time, they don’t sound like jokes or terms of endearment. I hang up.
You don’t call after that, and for a while I think we’re fully over, that the bright, magical chapter of my life involving you is finished and sealed, but then the letters start. You’re clearly traveling more without me as a physical anchor. One month you’re in Rome, then Addis Ababa, then Chennai, then Melbourne, then Buenos Aires. You’re always doing amazing things. I miss you. I remind myself that I need to work if I want to eat, that I’ve never seen where you live or even caught you having a snack, that you’re so ethereal that perhaps needing food and housing is beneath you, but basic human needs are certainly not beneath me.
When the letters stop, I fail to convince myself that you simply got tired of writing to me or that something got lost in the mail. The star that has always been you has winked out inside of me. I know you are dead. I mourn, but I also see more clearly.
I quit my job and launch myself in the wake of your travels. Rome. Addis Ababa. Chennai. Everywhere I go, I find friends of yours willing to take me in for a week or two as soon as they hear your name. All of them call me the same names you used: chosen one, savior, hero. The meaning of these names dawns on me gradually as I paint with your Italian friends, learn to play unfamiliar stringed instruments in Ethiopia, dance in India. There is no moment of realization, but eventually, I know.
Once I’ve completed a circuit of the globe, following the path of your letters, I return to that first mountain lake with our old friends. I call to passersby who I think might be open to learning the way. I teach them, as I have been taught. Not everyone is open to the message, but enough are that it feels worth the effort.
I am not surprised to find that my aging seems to be put on hold, that I no longer crave food as I once did, that moving gracefully is no longer a challenge, that time seems elastic. I have become what you were, I think, but maybe also more. It has been a long time since anyone called me by the name I was given at birth, or indeed any name that is not a synonym for hero.
Like the other changes, the wings are not really a surprise, nor is the way my legs fuse into a tail whenever I enter water. Of course the category of human no longer truly contains me. I travel more, meet more people, and create more beauty, both ephemeral and lasting. I leave deep joy, wonder, and contentment in my wake. Most of my acolytes remain fully human, and the few who don’t still transform less than I do.
I was not put here to make others become like me, nor was I put here to slay monsters or stuff all evil back into Pandora’s box. I was put here to expand the sense of possibility and the capacity for curiosity and joy in the people I meet. I cannot solve everything, no matter how many changes I undergo. I eventually reject the titles of chosen one and savior, but “hero” I keep. I am not here to save the world. You could not, and nor can I. But I improve things, over and over and over again, for so many people that I long ago lost count.
I’ll never see you again. I know that. But I catch glimpses of you anyway, everywhere I go. I think you’d be proud of me.
Linnea Peterson (they/them) is a queer, disabled writer from Minnesota. Their creative writing has appeared in A Truth Universally Acknowledged: Queer Fanworks Inspired by Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, FLARE Magazine, Five Minutes, and the Oneota Review. They have also published articles in the Minnesota Star Tribune, Living Lutheran magazine, Twin Cities Geek, and the Twin Cities Daily Planet. Their first book, a young adult novel called The Girls Will Be Okay, is forthcoming.
