PART 2
It was dark and cold, and it smelled like… hot coffee. Even the floor was cold. It seemed as if time had stopped…
Isabelle took a few steps forward. She just wished there was some light so she could see where she was. As soon as she thought this, a faint, thin streak of light appeared at some distance to where she was standing. She followed the light rays in front of her and to her amazement; she found the whole floor made of glass. She came close to the light and found it coming from a lantern placed on the floor. As she picked it up, she found it similar to the one that hung in her guest room.
She liked the different shades of color it gave from its multi-colored glass and so had decided to hang it in the guest room where it matched well with the rest of the décor. She walked across the place she was standing at and found it empty as far as she could see. She went to where she was standing earlier and lowering the lantern down to the floor, she found it was made of glass, the kind she admired: thick and shiny, with what looked like colorful bits studded into in, making it look like a lake of different colored waves. She always wanted the floor of her home to be made of this kind of glass. Confused as to how these things were here, and wondering where exactly was this here, Isabelle starting walking on the glass floor, with the lantern in her hand. She did remember sitting in her study, reading and drinking coffee, when she fell asleep there on the couch, but didn’t remember waking up after that.
Maybe I’m dreaming.
And just as the thought struck her, a thousand images floated and drifted in front of her; images of places she had dreamt of, people she had seen in her dreams, things she had never really known about but had only seen them in her dreams…every single image was that of what she had dreamt about.
Blinking her eyes from the sudden rush of colors and light the images had brought, Isabelle walked slowly across what seemed like faint ruins of a castle. She wondered if she had been kidnapped and her kidnapper had brought her here and shown her all this to scare her. As soon as the thought hit her, the real feeling of being scared rushed on her like a splash of water. Adrenaline cruised through her spine and the hair of the back of her neck shot up. Just as she was about to wipe away a bead of sweat trickling down her forehead, she heard a low growling, like that of a cat. As she turned around, Isabelle found dozens of large, black, green-eyed cats staring directly at her.
She had always been afraid of cats, especially black ones. They were her worst fear.
My worst fear, Isabelle thought, just as more cats started to appear before her out of nowhere. It took her a few minutes to figure it out: everything she thought of now was coming to life right before her eyes. Does this mean I should stop thinking so all this stops? Isabelle thought to herself. She did it again, she had thought and now something worse would happen. But just then, the whole place around her turned blank and white, like a huge sheet of paper without words. It seemed as if the air had been sucked right out of her lungs. Isabelle didn’t make a move in fear of something else suddenly appearing before her – nothing happened. She still needed to figure out where she was. Maybe if she could form a question in her mind as to what this place was and how she got here, she could find a way out. Thinking of it, Isabelle concentrated hard on the question
In that instance, the whole glass floor beneath her, cracking into a thousand pieces, gave way and Isabelle found herself falling downwards. The walls around her seemed to fall with her too. To her amazement, she noticed that the pieces of broken glass although they touched her body didn’t pierce through her skin or cut wounds into it, instead, they passed right through her, as if she was transparent, without leaving any scratch.
Afraid she might not even survive the fall, Isabelle closed her eyes shut and thought hard of some way to land safely on the ground. Remembering she could control the happenings by thinking of them, she concentrated hard to form a notion so as to touch the ground safely without getting hurt. Not concentrating on anything but her thoughts and unaware of anything around her, Isabelle opened her eyes a moment later just to realize that she had at last landed on hard ground, only that she didn’t feel it. It was as if she had fallen on a heap of cotton. She stood up, feeling quite numb.
What she found around her made her utterly lost and confused: dozens of large-sized, gleaming images were hanging vertically as if hung by something to the roof, like a large painting hung on the wall, only that there was no roof. They seemed to be…floating in about the air by themselves, as if by some invisible force. The whole place looked like a torn gray sky. There were no walls about it or any roof and it looked like a piece of desolate land floating in an open universe.
Isabelle went closer to one of the huge images hanging near her and when she put her hand on its surface, it literally sank into it, making large, round ripples around it, like those formed on a water surface when something is submerged into it. It looked as if the images were themselves made of water, with color filled in them. Isabelle went to the rest of the images hanging around her and the same happened with all of them whenever she put her hand on one: it went through and left ripples around it. Too dazed by all that she saw, Isabelle hadn’t noticed that like all the rest of images hanging around her, there were also many floating above her.
I’m in a picture land.
