Tea leaves, p.1
Tea Leaves, page 1
For all the queers and mystics and fairies and witches who only ever wanted to be seen.
When I opened my eyes a little wider and tilted my head just so—to see, really see—I noticed the fairies dancing between the floorboards of my bedroom. Have you ever passed by a painting every day without actually looking at it, and then just once, by chance, you take it in and realize all this time you’ve been walking past something shocking, like a painting of an angel sodomizing an alien, all along? You feel intrigued, but also kind of violated, when you think of how long the image has been slipping itself into your subconscious. Seeing the fairies felt like that, like maybe I’d been glancing at them out of the corner of my eye for my whole life. I watched the tiny glowing bodies dance in the ridges of the teal-painted hardwood, little naked, winged creatures all colorful and aglow like Christmas lights. I could’ve stared at them all morning if I hadn’t had to go to work.
Once I saw them I couldn’t stop seeing them, of course. They were everywhere, from a family of four in the orchid on my coworker’s desk (her cubicle always overflowed with over-the-top gestures from her fiancé) to three little blue men playing in the urinal like it was a goddamned water park.
When I mentioned my groundbreaking revelation about the fairies to Janet, the receptionist at work, she rolled her eyes and said (of all things), “Where the fuck have you been, Ronnie?”
But when I shrugged and walked off (I think she liked to call me “Ronnie” instead of “Ron” just to get under my skin), I glanced behind me to see her squinting at my back like I’d sprouted bat wings, and I didn’t buy her shtick for a second. No, sir. She’d been acting all snarky and too-cool ever since she’d tried to set me up with her “gay best friend” Enrique. Oh, yeah, she’d given me the whole line, He’s just so sassy and funny like you, and I’d said, You know not all us fags are a perfect match by virtue of the fact that you know them, Janet. Anyway, some of us are happier being alone. It was a petty thing to say, sure, and I was lying through my teeth about preferring to be alone. Still, I had my pride. Anyway, if this Enrique had helped her pick out even one of her tacky, ill-fitting skirt suits, then he was as tasteless as she was, and I wanted no part. Honestly, I don’t even know why I mentioned the fairies to Janet in the first place. I’d just sort of blurted it, eager to share the knowledge with someone, to share something new and exciting with another human as I had so little occasion to do. Obviously the wrong move.
I typically preferred to take my lunch break off-site, alone, lest I got stuck talking about marketing data during the hour we got to eat. Today, though, I brought lunch in a sad plastic bag to eat in the undersized kitchen on the fifth floor, to see if any of my coworkers talked about the fairies. It would finally give me something to talk about with someone, for once. I was getting lonelier and lonelier, less and less able to form relationships with the people around me, when the fairies showed up. When I brought my sad, soggy ham sandwich to the lunchroom (another reason I prefer to buy lunch off-site), I thought that if other people saw the tiny glowing creatures, maybe the universe was giving me a way to burst through my bubble of isolation, to soothe my quiet, aching loneliness. I waited until Janet left the lunchroom, because who knew what kind of passive-aggressive humiliation she’d try to subject me to if the topic came up?
I was cautious this time, waiting to see if the topic of fairies came up organically. After forty-five minutes nobody said a word about them, nor did anyone seem to notice the wild antics of the little pink lady dancing lewdly around the rim of Jerry’s bowl of tomato soup. Nope. Instead, spreadsheet horror stories consumed the majority of the conversation—precisely why I don’t eat lunch with these people. Even Leslie from HR, with her funky hair colors and ayahuasca retreats and transformative experiences at “regional burn” festivals, acted oblivious. I didn’t have a chance to bring it up, since after halfhearted mumbles of greeting nobody so much as looked my way the entire time.
By the time I had to clock back in, I felt too embarrassed at how diligently my coworkers ignored me to speak up. Was seeing the tiny glowing bodies so common an experience that nobody cared to talk about it? Had Janet whispered my revelation to the others and brought them in on some sick vengeful joke? Were they fucking with me? Either way, I was no closer to finding out what the fairies really were and whether they might have any real impact on our lives, and I was certainly no closer to figuring out how to find common ground with anyone vis-à-vis these weird creatures. Evidently, after all my working up the nerve to sit with these half-strangers I worked with, I was too bland for even my fellow marketing analysts to notice whether I ate with them, or not too bland to make them pause and listen to the sparkling world I’d grown so eager to share.
