It’s hard to
remember her, in the greater context of her life, as the girl who was so
utterly lost in the world, flailing about to try and find her place in it. That’s really how all such lives are, in my
experience anyway. But that was Sia as
the events of this particular story begin.
Sia was at that time a young adult, which
in those times had become something of an albatross, neither prepared to take
on the big challenges expected to get ahead nor capable of asserting herself in
a world dominated by her elders. She’d
moved away from home and begun the series of petty employments that was to keep
her in her tenuous independent existence, and yet she would never have described
herself as happily settled, nor content in the life, which was why she began exploring
the parts of her past she was most curious about, her ancestry, and what she
supposed she would discover about herself along the way.
Being chronically short of funds, her
recourse was free search engines and all the pitfalls therein, the utter
vagaries of the results, the inability to refine them so that she might know
instantly whether she was absolutely correct in the findings or had been led
gloriously astray. She plugged in the names
she knew, the grandparents on both sides, and found her great-grandparents and
further beyond that, and she guided herself along these waters with a name she’d
heard her mother use, Duende, hoping that she might come across it, although
she had no idea how except through dumb luck, and in tracing the origins of the
name itself, hoped to bridge the gap between what she might find and the
desperation of her yearning.
Now, Sia was on the whole a resourceful
person, and wasn’t overly shy in the pursuit, so when she wanted to consult a
relative, her uncle, she did, and that was how she confirmed her mother’s tale,
that there was a Duende, that somewhere in the crossroads of her French and Scandinavian
pasts she might discover the name for herself.
She cross-referenced Viking raids, settlements, and what she had learned
in the genealogies, and that was where she discovered the gap. Right where she expected to find Duende. Whoever they were.
Which is to say, Sia found herself
stymied.
Which is to say, Sia grew frustrated.
It’s all well and good to have a goal and
a general understanding of one’s frustration with the cosmos, quite another to
find that there’s not going to be much more satisfaction in this pursuit than
in the rest of one’s life, and that was about the sum total of Sia’s existence
at this early stage. This happens to be
a story where there are much wider discoveries waiting around the corner, but
at the start it looks very much like anything else in the humdrum world, and
Sia herself mind-numbingly ordinary, if even that, and very much aware of it,
but also that she could imagine greater things than that, and the curse of
knowing it.
To top it all off, she was also quite
isolated. No one much to talk to about
all this, except maybe her mother, but, and Sia very much adored her mother,
this was never going to be a conversation that they could share. She yearned more than anything for someone
with whom such things were possible.
Instead, in the meantime, she stared at a
screen and hoped it might spontaneously give her the answers she sought. No such search engine was powerful enough to
deliver such magic. She appreciated the
age in which she lived, in which she could search the vast sum of human
knowledge as captured by the internet, or could stroll to a bookshelf and
discover anything not found therein, and how humiliatingly limited it still
was, and how all of that was somehow prone to mismanagement, mostly by the
everyday custodians known as mankind. Basically,
to be concise, all that knowledge reduced to petty insults expressed with a
poor grasp of the language (any of them).
She developed poor posture, not really
because of all this, or the metaphorical burden of her existence, but through
sheer existential angst, and possibly also from all the reading, both on her
phone and in books. She found herself
worrying, when she thought about it, what kind of image she presented. Her hair was straggly, not so much styled as
caught in desperate snatches. She was
always brushing it out of her eyes, a slightly gold color that had been
mistakenly described as brown throughout her life, or possibly they’d brightened. Anyway, she was always trying to relax. She took frequent naps, mostly to rest her
eyes. She wore thick glasses when she
didn’t have her contacts in, which was whenever she didn’t need her
contacts. She tried not to avoid the
contacts too much. She worried
constantly about her eyes, and basically everything else. That’s mainly why she spent so much time
investigating her ancestry, and why she needed to find something important
there.
It’s funny that we really don’t know what
lies ahead. It’s got to be strange
living a nonlinear life, when you know everything all at once. I guess I’ll have to look into it. Always kind of busy, though.
Sia plowed ahead with what she tried
valiantly to not consider a disappointing life.
She tended to use the library when she was online. She didn’t yet have unlimited internet on her
phone, so she used, and trusted in, the library’s wifi, and also the ability to
browse the books, the newspapers, the magazines, everything that had made as
tidy an order of her life as she’d ever managed.
The problem was that she couldn’t spend
her life reading. The rest of it still
had to happen, and the rest was invariably disappointing, and Sia was
absolutely aware she was chasing what was probably some fictional version of a
past that didn’t have anymore practical applications than adding to her own
knowledge, which she had so far utterly fail to convince the world at large as
having any real meaning.
Still, there had to be something there. “Duende.”
It had always sounded important.
She just had no idea how, except for vague family legend, something in
the remote and incredibly dim past. If history
didn’t record it, there wasn’t much meaning to it. Right?
She sat back, stretched her neck,
pretended it was irrevocably wrecked already, closed her eyes, and imagined.
Which was how she did her best work.
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