My life – simple, poor, not a wide influence, only with my small sphere.

I gave up family and village to reach a wide world, leaving the familiar to wake the world, only to find an empty shell at the end of it all. Returning home in disappointment, no one recognized me. My house was destroyed in the high winds time and no one rebuilt it. My mother had died, father remarried, and moved to another town. No sight of my old friends, my brother and sister, all erased. One old woman approached me as if she knew me. But the other people in town said she was just crazy.

When I looked into her eyes I saw that she was my old auntie -my mother’s aunt from so long ago. What had happened to her and why was she now the madwoman of the village? I didn’t see how so much could have changed in such a short time. I’d only been gone for 20 years. Something was fishy.

At the edge of the town, the corner of one building looked like it was unravelling, curling up from the bottom like an old poster. Beneath it I saw another poster, fresh and bright. I began to tear and pull up the loose edge, to reveal more of the bright image underneath. Each time I lifted the corner there was a light flash in the back of my retina. Soon I’d opened up a 2×2 foot square of visible colour and light with shapes and forms.

Each day, I walked to the edge of my grey village, and lifted off more and more of the obscuring dark overlay. It was painstaking work but rewarding. And that was how I came to my home. My auntie sat beside me bringing tea or dry old cakes and humming old familiar tunes, reminding me of when I was a baby and she would hold me and tickle me, kiss me and sing.

Once day she gestured to me to follow her home. I packed up my tools and we set out along the wooded path that led to her cottage. It was outside of town because either she’d been shunned or she had chosen to live far from the taunts of the cruel villagers. Her hut was weathered wood, simple. She opened the door and a cat jumped in the doorway before us. She’d painted flowers on the door and door jamb.

I was astonished to see that the cabin as clean and bright – well-appointed with a soft bed covered in jewel-colored cushions, a table with two chairs to the side, a quite decent kitchen and a large beautiful armoire, carved with flowers and leaf motifs. Elaborate.

She made me delicious soup and as we ate, she surprised me even more. For she began to speak – I’d thought she was mute, except for the singing, so when she spoke her voice shocked me.

She told me everything that had befallen my family, and where they were now. Other gray villages. Other hard-scrabble work. Other people marrying, birthing, dying. It felt so incredibly hopeless. I was lost. My exploring the world had left me homeless. My expanding from the village had left me empty and useless. I was alone but I had discovered a secret in life, and I was in the process of revealing it.

No one knows what I was doing except Auntie. Now I knew that she could speak, I was concerned that she might tell the villagers. But there was no way she would – she was obviously living a secret life and was in disguise. So the villagers wouldn’t become suspicious, I only ate with her once a week. They thought I was taking care of her but really it was the other way around. Soon we were both humming as I worked, and one entire wall was revealed facing the forest (not the town). It was a building that had been abandoned. I’d peeled off the overlay and brilliant colours were revealed. Behind those colours and forms I saw a glimpse of a large face, covering the entire wall. It was a man’s face, moving as if he were speaking. I had a sense that he was far away and we were seeing his face as a projection. My auntie hid her head under her shawl, visibly disturbed, and she began to keen and cry. She stopped speaking at dinner. Stopped sitting by me as I worked. Went into madwoman mode.

His face was intermittently visible. Sometimes I only saw the colours, other times he appeared – black and white like a poor projection, his lips moving, eyes probing out toward us.

I felt he had a message for us but my auntie’s fearful response made me worry, and question why. Who was he and what did he want? I didn’t know and was afraid to find out. But in my heart I knew I’d come back to my village to meet him and receive his message. I took to sitting with my back to the forest, looking at the wall of colours, waiting to see if he’d appear again. He didn’t always come and his image was unstable when he did. His mouth moved. His eyes looked into me, absorbing me somehow.