That night, my kitchen was so packed with little purple ladies dancing rave-style over the black-and-white linoleum that I had to tiptoe ever so slowly across the floor. The purple tide dodged my footfalls effortlessly, without disrupting the ecstatic convulsions of their tiny limbs. Of course they did. They’d been dodging my feet for years, surely, without my oblivious ass of a self having the first clue that they were there.
I poured myself a shot of honey whiskey, slugged it back. Poured myself a half-full glass and bent over so I was eye-level with the black granite counter, upon which several fairies (mostly green or yellow) were having an orgy. “Here’s to you,” I said. I raised the glass like we were all having a toast, like we were all friends. Of course I already knew they weren’t listening. I knocked that one back pretty quick as well, practically in one gulp. Poured another glass over ice.
Hazy, I plopped down on the foamy couch in the living room and sprawled out, laptop on my belly. I typed “people who can see fairies what does it mean” into Google, because why the hell not? I scrolled for a while through various fairy enthusiast forums and a site called Witch Vox, but it was all fables or superstitious mumbo-jumbo or hippy spiritual shit. I scanned through legends about the dangers of entering into fairy rings (apparently this is just Not a Thing to Do), others about how to leave gifts out for the “fair folk” so they’d leave you alone or bring fortune on your household or bring back your changeling child or whatever (like, what kind of a fucked-up parent tries to write off their child’s developmental issues as their kid being an actual, real changeling?). I wasn’t finding anyone who’d actually seen the fuckers.
“What the hell are you?” I shouted at the pink man and green lady languishing on the coffee table like they were sunbathing. Figures in profile, the fairies didn’t even turn their heads. Even the damned fairies ignored me! I might have been the only person on the face of the planet who could see the goddamn things, and they wouldn’t give me the time of day. It figured. What else was new?
About an hour (and two more honey whiskies) later—in that sweet spot of drunken exhaustion where I was too tired to get up and drag myself to bed—I stumbled across a thread on the r/Fairy “subreddit” titled, “DOES ANYONE ELSE SEE THOSE TINY GLOWING FAIRY PEOPLE EVERYWHERE? I FEEL LIKE I’M GOING CRAZY.” Yes, as it turned out. There were others of us, many of us even! My sleepiness melted away. My heart thudded, though I still felt thick with sweet liquor. I read the original post, by a user named Julianax89, clung to every word and didn’t even balk at the awful grammar:
“OK this is going to sound CRAZY and im probably gonna DELETE this but has ANYONE ELSE been seeing like these fairy people all over the place like just doing their thing??? idk how to explain it, i feel like last week something like kinda clicked in my brain and now i just cant stop seeing them ALL OVER THE PLACE, and my girlfriend doesnt see them and she thinks im just tripping, like i use to microdose acid for my anxiety but i even STOPPED bc of the fairies, i havent REALLY gone on like an acid trip or anything in forever. thoughts?”
The time stamp was three years ago. My chest felt like it was expanding, like I was on one of those massive tower rides and it was about to drop. With the exception of one heavily downvoted comment from a user named [[chaosmagick666]]—“Yeah, you probably just took too much acid. It’s too late for you now.”—scores of users were replying in earnest. The first, catLover900: “Mother of two here. I started seeing them when my second boy was born. Seems like he sees them too, never thought of them as fairies but I guess that makes sense.”
I scrolled through, eating everything up. Theories were made: aliens (of course), ghosts, demons, travelers from another dimension. Nothing conclusive, or all that convincing, and after the third theory (evidently inspired by X-Men) about how we must all share some evolved genetics and how we ought to band together to use our power for good but we had to be careful about exposing it to the world lest people fear our mutant gifts and persecute us (like . . .?), I began to get bored with these theories. No, what interested me more was people meeting and talking about it. Reddit users sounded off in various cities. Something like fairy support groups formed. People planned to get together, one-on-one or in groups, depending on the number of fairy-aware individuals in their area.