The ones above her were moving slowly, one upon the other, like hovering aircrafts. Lost in her confusion as to what to make of all that was around her, Isabelle missed the fact of what the images were of. Some of them were very familiar to her, while others just made her feel as if they were memories of a distant past. Going up to the one on her right, Isabelle looked at it closely, trying to figure out what it depicted. Though the picture was blurry and faint, she could still make out something of it. She ran her fingers through the surface and it became clearer as if all it needed was a slight touch to remove the blurriness. The picture looked vaguely familiar to Isabelle, showing a man sitting on a desk piled high with papers, working under the dim light emanating from a small lamp placed at the desk, and next to him, a girl stood holding a paper with loads of numbers and alphabets, talking to the man in a cheerful manner.
As Isabelle started to take in every detail of the picture, she had the strange feeling of somehow being a part of what it depicted. She looked more closely at the picture; the man sitting at the desk had some resemblance to her father, the girl standing next to him was holding something that she thought she had come across in the distant past, the room and everything in it seemed all to familiar to her but she still couldn’t make out how. Using a technique her professor of cryptology had once taught her to use when unable to concentrate or remember something, Isabelle closed eyes and envisioned herself in the room, with the man and the little girl next to her. Like a rush of pain shot through her, she suddenly opened her eyes, realization suddenly dawning. Everything made sense to her now. The man in the picture, which she took to be the likeness of her father, was indeed her father and the little girl was none other than herself, when she was 9, and the room was her father’s study. The paper held by the little girl, or she herself, was a solution to an arithmetical cipher. She remembered it all now.
It was sometime before her parents died. One day Isabelle was busy in her schoolwork when her father gave her a new code he had made and told her it was nothing like she had ever come across. He had promised her a small present if she managed to decipher the cipher and then went back to his study. Smart as she was, it had taken Isabelle just a few minutes to solve the cipher. After using all the different techniques and methods she knew at that time to decipher a message, she had finally hit upon the correct one: The Caesar Cipher, a type of substitution cipher in which each letter in the plaintext is replaced by a letter some fixed number of positions down the alphabet. Isabelle replaced all the numbers and letters in the cipher according to their original places and after she finished, she happily went to her f
ather in his study and showed him the solution she had made for the code. Surprised and delighted at the same time at her cleverness, her father explained more of the Caesar Cipher to Isabelle and how it came into existence by the great Julius Caesar. After he had finished, Isabelle asked him for her present. At that he had told her a present in not only something we can receive from someone else or achieve ourselves by gaining something, in fact, the greatest present a person can possibly receive from someone else is the one that stays with him always, no matter what happens.
Isabelle asked her father what it was; eager to know what such a big present could be, and upon that he told her that the greatest present one can receive is the wisdom of life, because whatever life has in store for us is utterly un-perceivable – if we don’t have the wisdom about it. We may reject a great chance of happiness just because we didn’t realize the meaning that it was meant for us; we may stumble upon a great beauty and walk away from it just because we didn’t have the insight of it. And so he had told her one of the Wisdoms of life that by taking chances and risks we can learn new lessons in life and those lessons are learned better than what we learn from our mistakes or fall-outs. At that time, though, Isabelle didn’t seem to understand but later in life she got to know what her father had meant; that you can’t always expect to be shown every emptiness in life that needs to be fulfilled, rather, you have to take chances and risks in order to come across new aspects of reality, whether they turn out to be what we like or not.
Now, glaring at what had been a dear memory of her, Isabelle started to wonder just what else this place had to show her. But seeing her own memory – it made no sense to her at all. She wasn’t poring over the possibility of seeing something that had been her past; she was captivated by the feelings these images brought to her, the reminder of all the happy moments she had spent with her parents and the lessons she learned from them. It was the only reason she liked to dwell on her past, never caring about the present or the future. In her solitary life, only these memories brought her happiness and consolation one needs to survive.
Stepping away from the picture, Isabelle went on to look at the others. There were so many around her, they looked like a huge puzzle floating in the air. Walking in between the many rows of these bitter reminders of her past, Isabelle found a one that touched a deep broken cord in her heart. She went up to it, and upon running her fingers over its surface, it became clearer. It showed a girl struggling with ridding a bicycle and a woman beside her, guiding and helping her with it.
Upon getting 1st position in third grade, Isabelle’s parents had bought her a new bicycle and she had started ridding on it on the very next day. She had some difficulty with it at first but got better at it once her mother helped her. But even that had not made it easy for her. She had been scared that if her mother let go of her and stopped walking along by her side, she might fall – but that hadn’t happened. Her mother had held on to her firmly, making her keep her balance upright. After a while, her mother had told her to ride by herself, without taking any support so that she might learn how to keep herself from falling. She had insisted her mother go with her for a few more steps and then she would be on her own, but after riding some further blocks, when her mother had let go of her, Isabelle had been a bit scared that she might not be able to balance herself on the huge wheels of the bicycle and would fall. She hadn’t been able to balance herself well.
