Journey to Psitharis

Chapter 6

As a little girl there wasn't much for me to do with my life. During a very difficult period where Mom had gotten mad at Grandpa and Grandma and had moved us out into the middle of nowhere into a little, run-down trailer that was low rent and low everything else, I found myself quite alone in the world. I was five years old going on six, and Aurora's caretaker at night. Mom was working at the bar at night and sleeping in during the morning. She didn't tell anyone there was no sitter. At night she would put us into bed, and all we knew was when we woke up she was home. Once or twice I awoke to find her gone, but I had grown accustomed to her absences so I went to the bathroom or got some water on my own before heading back to bed. Every now and then Aurora would cry, would scream for our mom, but I was always there to calm her, to get her to go back to sleep.

In the mornings Mom would get ready for bed by locking herself in her room, with Aurora in her playpen watching the finest shows PBS had to offer. And she left me in the living room with strict instructions to stay put and to not open the door to anyone. While my mother slept and while my sister grew increasingly educated by watching television in the bedroom, I broke the rules by going outside to explore. We lived in the middle of nowhere; the nearest house to us was a quarter of a mile away. And each day I would become a little braver by wandering to the back yard, past the back yard to a little, secluded area in the woods behind our house.

It was very idyllic in my little haven. There was a large tree for shade and below that there was a patch of green moss that jutted out beside a small pond. I would often take a book or some chips and a juice packet and hide away there, pretending I was sitting at the banks of a major ocean watching for a redheaded mermaid to surface, or waiting for Alice to crawl through the rabbit hole to join me in Wonderland. After a while, other peoples' notions began to bore me, so I came up with my own world. And in that new creation I stowed all the hopes and dreams a little mind like mine could hold.

It was a world that had a beautiful shoreline where children could play all day. There was an amusement park in the distance that went on for a mile, filled with roller coasters and ferris wheels and any sort of sweet treat a little girl could ever want. And far beyond the shore and the amusement park, high atop a snow-capped mountain was a beautiful palace that was made of iridescent blue glass. And when the sun was high in the sky it would hit the cerulean walls, and an entire swath of my secret land would be bathed in a beautiful blue light. Sometimes I would just stand in the blue light, wondering what it looked like from the dizzying heights. One day I hoped to find out. But for now the confines of my play land more than sufficed. I guess it never occurred to me that I deserved to see the view from the top of that dizzying elevation. Or maybe I just felt safer on solid ground and not advancing toward the unknown. Maybe I just didn't know enough about mountains and castles at the age of six to get that far with my imagination. I'm not sure why I preferred my little refuge I created in the real refuge of the woods, but something about the castle filled me with both awe and abject terror.

I originally named my imaginary world Dream Land, because up until then it was hard for me to find my dreams anywhere else. My mom had Aurora, Aurora had my mom. I honestly had nobody, not even Grandpa and Grandma at this point, so I created people to depend on. I would sneak out over the summer months and stay all day, being very careful to sneak back according to the sun's position. My mother usually woke up around the time the sun got to the middle of the sky, so that was my cue to head back. Sometimes I cut it pretty close, stepping inside the door with just moments to spare before I heard my mom's lumbering footsteps in the hallway, the unskilled pattering of my sister's footsteps right behind her. We spent three years in that trailer, during which time I renamed my world Psitharis. It came from the word "thesaurus", a word I grew fascinated with during a first-grade English lesson, only switched around a bit so my fantasy world seemed more grown up. So the world itself was called Psitharis, and my park got to remain Dream Land. I spent every moment I could in my land of splendor and overabundant happiness. And the more I visited this world, the more vivid it became, almost to the point where I couldn't tell where reality ended and Psitharis began.