“You’ve been able to speak English this whole time?” Alex asked, a little irritated.

“No, I do not speak your language,” she responded.

“What do you mean? You’re speaking it right now!”

You are wearing lahpok’es,”

“Lahpok’es?”

The woman nodded.

“What does that mean?” Alex had never heard that word before. Were they a type of special trousers? Why did they make noise and light? Alex didn’t know much about chemistry or science, but could the hum and glow have come from a chemical reaction of some kind? Alex could only speculate.

Alex never had any interest in science. Growing up, his only hobbies and interests were learning new words. Every day after school he would walk to the public library and check out books on linguistics. Fascinated by syntax and phonetics, he had, by the end of seventh grade, read every book on the topic of language in the whole library.

Alex wasn’t satisfied with the amount of knowledge he had collected. He wanted more from this intriguing facet of social science. Alex wanted to learn all the languages he had read about. Alex spoke two languages at the time: English and French. His mother had grown up in New Brunswick, a province that had many French speakers living in it. She had taught Alex how to speak French when he was nine years old and regularly spoke it at home.

Alex’s third language had been Spanish. It did not take him much time to become a fluent speaker, as he already spoke one Romance language and had studied language structure. Over the years, Alex had become a fluent speaker of more than a dozen languages.

The woman responded to Alex’s question, “Lahpok’es are enchanted leggings. The particular enchantment applied to this pair interprets meaning from one mind to another.”

“E-enchanted?” Alex wasn’t expecting an answer like that.

“Correct.” The woman nodded.

“Enchanted as in... with magic?”

The woman looked puzzled by the question, “Does there exist another way to enchant?”

“I don’t know- I- What?” It was Alex’s turn to look puzzled. What was she implying? Was she telling a joke? Did he just not register her sarcasm? There was no tone of jest in her words, nor a playful wink and nod. Was this woman delusional? Had Alex unknowingly given his trust to a nutcase?

Alex blinked, and in the instant he did, it dawned on him that he wasn’t in the same world he had fallen asleep in the night before. His heart jumped and a wave of emotions came flooding into him: fear, shock, confusion, uncertainty, joy. His dream had come true. He was in a different world.

Alex dropped to his knees. His stomach was doing flips in his gut and he began to shake violently. A loud sudder escaped his lips as tears formed in his eyes and a fraction of a second later he was weeping into his hands.

The woman rushed over to him. “Are you ill?” she asked with concern. She kneeled next to him and placed her hands on his shoulders.

Alex couldn’t respond, his body wouldn’t let him. His mind had shut his decision-making abilities off and all that was driving his body to act now was emotion. The emotion pulled at his muscles, curling him into a ball as he howled. The emotion suffocated him, drowned him in an ocean of existentialism.

Memories of his childhood flashed through his mind like a slideshow of his life experiences. Memories that hadn’t been dusted off since they were first developed. Why were they coming up now? Why were they so lucid?

Tucked away in the corner of the library, the scent of aging paperbacks drifting into his nose as he flips through the pages of an Italian-to-French dictionary. Showing the baby tooth he’d lost earlier that day in school to his three disgusted little sisters then chasing them around the house with it. Shooting himself in the forehead as he failed to create a rubber band gun with his fingers. Teaching his sisters how to juggle snowballs. Climbing the thick, twisting branches of the huge trees in the park near his house. Drinking from the garden hose and the subsequent scolding from his mother. Snapping together markers and having sword fights with his friends. Racing the neighbourhood kids to the end of the street.

Alex’s tether to his own sense of self had been cut loose, leaving his mind to drift away from the reality of his situation. Right now, he was in another world. A world he already knew. 

----------------------------------------------------------------------

“Please, tell me what’s wrong,” she pleaded. She didn’t understand what could have caused this man to have such a reaction to her question. She thought he might be sick but upon seeing his face realized that the man was in distress. Why was this man suffering? What had she done to make him feel this way? Had she been responsible?

It had been a very long time since she had dealt with emotions this strong. That being the case, even if she didn’t know who he was, her empathy and sense of duty had pushed her to reach out and connect with someone for the first time in what felt like a dozen lifetimes.

The man’s cries and moans reverberated through the room. They reminded her of a wounded animal: agonizing, uncomfortable, sad. She felt so sorry that she didn’t know how to help him. She wasn’t used to not knowing what to do; not used to feeling useless.

 She could tell there would be no conversation for a fair amount of time. The man was clearly lost in his own thoughts and emotions, completely disconnected from the rest of the world like someone lost at sea struggling to keep their head above the crashing waves. His heart was locked in battle with his mind and the aftermath would be crippling if she couldn’t ground him somehow.

She did the only thing she could think to do: embrace him and sing a soothing melody from her childhood.