Oh Dear!

When I was younger I worked in a factory. I worked in a factory that smelt like burning metal, aerosolized hydrolic fluid, sweat and dust. For ten hours a day, five days a week, I subjected my feet to the unyielding concrete in heavy steel-toed-boots. Whenever I came home, my limbs would scream in agony, my joints protested any movement that wasn't the soft sinking into my bed, and most of all my mind cracked like an egg every morning when I rose before the sun to haul my aching body back into the factory.

I don't recall how many years passed in that place. At first I know i must have been eager, excited even, at working in such a large, fascinating facility but, I'm almost ashamed to admit despite everything that was to come after that wonderful spring morning that changed my life, I cannot imagine this bright eyed woman. She is a stranger to me, lost somewhere amongst the days that faded into weeks that folded neatly into the years.

For all my life, I'd like to say I was a respectable and reserved young woman. Raised the daughter of a stoic English woman, I had the stiff upper lipped attitude that ran through my veins. It dominated my fathers rather free spirited American attitudes and demanded order within my inner being. My colleagues had come to know me as such a creature; calm, level-headed, and unwavering to a fault.

So it must have come as quiet the surprise when one spring day, in the middle of a rather intense week of production, this calm collected woman grabbed the floor managers clipboard from his thick fingers and broke it over her knee before grabbing as many tools as she could and began to fling them everywhere. A wrench went through a banner about positivity, a screwdriver found itself embedded into a computer monitor which gave a few sad flickers before dying, and a torso length crowbar had somehow become wedged in the rafters between two overhead cranes. All the while this mad-woman screamed. She screamed and screamed at everything and nothing, sometimes forming words and other times just guttural, primal sounds of bone deep frustration.

This young woman was promptly seen off the premises.

It took my fogged and battered brain awhile to really register what I'd done. Something deep within me had finally snapped at the repetitious monotony of the never ending work. The ceaseless putting together of parts, motions my hands and body knew how to do without any thought at all, thus the atrophy of my mind.

I didn't live too far from the factory, but in my confused state I wandered aimlessly into the nearby woods, trying not to cry like a child lost in a very big mall. What was I going to do? I had bills to pay, mouths to feed! I had worked at the factory for so long I wasn't entirely sure I'd be able to do anything else.

It was in this horror-dazed wandering that I stumbled into a small clearing where I found a very small creature sitting on a tree stump holding a porcelain teacup in its hands. I say creature, but it was more like a very small man who had an astonishing physique, with unsettlingly large eyes and a goatee, dressed in what looked like a tulip very fashionably tied around his waist.

We stared at each other for a very long time until the small man finally put the teacup down next to him and blinked in amazement, "wait, you can actually see me?"

The high pitched, airy voice was not what I had expected from the figure. In my dumb silence I could only nod.

"Oh, oh no. This isn't good. This isn't good at all." The figure floated up, with no wings, no gestures of anything, it was like some invisible hand had grabbed the scruff of his neck and gently placed him on his tiny feet.

I finally recovered the use of my voice enough to mumble, "w-why? Who-"

"Hush-shh!" The pacing figure waved a hand in my direction to quiet me. "We must work quickly and perhaps this can be salvaged."

"Wha-"

"Quick, follow me!"

The figure rose into the air and floated lazily into the brush, disappearing into the shadows of the forest. Unsure of what else to do, with nothing else to do besides go home and cry, I followed the creature. It floated as if on a lazy river, rotating this way and that way and snaking slowly through the air, but always moving forward. He would have look right at home in a rubber ring with a martini in his hand.

I cleared my throat, "e-excuse me, sir, but could you tell me if I'm going insane or not?"

"Insane? Pha!" The little figure threw up a hand, his voiced filled with disgust, "no dear girl, you're waking up!"

When it was clear I wasn't following, he rotated to look at me and fixed me with his stare. His eyes, I noticed, were a rather nice shade of orange that reminded me of pumpkins.

"You have been insane, for years in fact. It happens quiet a lot nowadays. Its really sad to see, quiet honestly. You humans seem to love getting yourselves into this little cycles where you try to catch your tail by going no where and doing nothing but the same thing you've always ever done. But now! Your whimsy left, and with that splitting of mind and soul, you woke up! That was a nice display in that horrid little place by the way. I really enjoyed watching that crowbar wedge itself into the ceiling, gave the pigeons on the other side quiet a fright."

The man broke off into a fit of giggles while I just wanted to melt into a puddle and stop existing. I could feel my highborn ancestors fainting at such a rageful display.

"My whimsy?"

"Yes girl, your whimsy! The thing that makes your life tick. Your heart want to keep beating and your mind looking for new things. If you can see me, then that means it's gone and we've got to find it."

"Who are you?"

"Me? Oh I'm nobody special, just the embodiment of your subconscious."

I walked, he floated, in silence for a few minutes before I asked, "I dont mean to be rude, but if your the embodiment of my subconscious then why do you look . . ."

"Like David Hasselhoff grew a goatee?"

"Yeah."

"I'm an amalgamation of all the shows you watched with your dad when you were a kid. A lot of baywatch, surprisingly."

I thought of my dad and grimaced, "not all that surprising, but that explains it."

The silence settled again, and seen the forest began to bend and warp around us. The colors changed like someone had jacked up the saturation on the world around us, and a distant a-rhythmic thundering began.

"Uh, subconscious? Whats happening?"

"You're waking up silly," the figures voice had gone from a high pitch to a low baritone. He turned towards me and half his face began to melt into colorful rivulets of rainbows. "Find your whimsy."

I stumbled back in shock, my foot caught on a tree root and I fell backwards. The forest floor rose up to catch me, but failed to stop my fall. I broke through the dense buildup of decaying leaves and grass into a void of darkness, surrounded only by the thunder.

And that's when I woke up on the floor of the factory. Turns out the crowbar hadn't been as wedge as everyone had thought and during some of the incoherent yelling it had come sailing back down with a vengeance. I'd woken up to a paramedic asking me what year it was.

I was later told I'd simply smiled, closed my eyes again and mumbled, "the year of whimsy" and promptly passed out again.

Needless to say I was fired on the spot and after an extensive hospital stay I was released into a world for which I had discovered a new passion. Something had shifted back into place when that crowbar had shattered my skull, something that was hungry to revive all the dreams I'd so easily given up on and pursue them all with a relentless hunger, no matter what.

I still think about my little subconscious every once in awhile, and sometimes, on my darker days when the world has begun to feel like the factory again, I see him out of the corner of my eye and I feel the strength to roll my sleeves up a little further and carry on.

I might not always be successful, but at least I'm having fun.