Everard
Legacy Name: Everard

You're falling, again, seeing golden motes in the dusty sunlight. You inhale, and breathe in air that is rich with earth and fragrant with woodsmoke and sunshine, warm in your chest and cleansing against your skin.

Beads of amber and honey trail behind, like tiny, glass-spun baubles, glistening like droplets of dew on sweetgrass. The muted sunlight scatters a kaleidoscope of glinting oranges and yellows through them.

You look at your hands, intrigued, at the way that the light shimmers on skin, on white knuckles and slender fingers. You reach for it, slowly.

A sudden spark. Blurring vision. A brilliant flare of burning, sharp light, blinding and warm and white amidst a rich backdrop of nothingness. And in the middle, you.

The atmosphere is charged with energy; colliding electrons and misfiring neurons send sparks of electricity crawling against your skin, and you feel the hair on the back of your nape stand on end as the light burns behind your retinas like white-hot embers. You breathe in ozone and fire, and are lost in flame and sparks and the heat of the sun.

Pain. A dull sensation, an ache, in your shoulder; foreign and alien, out of place in this warmth.

The blazing light has you disorientated and exhilarated and confused, and through the thick haze, you begin to recognize that the pain is real. I'm dreaming, you realize.

The thought stirs slowly, pulling you towards consciousness like a hook as the heavy, water-like glaze of sleep begins to peel away. The light fades, and your eyes flutter open to a canopy of leaves resplendent in green and gold, wreathed against a backdrop of soft blue.

Ouch. Now fully awake, you cringe. He hit you, despite the look of innocence he feigns.

"What the hell was that for? I was having a very nice dream." You frown.

"You were convulsing and twitching like you were in the throes of death, so I woke you. And shouldn't you be ignoring me? I don't exist, remember?" His own frown, mirroring yours, sets itself in his face. As you sit up, you're greeted by a cloudless sky and a soft summer breeze carrying the scent of petals and rain.

"You know what the doctor said, Laurel. I have to distinguish between what's really here and what's... not."

Laurel stares, the lines around his eyes unreadable. You mean to speak again, tongue heavy with regret, but he stands and walks away before you say anything more. A sigh, instead, is exchanged for the unsaid words.

Despite the fact that he's not real, you've hurt his feelings and feel guilty. But you're not supposed to speak to him — you can't get better if you continue to acknowledge him like this. The doctor has been saying that for months.

Your name is Everard, and you think you see ghosts.

When I was little, I thought nothing of the multitude of friends I had.

(Looking back in retrospect, though, it all seems to make so much more sense.)

They would come and go as if flitting in and out of existence, like shadows within darkness, like ghosts — by my side one second, and gone the next. I had no idea that they were figments of my own psyche until I was much older. My father never suspected anything, for he thought it was good-natured play — wasn't it perfectly normal for a child to amuse himself by talking to himself from time to time?

Not until I was thirteen did he notice something amiss. He would hear my laughter from beyond the door to my room, released from some untold joke that no one else could hear. I began to linger too long in the doorways at banquets and parties, chatting merrily to the companion that the eyes of others could not see. With the numerous and ever increasing instances of oh hello, how are you todays and I'd love to go out and play but I'm really quite busys uttered to no one in particular, he grew increasingly concerned as my behavior became too strange for someone of my age.

I was diagnosed with chronic hallucinatory palinopsia a year later. Palinopsia is a medical term that describes seeing and hearing things that aren't really there. A different perception of reality, if you will.

The most disconcerting thing about this whole thing? That I'll always wonder about the people that I have met all these years, and whether they were real.

Did the old woman who cultivated yellow petunias really live in the house next to ours? Did I actually have friends as a boy, or were those all phantoms of my own making, too? When you can't differentiate reality from the ghosts within your head, the world around you can become truly disorienting.

This is where I reach the impasse with Laurel.

It took me a few months for me to realize that he existed only in my head. Laurel has attempted to persuade me otherwise more times than I can count, but I know he's invisible to others. When asking the question that's plagued me for years, do you see this man?, the only person who didn't think I was insane was a five-year old girl. (And I must point out that it took a lot of courage to intentionally look like an idiot and ask that.)

