Nyla had company during the night.
But in the pre-dawn as she awoke with a jolt, she discovered that she was physically alone. It must have been a dream, this presence trying so earnestly, so diffidently to reach her. And now Nyla was left with only the feeling, no different from what is left when any person moves from on to off-stage. The lingering impression of a personality, in this case with a plea for attention.
Nyla tarried in bed, brooding, until dawn began to sneak around the edges of the window shades, then reluctantly rose, but the dream, unlike most which vaporize in the daylight, went with her.
So she didn’t immediately notice as she crossed in front of the bedroom dressing mirror that there was only nothing where her reflection should have been. She paused, knowing that couldn’t be right, and only then did her hazy self grudgingly materialize in the glass, and she felt the razor thin difference between one’s something and one’s nothing.
All of these uneasy thoughts followed her into the waking world.
Along with the whispers of her newfound companion.
As she drove to work, she was slower than the tide of commuters, trying to hold her own in the slow lane as everyone passed her, but without anger or any emotion, as though the space she occupied didn’t include her. She tried to remember the last time she had made eye contact with anyone, with a glance toward the passenger seat.
She stopped by the coffee shop where everyone looked straight through her. She used her phone to order, as ordinary working people swirled around her, not pushy, not rude, not anything. Several orders appeared on the counter, and she timorously looked to see if one might be hers. “Is one of these mine?” she attempted to ask out loud, but the barista might as well have been a mile away. Arms swooped around her to claim the waiting cups, leaving one when the flurry was done. She looked around at the other faces, trying to summon the nerve to claim it. She looked aside, as though for permission, then reached for it. No one contested her bold move. No one noticed it.
When she was safely back in her car, her phone rang, and she said “Hello,” but there was only silence on the other end. Either someone being no one—or no one being someone. With silence and a sheepish look at the passenger seat, she killed the call.
She made it through a day of work at her desk without engagement with anyone. Her protests stayed in her mind, as all the while the air beside her seemed to be straining to become not merely the place where something could be, but was.
At 4:30 she went home.
#
Yes, she was fifty, a heavy sounding number, and as she remembered it, she had in a receding earlier life interacted with people, known friendships, fallen in love, once, pursued goals, had added, in short, her bit of heat to the fever of humanity, but now these memories seemed to be burning away like morning mist as the sun rises, to the extent she could not be sure they had happened at all.
Leaving what?
Yes, the question.
Once back in her apartment she re-closed all the shades, leery of the tired and sterile scenes, like little billboards, that lay beyond the windows. She had very little appetite, and brewed some tea out of habit. As she sat in her familiar chair, sipping her tea, a feeling that might have been peace flooded her like an ocean swell and she fell into a pleasing trance, where she felt the other presence as one would another person in a small, dark room.
She felt it pushing, probing, and either in her real or her mind’s eye she saw a rubbery veil with something pressing against it like a restless fetus. At one point the crude features of a face pushed into it—then shoulders, knees, fingers, hands. Then suddenly two hands and forearms—small, feminine—broke through the veil like birth and floated in the air, fingers hungrily clenching and unclenching, and she felt a mix of uncertain emotion—compassion one moment, dread the next.
What did this entity want? The question didn’t really seem so different from what did Nyla want? To overtake and replace the other? To complement her as a long-missing half? Or was this simply her own self making a long-overdue house call?
Nyla knew a door had opened. She just didn’t know who was saying “Come in."