Her mother had told her to let go and let the bicycle ride by itself and then take control of it. Following her mother’s advice, Isabelle had let go of the handles and let the bicycle balance upon its own. Surprisingly enough, instead of going left and right, unbalanced, it had gone straight. She had been enjoying the whole moment, when suddenly, she had stumbled upon a dent in the path and had fallen. She had fractured her ankle. Her mother immediately came to her and carried her home, where she lay for two whole weeks in great pain. She had also missed school. The images of that time suddenly disappearing from before her eyes, Isabelle blinked away back tears and tried to ignore the hurt she now felt deep inside from the loss of her parents and the time they spent together. She didn’t know she still had this memory within her.
You have to let go.
Her mother’s voice echoed so clear in her mind still. Though at that time she had only meant for Isabelle to let go of the bicycle so it might balance itself, yet now, in all the twists and turns she had to face in life, Isabelle knew what her mother had meant. Often times we come across things in life which we don’t have control over, which we can’t change as to the way they flow. Because of our blindness, we don’t see the light at the end of the dark tunnel, but only pray to get out of it. Just like everything happens for a reason, we have close encounters with misery or hardships so that we can search for something better. Other time, we can’t really do much and have to let go, and let time and fate decide.
Feeling as if wounds of her past were open afresh, Isabelle made up her mind not to look at any other of these painful reminders of her past. She didn’t believe that time healed all wounds, like its said, but only makes them deeper, concealing them in our soul, and reviving them again when their memories seem to fade. It looked as if nearly all her past had been engraved into these pictures and left to be remembered again. From her darkest to the most pleasant of memories, Isabelle found all her past before her.
She found pictures showing her memories of the first time she learned to write, of the first time she learned the art of numbers and the first code she ever broke, memories of all the pleasant moments she had spent with her father, learning new and surprising things from him, memories of her mother telling her tales of great men in history who gave us something to live upon, and finally, memories of the time she was separated with a happy life by fate: the time she lost her parents. The memories of that time were so clear and vivid before her, she felt as if she was re-living that moment. Isabelle realized just how cruel time seems to be sometimes, making us live in the past moments in such a vibrant way.
It was the 30th of June; a day that started for Isabelle waiting for her parents to return from their archaeological trip to Peru, but left her waiting for them for her whole life, with the impending doom of realization that they’d never return again. Her parents had got an invitation three days before her birthday from the main head department of archaeology in Paris to visit an ancient temple in the outskirts of Peru, where countless historical monuments stand to this day. They had accepted the invitation gladly. Isabelle had a vague feeling they might not be able to safely back home and insisted them not to go. They promised her that they’d be back soon for her birthday, and left her at her aunt Agnes’ house.
Isabelle recalled now, waking up early that morning, with a knot of worry in her stomach and a strange feeling of something not being right. She spent the better part of her day at home watching TV with her aunt, not uttering a word the whole time. Her aunt knew her distress so she didn’t press her much. Aunt Agnes had baked a lovely little cake for her and tries her best to keep her cheered-up and all smiles. When night had fallen and there was still so sing or her parents’ coming home, Isabelle had gone to bed, feeling tired from waiting all day. She remembered having a strange dream that night, She dreamt about her parents, standing in what she thought were the ruins of some kind of old monument. They were reaching out for her, asking her to come with them. There was a raging storm all around, with a furious wind blowing and heavy rainfall, ready to take-up everything in its wake. Isabelle focused hard to make out the hazy forms of her parents, as it was so blurry because of the rain and wind that she couldn’t see much clearly. She stepped up real close to them and to her horror, when she reached out to them they suddenly vanished, like smoke, and she touched thin air.
Isabelle had woken up with a start, opening her eyes suddenly as if she woke up from a fit. Too dazed in her sleep, she h
adn’t heard her aunt’s anguished screams, calling out her name, telling her to wake up. When her aunt had seen her open her eyes, she thrust her arms around her neck in a tight, secure hug, as if she hadn’t met in a long time. Isabelle saw her aunt’s tear filled eyes, and struggled to take her voice out to ask what was wrong. But deep down inside, in the empty corners of her heart, she knew exactly what was wrong, had felt it all along. Strong as she was, she readied her aching heart to take in all that was about to come, and asked her aunt again what was wrong. At the beginning there was nothing but the silent, painful sobs of aunt Agnes filling the quietness of the room, but then she gathered up her strength, to explain to a 10 year old child that her parents were gone forever, and began to speak in broken, muffled sentences.