But he seems so real, so tangible; the delicate slant of light that dapples his limbs as we sit under swaying aspen leaves in summer, the slight tilt of his head when he smiles, the soft lilting crescent of his laughter.

I am simple and ordinary, and my mind even more so. How can such a simple and ordinary thing create something so rich and real and human?

I know that I'm only humoring myself, though, because no one else can see him. I wish they could.

Despite the past, deep down I refuse to believe Laurel is a part of me. He seems too real for that.

The house you live in overlooks a small meadow filled with sweetgrass, dandelion, marigolds, daffodils — all sorts of blossoms from the shades of bloodred to deep violet. Their crowns open to the sun at the first warm showers of spring, and the heady fragrance of earth and sun-kissed petals during this time of year can bring to a halt the most hardened of city men.

You met Laurel in this glade when you were fifteen.

It was spring. You were on the porch, soaking in the morning sunlight -- when you saw a boy, slowly winding through the meadow with his hands in his front pockets.

You remember... remember him standing serenely, head tilted towards the blue, blue sky in the middle of a cluster of daffodils.

He'd said they were his favorite flower.

Laurel stops walking and sits down amidst the long blades of grass. You bite your lip, replaying words of caution uttered by the doctor ("You have to ignore him, you can't keep letting him win — otherwise you'll be like this forever, and you don't want that, do you?").

(Laurel wins on most days, though. Today is no exception.)

The daffodils bend their delicate heads and murmur in the breeze as you move through the field and sit down beside him.

"Are you going to talk to me?" He laughs bitterly. "I thought I wasn't real."

The apology that almost slips past your lips evaporates into the warm summer air, and instead, a retort takes its place. With him, you slip into banter much too easily.

"You're not. And I'm not talking to you either; I'm talking to myself. People talk to themselves all the time, so this is a completely normal thing to do."

"If you would just believe me when I say that I'm real and stop being so stubborn, we wouldn't have this issue."

"Our issue is technically my issue." You look at Laurel helplessly.

Here's the impasse again. You don't know why you're so intent on proving him wrong.

Maybe it's because you care about him too much, a little voice whispers unhelpfully. You don't want to believe he's real, to believe he exists, only to have the illusion shatter in your face.

His hand whips out in a blur like the strike of a hunting snake, catching your forearm against his hard fingertips. A red welt immediately begins to form.

"Ow, what—" you begin angrily.

"Did you feel that?"

"Let's investigate Laurel's mystery of the day. Of course I felt it!"

"There. I exist, plain and simple."

"That doesn't prove anything! I hallucinate, Laurel! You're in my head, and my head decides what I feel! I can see, hear, touch, smell and taste you. As far as I'm concerned, you're here."

"Gross." His response catches you off guard and you pause.

"What?"

"You said you could taste me."

"God, grow up, Laurel," you laugh.

"The only way I could grow up was if I existed, which I obviously don't! If I want to be immature, I will be." He crosses his arms and continues, trying to keep the hurt from creeping into his voice. He fails. "I've decided to get over the initial insult of my false existence and go with whatever you think is great."

He tucks his head in his arms, looking away. Your emotions change and contort as rapidly as the rising tempest of an ocean wave: guilt and pain immediately flood into you again.

You know what will make him happy: saying the words I believe you. But you can't lie to him. He is your best friend.

"Prove to me that you're real."

"What?"

"Please. Prove it to me. You seem so sure of your existence, and I'm not going to lie to you. I can't." You pause. Close your eyes and suck in a shaky breath. If you're honest, the words you're about to say are addressed more to yourself than to him, and as they're spoken, you feel a slow burn start to rise in your lungs. "If you're real, then this should be simple," you murmur.

He lifts his head and looks you in the eyes. "Am I important to you?"

You think of a blue, blue sky, of a spring morning and a meadow of daffodils. You think of sun-kissed freckles and berry stained lips in summer, of laughter and shared silence in the waning sunlight of the evening. But most of all, you think of a boy who is warm, and who burns as brilliantly as the sun.

You close your eyes.

Am I important to you?

"Yes," you whisper.

"Then I'm real."