Common ground! It seemed like a surprising number of people identified somewhere on the queer spectrum, felt the need to insert their queer identities or queer relationships into their comments somewhere. It was like those guys at the “LGBT-friendly” group therapy (read: all white gay men) who feel the need to slip something in about “how hard it is being a single gay man,” and you think, oh my god, you’re cruising this group therapy session, aren’t you? On Reddit, though? Blame it on the Tumblr millennials, I guess—identity’s gotta be a part of everything. In my whiskey-swirled state I thought, god, all this on a Reddit thread, this tiny public pocket hiding out in the open on the internet, untouched by anyone who wasn’t looking for it. What else out there was I missing? Elves? Sea monsters? God, as if taking my shirt off at the beach wasn’t stressful enough already.
I was getting tired again—slipping away. I hit Control + F and searched the page for the word Seattle, just to see if anyone was in my area so I could call it a night. One match, in a comment by a user named mitchthepainter: “Anyone here from Seattle want to meet up? This has been driving me crazy. Glad to know there are others though.”
Time stamp: two years ago. Nobody had replied to him.
My hands shook when I went to comment, which signaled to me that I hadn’t had enough to drink: I was still that nervous to reply semi-anonymously to someone’s comment on a Reddit thread. Was I really that pathetic? Even if the username indicated that person was a guy, and the trend of the thread seemed to imply he might be queer. Anyway, I slugged back a shot of Evan Williams—this was a practical shot, an anxiety-dulling shot, so I didn’t bother with the honey whiskey—and the mostly green fairies, still having their orgy on my kitchen counter, god bless ’em, stared up at me in unison. Did they understand? All that alcohol, all that time on my computer, just to type a two-sentence reply, still a little nervous: “I live in Seattle. Just started seeing the fairies, if you’re still interested in meeting up?”
God, looking back on it now, I was already setting myself up for rejection: If you’re still interested in meeting up? With a goddamned question mark. But what if he didn’t use Reddit anymore? What if he didn’t want to meet up to talk about the fairies anymore? Couldn’t see them anymore? Had a boyfriend (or worse, a girlfriend)? Was dead? But that last shot of Evan Williams was hitting me, and I decided that the comment wasn’t enough. I clicked on his username, “mitchthepainter,” clicked the “send message” link, titled my message “Fairies in Seattle.” What ensued was a message I’d rather not repeat in its entirety. A brief preamble about my recent discovery of the fairies. My name, phone number, and (just in case) my rough schedule. I puzzled over a way to convey that I was also a single gay man without coming on too strong, or presuming that that would matter to him and/or had anything to do with why I was messaging him, or whatever. I settled on (and I don’t know why the hell I thought this made any sense at the time), “With PRIDE, Ron.” What did I tell you? That wasn’t even the worst of it.
I fell asleep on the couch, with my clothes on.
• • •
Aside from some fairies sitting in a campfire-esque circle next to my keyboard at work, as well as a dreadful honey-whiskey hangover, it was as if the previous night had been a dream. The waking up in my rumpled clothes, on my couch. The dead phone, its alarm failing to wake me up in time for work. The text to my boss when I recharged it—“Running behind, family crisis kept me up really late, so so so sorry”—and that sluggish scramble to get ready for work as quickly as possible without upsetting my mammoth of a headache. I’d stayed up until god knows when because I thought my life might change, what with this fairy nonsense, this discovery that there actually was something special and different about me and that there were others out there, others who understood and who were therefore connected with me, inextricably, by this shared fact. But when I woke up that morning, everything was still the same—I was still alone, and I was no closer to being any less so, except that I’d messaged somebody on Reddit who’d probably never read my message to him, and if he did, who cared? It wouldn’t change anything.
I got to work two hours late and avoided Janet’s eyes when I walked past her desk.
“All work and no play, huh?” she shot at my back like a poisoned dart. “Blame it on the fairies, Ronnie?”
I droned through data all morning. Chugged bottle after bottle of water and excused myself to the bathroom every twenty minutes and watched my acid yellow piss progress to clearer and clearer shades. I tried to convince myself that my headache was improving, that I was feeling better.
My phone buzzed while I ate lunch at the tavern down the street. It happened just as I bit into one of those “hangover cure” burgers with the over-easy egg on top, and all I thought was, What now? Then, the unfamiliar area code, the text: “Hey, this is Mitchell from Reddit.” I froze, phone in one hand, burger in the other. Egg yolk dripped onto the plate and made a yellow puddle. Promptly, two red fairies hopped onto my plate and began to roll around in the fallen yolk.
