Turns out I had been unconscious for nearly three weeks. I had been hit in the back of the neck with a soccer ball that day long ago, and it had caused enough problems to fill several hefty medical files, namely my unexplained comatose state yet constant brain activity. I tried not to ask too many questions. I suppose it accounted for the minor 'travel between parallel dimensions' thin too. I needed to get conked on the head again, already the stench of the 21st century was overwhelming my soothing memories of the Imadaris gardens. I looked around the room at the various flowers, balloons, stuffed animals and absentmindedly scratched around the IV attached to my arm as Virginia leaded through a hastily stapled package of handwritten pages.
"Great fan fiction," was all she said, and a sense of listless frustration settled over me.
"The doctors attribute these…hallucinations to injury trauma and sustained comatose." She was explaining, but my mind was traipsing through Rivendell on horseback with Estel, challenging him to a race and having a picnic shoreside.
"Marina, I'm going crazy here!" I whined later that day as we built castles out of hospital mashed potatoes.
"These are disgusting," she said, and abruptly walked out of the room, leaving me the siege of Carrot Tower to me and the hurtling peas.
"You've got until the end of visiting hours," she said, whirling back into the room secret agent like.
"To do what?" I replied suspiciously.
"Breathe. Escape. Paint your nose bright red. The point is, we're getting out of here," she tossed a pile of clothes toward me and pushed me into the bathroom. (Another thing the doctors couldn't explain. No muscle deterioration. The reason why, I tell you, is because I was enduring brutal sword fighting lessons. But do they believe that? No.)
"I'll be back," she tata'd and waltzed from the room as I sat on the toilet attempting to pull on some shorts and pull a comb through my hair. I looked in the mirror and the sight nearly convinced me that I had never left the hospital, let alone the state, country, millennium, etc. my cheeks were sunken, and the only color cam from a raspberry colored bruise on my left temple. Scraggly mouse brown hair ecaped my bun. Oh well, I was going outside. That's what mattered.
Just then, breaking my melancholy reverie, Marina, Selene, and Virginia all burst through the door wearing goucho glasses—the tick frames with large noses and moustaches, and they tossed pe a pair as we "stealthily" made our way to the elevator, Marina shouting random Blackhawk down commands (Come one people, let's move! Move! Move!) We successfully made it out of the parking lot and headed toward the center of our world. Walking through the manicured gardens and landscaped trees of our park, I had an eerie sense of deje a vu. It was almost as if Elladan was awlking next to me, pinting out major sites—some trees had been cut and others were growing and the world was unnarturally ordered, none of the untamed mysticism of Rivendell—but still…I broke from the path as though in a trance and almost hesitantly found the tree Estel and I had…
"for a memory of happier times…" it was there, moss covered, but still carved. Marina stopped next to me and summed up the moment, "it's real."
Virginia looked questioningly at her as she explained, and then replied, "And I'm George Bush."
"Pleased to meet you Mr. President" I quipped, reciting lines from a story we wrote a lifetime ago. We all link arms and walking into the dying rays of the sun.