Rose
Rose Brecht had an enchanted childhood, rendered even more so because she’d been born blessed with a vivid imagination.
Her mind made up worlds and stories, so complex and filled with detail that even the grown-ups had trouble telling them apart from reality some times.
Though they got her in trouble more often than she liked to admit, these worlds inside her mind felt very real to her, even though she couldn’t share them with anybody, not without being scolded.
Throughout her childhood this imaginary world shared the landscape of her mind with the real one, and she allocated equal importance to the two to the dismay of her family and friends.
When time came for her to go to college, she shocked her loved ones by choosing a discipline deeply grounded in science, replete with experiments, fact finding and extensive research, a choice they had difficulty believing at first, used as they were to her wild flights of fancy.
She had been very lucky to be selected for one of the research assistantships when the faculty got the grant to study the manuscript, a strange turn of events, really, since they rarely considered graduate students during their first year.
The second she laid eyes on the pages of the manuscript she was smitten. She lived and breathed its essence, poring over its every detail, and if somebody asked her why she wouldn’t have been able to tell them, but who spends time questioning the unbridled enthusiasm of a twenty-year-old? Weren’t they all that way?
She had noticed the handwriting the second she saw it, but knew better than to comment about it, she could still remember the chiding she got in fourth grade, when she engaged the entire family in a wild goose chase to find a lost dog that only lived inside her imagination.
It surprised her that nobody else noticed how much the handwriting in the manuscript looked like her own, even disguised by the ancient calligraphy flourishes of a different century.
She didn’t think twice about internalizing the crazy belief that she must have penned that manuscript herself somehow, in a different life, maybe, or during a trip back in time, or through some other equally unlikely feat, and welcomed this crazy belief as a core truth of that other life of hers that she lived inside her head and shared with no one.
Her real life dedication to the project didn’t pass unnoticed, however, and it endeared her to the library custodian and to the members of the research team in a way that facilitated her analysis and fact finding in significant ways.
She was holding the last page of the manuscript in her lap, lost in the secret world she and it shared, absentmindedly touching the old paper with the tips of her fingers trying to remember its familiar texture, and half listening to the conversation in the background, which ran over details about the next step of the project, travel plans and grant requests, when she was interrupted from her blissful reverie by an irate uttering of her name.
“ROSE!”
She startled, almost dropping the papers, confused over the reason for this unexpected rebuke, whose severity immediately relegated her to a childlike state.
“Are you handling those documents without gloves? Do you have any idea what the perspiration and oils on your fingers will do to that old paper? If the custodian sees you, we’ll never get access to a manuscript again, it was a miracle they even allowed us to see this one, the library wasn’t keen on sharing papers from the private collection!”
Rose blushed to the roots of her hair, mortified by the public dressing down, and started looking for her archival gloves in a panic, while her eyes welled up with tears.
She tried to hold them back, of course, but she wasn’t able to do so before a heavy teardrop reached the bottom of the paper and left a permanent stain next to the rose seal, despite her desperate attempts to wipe it off before the thirsty paper absorbed it like a sponge.
She froze, dismayed and staring in disbelief at the round dot whose fuzzy edges kept spreading out until they reached the edge of the seal and smudged the ink.
She contemplated the slow moving disaster her dream career would become after defacing a priceless old artifact in her care, if the word career could still apply to whatever the future had in hold for her now.
“What are you doing?” her professor walked towards her, aggravated that she still didn’t have her gloves on.
He looked over her shoulder, to see what part of the document was at a risk of getting damaged and commented irritated that the paper had already sustained water damage, even though not as extensive as some of the others, and any exposure to other contaminants would only hasten the erosion of the seal.
Rose breathed out very very slowly, careful not to reveal the wild pounding of her heart, which she could feel in her throat and hear in her ears, just as she could feel her cheeks burn and reach a deep shade of rose and her eyes turn glassy from the rush of blood that went to her head.
The tear stain had stopped spreading, and the way it overlapped part of the seal made it look like a weird Venn diagram for the meeting of two worlds.
What a strange thing, she thought, that this teardrop seemed to have always been there, it contributed, somehow, to the uniqueness of the document and it belonged to it now, just like the darkening of the text from the previous pages, or the optical illusion of the roses.