It took me the entirety of lunch to respond. I took bites of my messy burger, alternating between ravenous hunger, hangover nausea, and of course anxiety over what to say to Mitchell. Yesterday, un-hungover, I would’ve marveled at the fairies glowing inside the bottles of liquor that lined the shelves behind the bar, some twirling and flipping like showy little mermaids, some still and placid, floating in the alcohol like embryos. Now, I was glaring at them—they were far less charming after drinking heavily on a weeknight. How to reply to Mitchell? Cutting straight to “let’s meet up” might read a little desperate (we were meeting via the r/Fairy subreddit, not OKCupid, after all), but I was the worst at perpetuating text message small talk, always allowing conversations to fizzle out before getting to the big “when are you free?” moment. I felt sick. Was it the burger? It was probably the burger.
When I shuffled out of the tavern toward my office, the sun’s harsh whiteness mocked my headache. “Hi Mitchell,” I typed. “Ron here. How did you first notice them? What was it like? I feel like I have so many questions for you.”
That felt right. It implied “I have so many questions for you that it might require a date.” A date? I didn’t say it. Out loud.
When I sat back down at my desk, I read his infuriatingly noncommittal reply: “Ask away.” Okay, fair enough. So we were doing the dance. Did I detect a little coyness?
But then, he surprised me by sending another message, a long text:
“To answer your question, I was working on my master’s thesis, spending a lot of time in the studio and whatnot. Probably sleep deprived, not eating enough . . . But it was way different than any experiences with psychedelics . . . I felt really clear. I didn’t feel delirious or anything. But honestly, I had to keep painting in that moment. Art school fucks with you, you get so busy. Bombs could be going off and you’d basically take your canvas to the bomb shelter . . . You know? So then until I finished my thesis, they just faded into the background. It was only after I graduated that I really started to process it.”
If I wasn’t stunned by the double message, I was floored when he sent a third text after that one: “That was a lot, huh? Sorry, I’ve just never talked to anyone about this.”
I distracted myself from my Mitchell-anxiety by doing my actual work, and then I distracted myself from my work by entering his phone number into Facebook to find his profile (you used to be able to do that, you know, and in case you were wondering, he had one of those inscrutable profiles where all you can see is the profile pictures, and they’re all stills from obscure cartoons, close-ups of bugs, Karl Marx’s face covered in the rainbow flag, etc. But the rainbow flag was promising?). Myriad fairies sat watching me from atop my desk, the rim of my cubicle, the edge of my computer monitor, my keyboard. They just sat, staring, like they were at a movie theater, minus tiny fairy popcorn. They all sat still except the ones on my computer keyboard, who dove out of the way when I went to type something but reclaimed their spots as soon as I lifted my hands.
I went for it. After sending my next two texts (and receiving five responses in return), I told him that we should probably really get together in person—that we had so much to talk about.
• • •
Mitchell was short, with clipped dark curls and a thick, well-kept beard that featured the occasional white hair. He was the only customer in the tiny “pop-up” coffee shop (a white-walled, minimally decorated affair), sitting at one of the only two white Ikea tables. He must’ve known it was me looking nervously about, because he said my name, jumped up, and hugged me. At six feet, four inches, I tower over most people as it is, but Mitchell’s cheek pressed just under my left nipple when he hugged me, which suggested he was definitely below average height. It was an odd choice on his part, hugging me, but his body was warm and his embrace was enthusiastic and it was an overcast, cold March day outside, and goddammit, wasn’t it true that I hadn’t been touched in . . . how long? He pulled away. He sported a blue flannel shirt and genuinely worn-looking jeans (not those “distressed” jeans you pay a lot of money for). And, yes, when he turned to take his seat I did notice that the jeans, though loose-fitting, hugged a surprisingly meaty ass. God, how thirsty was I? I mean, it wasn’t even clear whether he was actually gay. Anyway, we weren’t on a date. We were just two guys meeting up to discuss the fact that we could see these tiny glowing fairies that the majority of the population couldn’t see.
