Despite living in the same house for 18 years, I still didn’t feel at home.

Back at the house, it was just mom and me. I wanted to go into art, but there was no way I would be allowed to. Art was what dad chose over his family.

I loved my mom, but I did not love my life — which was why when a blue-skinned man showed up in my dream, offering to take me to a better reality, I went with him.

He had a wanderer’s heart and a prison of a home — a free spirit trapped just like me — then he escaped, and created the Haven.

“Haven or Heaven,” he said, “it doesn’t matter, a rose by any other name, after all.” We were in Hulunbuir, Inner Mongolia. A different Inner Mongolia, of course, one where all the world’s a stage, and we were the puppet masters.

“So,” that first miraculous day, he asked me, “where do you want to go?”

“Everywhere,” I was hesitant, “but do we have time?”

His laugh spilled out like water. “Oh, we have all the time in the world.”

____________________________________________________________________________

We went to New York first. He snapped and there we were in the Met in front of priceless paintings. I worshipped the Miró’s, the Warhol’s, the Matisse’s. Then we had lunch at Le Bernardin. It was a three Michelin star restaurant, but he snapped, and we were led to a table. We didn’t pay.  

“Where next?” 

London came after. A snap and we were speeding down a street in a cab. We took a leisurely stroll down Baker Street. He snapped, and we were in a narrower street of cobblestone, horses neighing, the air reeking from the astringency of the gas lights. 

“Voilà, the Victorian Era.” 

It was a silent night, but then we heard the stamping of hooves, and out from a carriage jumped a man in a deerstalker. He nodded. “Evening, gentlemen.” My companion beamed, his blue complexion shadowed by a top hat. “Evening, Mr. Holmes.”

Then I got the hang of things, I started to take control, and we traveled the world, we traveled in time. I learnt painting from the Renaissance masters. Mona Lisa smiled at me. I thought saw that smile somewhere before, and not on the painting.

We danced through the statues of old in Rome, raced in Venetian gondolas, we went ice skating at the Rockefeller rink, the famed Christmas tree blinking red and gold. We counted down from ten in Times Square, and when “Happy New Year!” erupted, we melted into one. We were there in Candlestick Park where the Beatles last sang. 

We were in Berlin 1994 one day, dining to Strauss’s tunes, and it struck me I’ve never seen his home.

His expression broke into his signature smile. “You’re the first person to ask. We shall set sail on the Dawn Treader tomorrow, then, across the North Sea, the Celtic, and the Mediterranean.” 

“The Dawn Treader?” I asked, chuckling. “You’re a fan of Narnia?”

“It is my world, after all.”

I realised how I haven’t seen my world in an eternity.

____________________________________________________________________________

We anchored in Dubrovnik, Croatia. He led me through a maze of alleyways on a gentle slope, their walls lined with light brown, terracotta, and grey. The port disappeared from view, the palm trees becoming potted plants on windowsills, the ultramarine of the sea rising and melting away into the lighter azure of the sky, threaded with wisps of clouds. I look at the sky, then look at him, his white curls framing his blue skin, and I concluded he was nothing if not the son of the sky. Carefree, the opposite of me, who still woke up at night, weighed down by my mother’s face, crashing down when the high burnt off.

“We’re here,” my thoughts were broken as we walked in. It was an ordinary house: plain wallpaper, watercolour pictures, an old green sofa. I didn’t know what I was expecting, but not something this real. 

“This is your home?” For a man who lived so spectacular a life, it was hard to believe.

“It can be our home.” He poured me tea in a chipped mug, smiling toothily at me. I turned away from his burning, radiant smile. He filled the silence with a sigh.

“You are going to leave me someday, aren’t you.” It wasn’t a question. “Stay. We can live in the Buckingham, the Neuschwanstein, we can live anywhere — home is where my heart is, after all.”

“Can I see my mom tomorrow?”

“Today works just as well.” He raised his hand and snapped.

____________________________________________________________________________

My feet have walked down this street thousands of times. It was no sunny Croatian alley. I stared at the blades of grass breaking through the concrete, as we walked, and I didn’t have to look up to see we’ve arrived. I pressed the doorbell. A moment later, my mom walked out.

“You’re home early today, dear.”

“My guidance counsellor told me art was a great choice.”

She frowned. My shoulders loosened. She would always be the same.

We sat down at the kitchen table. She didn’t question the blue-skinned stranger in her house after a snap. 

“Now, dear,” the familiar tic in her jaw was there, “we’ve talked about this many times already—”

I snapped my fingers. “Mom, I want to go to art school.” 

“Of course, dear. I’ll support you no matter what you do.”

I ran out of the house, away from the ghost of her.

____________________________________________________________________________

He found me in the Hulunbuir. The grass and the sky and him were still the same, but I was changed. His smile was tired.

“Take me back, please!” His teeth flashed white and cold.

“I can make you forget everything. I can make you stay with me.”

I said nothing, stunned.
“Take you where? Do you even remember?” It may be his mind trick, but he was right. For the life of me, I couldn’t remember where I came from. It was on the tip of my tongue, like wine waiting to be poured. 

I tore into my memories, but I could not find it. The echoes of the past weeks crashed inside my mind, his smiles and our dances and the snow, and suddenly it was him from earlier today, saying a word over and over again, a glitch in a cassette. I knew my answer.

“Take me home.” 

This time, the upturn of his mouth was no longer cruel but defeated. “As you wish.” He snapped his fingers, and behind him was the door of my house.

I walked towards it, my movements sluggish as if I was underwater.

“You can never come back.” Desperation bled through his voice.

I said, slowly but earnestly, “I’m sorry that your home couldn’t be mine.” He snapped one last time.

    “That was a parting gift.” He tried to smile, but his pain bled through, raw and ugly. “Goodbye.”

    “Goodbye.” I turned the handle, opened the door, and then I looked back a final time, to only find him walking away, his silhouette illuminated by the bare sun of the grasslands. This was the memory of him that I burnt into my mind. 

I finally decoded his enigmatic smile: it was a smile of the triumphant and lonely. It was like Mona Lisa’s.

____________________________________________________________________________

I woke up in my bedroom to the morning after my dream — it seemed like one, for no time had passed, nor is there any indication of my journey besides the fatigue in my bones.

When I walked into the kitchen, I found my mother sitting there, her eyes haunted. Then, I was in her embrace. She wept and told me of her dream: that I was swept away to another world, that she’d lost me. I told her that she would never lose me. She told me that I could study anything if it meant that she wouldn’t lose me. I didn’t know how to comfort her because that dream was true.

This was his gift to me: even though I ruined his dream, he still gave me mine. 

____________________________________________________________________________

Years later, I was at an art auction. I found my home in art, but a tiny piece of him took roots in me, growing and growing until I was chock full with the flowers of missing him. Repeatedly I painted his blue silhouette: his head upturned in New York snow, his gait light on a seaside Croatian street, his face dark against a cold London night. The piece beside me was of him in the Hulunbuir, infinite against the brushstrokes of grass, crowned by a halo, his skin reflecting the sky.

I listened halfheartedly to the auction. A hundred thousand. Two hundred thousand. 

“Eight hundred thousand! Thank you, sir! At eight hundred thousand, going once, going twice, and—”

“Two million.” Heads turned to the voice at the back.

The bidder was a man wearing a Victorian tailcoat, a top hat, and a bright smile. In his hands was a bouquet of yellow flowers as sunny as his smile. I knew the flowers to be extinct since the 1st Century B.C.E.

His skin wasn’t blue, but I would recognize that smile from anywhere. 

This time, I would rip the loneliness from his Mona Lisa smile and fill the gap with promises of home, home, home.