There really had been a storm in the place Isabelle’s parents had been working on: a 4.000 years old site near Cusco, on the outskirts of Peru, where a temple of sun and moon worship stood worn-out condition. The early Incan emperors, devoted to sun and moon worship built the temple to carry out their sacrifices in the honor of the two “heavenly deities”, as they referred to the sun and moon. It was this temple the Aimerys had been sent to dig up some ground and look for something that might be of historical importance and help in understanding the civilization’s age-old history. The temple had stood there for centuries, fighting against every kind of weather, but this storm was too much for it to hold against. As the storm grew more fuming by each blow of wind, the walls and pillars started to give way, and all at once the whole temple had come tumbling to the ground, its each and every brick turning to pieces.
The Aimerys had been working in an undergoing recess that was beneath the temple. The Incas, at the time of their enslavement by the Spanish conquistadors, had tried to save as much of their valuable treasures as much as they could from the Spaniards catching hold of it. For this purpose, they had made large clay pots and stored in them all of their gold, precious stones and jewels, steel ornaments and all the rest of their things of value, and then hid these pots in underground stores they made beneath their temples, hoping their gods to protect them.
So it was one of these underground stores the Aimerys were searching in – un-earthing clay pots buried deep inside the ground, when the walls around them had started to shake and tumble from every direction. They had hurriedly collected all their research equipments and made their way for the passage leading to the opening. The walls were falling one by one all around them and the passage had been blocked from the concrete falling above at the ground. Not finding any way out, they had helplessly accepted the danger they were in, realizing they could do nothing but leave their fates in the hands of God.
Though Death is an un-invited guest, yet it does somehow warn its host about its arrival. Thus we say that a person knows he’s about to die, as if he can see his death coming. The Aimerys, knowing they could do nothing and go nowhere, had sat in a corner of the underground pit that was to become their grave, huddled in each other’s arms, being one another’s warmth and comfort. Realizing deeply they would be crushed to death under a centuries-old temple, with no one there to find them, they had thought of just one thing to ease their pain: their daughter.
Isabelle had begged them not to go, and they regretted it deeply ever coming there. They had felt ashamed for breaking their promise with their daughter that they would be there for her birthday. Suddenly the passage joining the ground above with the one below, gave itself away, and had fallen right down on the place where the Aimerys had been sitting. One by one, every single mast fell down, crushing the walls around it too. The structure that had stood there for centuries, reflecting the lives once lead there and the rituals and sacrifices carried out on its very ground, turned into a devastated ruin. Back at the archaeology department, when they hadn’t heard from the Aimerys for nearly 3 days, a rescue team had been sent to the place to look for them. The whole place had turned into a ruin, and even though every piece of rock was searched under, no body had been found – just the signs all around of a horrible storm. The director of the board of the department had personally called aunt Agnes and told her about what had happened. He had expressed how sorry they all were and wished none of it would have happened, as they lost some real good people, and that they could do nothing more to help. Isabelle hadn’t first reacted much; didn’t shed a drop of tear or expressed her sorrow, but when her aunt had left, she had crawled up in bed and cried, letting out all her pain in silent, painful, anguished sobs. Her mother had always taught her to learn to let go of things in life we don’t have control over but she found it hard to let go of the only thing she held dear in the whole world, her parents. But she learned eventually that no matter how hard the times becomes, there is always something good at the end.
From that day onwards, Isabelle had experienced the true feeling of being lonely, and for her, it wasn’t just about having no one to spend your time with or share your feelings with – for her, it all seemed a plot made by fate, to take from us what we hold dear, something that makes us happy and gives us a reason to live for . . . and then to test us for how we react to it.
Now, as Isabelle stood their, looking at that memory, she felt all alone again, something she had gotten quite used to now. She learned long ago that despite the fact that memories bring pleasant moments afresh in times of sorrow, they are also man’s weakness: they take us back to the times we spent happily and make us long for them, so much do they draw us towards them that we forget what we have at the present moment; and wanting to go back in those moments. Isabelle cherished the idea of having some pleasant memories to look upon when she felt alone, but she never let herself get absorbed in them too much; just enough to keep her from the demons always lingering in her mind, eager to consume her. When she fully came back to her present state, recalling to mind she still hadn’t figured out where she was or how to get out of there, Isabelle gathered up her strength, kicked off the forlorn emotions bubbling within her and walked away from the images hanging around her.