Let us be honest: I have no idea where this plot is going, or where I even want it to go. I just need to get this out of my head. Let me know if you have any ideas you wish to share with me. -Suna
Chapter One
Welcome to the Real World
Sarah dropped her duffel bag in the doorway. Five years at University, two Degrees, one in English and one in Art, four summer jobs, and one shakily self-diagnosed case of schizophrenia hadn't changed her room at home in the slightest. That was all well and logical, but she had felt somehow that college, that knowing, would have left everything changed. Stepping back into her room was like erasing those five years. The only thing new was her cap from graduation, sitting proudly on her dresser, nestled next to items from her childhood, items that reminded her of that incident. Items that had once been her friends, but that now lay silent.
She stepped forward, picking up one of the stuffed animals off of the dresser and stoking her hands over it. When she had gone to college she had taken all of them with her. Eventually, though, school, and studying, and new friends, human friends, had pushed her childhood friends and her childhood tendencies away. She was a woman now. And slowly she had started taking her old friends back home until none were left in her apartment. The last had been taken away the spring semester of her Sophomore year. Just four years and a handful of months after that incident. But four years was a long time to allow one's self to be insane.
It was a couple of months after that, that he had stopped watching her.
After that incident the owl had always been around, showing up a couple of times a week, staying only for a short while. Long enough for her to notice. Long enough for him to take stock of her life as she assumed he was doing. Thinking he watched her was like the peak of a roller coaster- you know that at any moment the ground will drop out from beneath you, you just do not know when.
Sarah put the toy down and sat on her bed. From the purse at her side she pulled out an old sketchbook, it's spine held together with teal duct-tape, and a pencil. She tried to let her mind wander as the pencil moved across the page in slow curves and elegant cursive, but as she so often did she thought again of Jareth, of Goblins, of magic so concentrated it was visible, glittering in the air. Of what her schizophrenia made her see. She had been thankful, at first, when Jareth's visits slowed, going from every few days to every few weeks and then finally to every few months until he wasn't in her life at all. She felt less insane. She felt like she could breathe again, like she was finally getting off of the roller coaster. But it was after he left, after the pain and fear and sleeplessness ended, that she realized that her life was dull.
Although the first month of her Sophomore year was nothing but a dark blur in her mind, Sarah didn't party in college, didn't drink, didn't smoke. The most fun she ever experienced that was not related to school was the time she went to the zoo by herself just to waste a Sunday afternoon. She studied and went to class. She wrote essays and short fiction and poetry. She painted and took a course on glass blowing. She worked and slept. But life was dull and she found herself missing the ride of Jareth's watching her.
But she didn't want to go back there, and she refused to speak those words and was so compete in her refusal that she did not put candles on her birthday cakes, did not throw coins into fountain, and especially not wells. She often told herself that she was being silly, that there didn't exist, that they had never existed.
Being back in her childhood room was almost too much. It pushed in her face the option that everything she knew wasn't real, everything she didn't want to be real, was.
Her father called from the kitchen, saying that dinner was ready. Toby raced by her room, blowing her a raspberry through the open door. As Sarah came back to herself she smiled at him before she glanced down at her sketchbook. Her own face stared back, something easy enough to draw for an art student with but herself and a mirror to perfect her figure drawing, but in her self portrait's cupped hands was that maze and the image was ringed with spiraling cursive spelling out the words 'I'm coming home.'
Sarah slammed the book shut and looked out the window, but there was no owl. There would never again be an owl. There never had been an owl. All the same her hands shook. "I am home."