It's a fact that we never think to look behind what we believe is true. A fact, they say, is anything you can convince someone else to believe. Faeries exist. Just clap your hands. The bogeyman doesn't live in the closet. He actually rents a condo in Manhattan. And unicorns do come to non-virgins. Like any wild animal, they're drawn by the lingering subconscious smell of sex.
This is what we believe. What do you believe?
Understand that we live in a reality that we don't control. If anything, we are under the ultimate thumb, swayed by media, science, religion, peers. There are those who want to believe, with all their hearts, that there's something more. They want to believe that they can push aside the gossamer curtain and there would be the kingdom of Avalon; and tiny winged creatures would ride the backs of mother-of-pearl unicorns. There are those who never stopped dreaming of chasing their dogs through holes in fences with untied sneakers, of stealing apples from neighbor’s trees, of playing jump rope and freeze tag.
Then there are those who lie awake in perpetual nightmares, trembling in an acid trip that hasn't worn off, where the dreams are close enough to touch. To them, the bleeding walls are the reality, and the elves have razor sharp teeth. When these dreamers awaken in the morning, there are tiny bite marks on their arms.
Among some dreamers, there are alter egos. It's not split personality, and it's not schizophrenic, but it is sometimes beyond human understanding. In their dreams, waking or sleeping, they can shift mentalities, detach parts of the spirit, enter the place behind the curtain without losing reality. Some people take the forms of animals when they aren't playing warriors or angels. It never matters. But for the dreamers who can slip behind the chimera's veil, the price sometimes paid is always worth the adventure.
Changelings, as most people believe, are not faerie children who replace stolen human babies in the night. Changelings are a definitive mix of human and elfin blood, since fae lineage is too thin to create pureblood offspring. It's just another word for those people—-women in particular—-born with willow-reed figures, long slender fingers, delicate skin and bones. Their eyes are too big in their childlike faces, and their ears stick out a little and have that tiny curve if the trained eye looks hard enough. They like to wear their hair long. They never gain much weight and lose it too quickly. Most of the girls never grow past five three, and the boys hardly ever become basketball players. Friends are always envious and at the same time protective—these petite, innocent creatures who look like they could fade away at any minute. There’s something almost ethereal about them.
Some of them, psychically, serve as beacons and radars, projecting so powerfully on the astral plane that they can be considered lighthouses if not easy prey. Some of them are conduits, batteries, reacting to every type of psychic energy so quickly that a more tightly-shielded empath would barely realize that anything had happened. Most fae empaths, in groups, are considered invaluable, and are the most shielded, the most protected. Their energy patterns are so strong, no one knows how to tone them down, and they tend to become magnets, attracting things in the preternatural world that are not necessarily supposed to cross over.
We write stories about them, songs and poems, ballads, paintings, movies. Dracula. Oberon and Titania. Bacchus and Pan. Werewolves in London. We think we see them, late at night, when our minds are too tired and wary to separate reality from reality. They are what we most fear, what we most desire.
Look closer...
I am not what you see.
There was a movie made, once, about a homeless man who used to be a college history professor, before his wife was gunned down before his eyes, before he began to hallucinate and see dragons and knights on horseback in the streets of the city. There is a role-playing game, live-action, where players create characters in a fantasy setting: faeries and goblins and shape-shifters, children of Oberon and Titania. There are games people play, pretending to be vampires and werewolves and risen ghosts. But for people like that fictional homeless college professor, lost in his world of delusions, lost in a world where red knights chase him with flaming swords, it is all too real.
This is not a delusion. This is not a game.
This is real.
We live in a world dominated by science, pushed by religion. Contradiction abounds. What you see is what you get, but there is so much more under the microscope. How do we know what kind of forces are out there? Deities? Spirits? How do we know? And, more importantly, what do we know?
We don't know. Even the most devout, the most pious-—even they truly don't know. True religion belongs to those whose minds have snapped. People only say they are really devout. What they really believe is a different story—-and a frightening one.
But some things are real. There is a saying, popular with shirts and stickers: "Some Things Exist Whether You Believe In Them Or Not." For many people, this has become a very real and very strange sort of truth.
But what is truth, anyway?
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