The World Walkers: Arian: Taithmarin: Stepping onto Taithmarin

[k_a_webb]

I should have stepped into English. Even though I’d chosen it I wasn’t enjoying the class due to the lecturer, but I wasn’t going to stop in the middle of the year no matter how unhappy I was. The one thing I’d never been was a quitter and I was going to stick with it, no matter how much I hated the woman I was learning from or the book we were reading – yet it was a choice that was taken away from me that day, when I went from the hallway in college to another hallway that looked like it was in a block of flats. When I think back to what happened I can’t help wondering why the door chose me. What made it think that I was the right person for Taithmarin? Especially as it took me such a long time to get used to the world I found myself on, but that’s me getting ahead of myself.

Like everyone else I turned to see if the door was still behind me, but it wasn’t. All I could see was a wall and I didn’t know what I should do next. A part of me, I admit, wanted to start crying. Ignoring that urge was harder than it had been before, because I had no idea where I was, how I was going to get back, or how it had happened. Did I think of magic? No, magic was fantasy, and it didn’t matter how many books I read I didn’t believe it was possible for a magic door to drag me from Earth to another world. When I was eight I did dream of being able to go to one of the worlds I’d read about, but I was eight. That’s what eight year olds do. At twenty I wasn’t the same person.

At twenty I had people I really didn’t want to leave behind and I knew it wouldn’t have bothered me in the same way if I was a child. It never bothered anyone else when they stepped through a door onto another world. They didn’t stop to think about their parents, or their friends, or if they were ever going to get back home. Excitement overwhelmed all of that, because they knew they were having an Adventure, and that was too wonderful for them to wonder if they might be trapped on their new world. For me it was different. Of course I stopped to think of everyone I might never see again, from my grandparents to the man I thought might be relationship material, because I had a horrible feeling I never would get back.

Now I can’t imagine going back, but it took me a lot of time to get to that point. My guide stepped through the door at the other end of the hallway as I looked back in that direction, having accepted, mostly, that there was no door behind me that would take me back to the place I’d come from. He smiled at me, although it was a smile tinged with sadness, and it told me he remembered doing the very same thing when he stepped through the door himself. As our eyes met I could see the remembered pain within his, which made me wonder why he was doing something so masochistic as to put himself through it all again.

Mirrored from K. A. Webb Writing.

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