I'm learning to breathe on my own...

Some people live in a house on a hill
And they wish they were someplace else
There's nobody there when the evening is still
Secrets with no one to tell

Sometimes Fred didn't understand the world.

For all her learnings and education and the hundred upon hundred of thoughts that seemed content to roost up in the recesses of her mind? For all she'd seen and done and loved and had the rules of the world rewrite themselves right in front of her? Because when she added up all the hurt and loss and blended it with self discovery -- all done with the simple energy of the shivers down her back and up her arms as all the ideas collided?

She still didn't get it.

Because all she knew was when she was lost in Pylea, she would have given almost anything to have someone -- something even -- to talk to that would actually talk back. More importantly, to listen with. The most complicated, wonderful amazing of dances that took two people and four ears and a whole lost of hearing and very little talking. Heck, even more than four ears. She'd learned since then not to judge.

But either way, it's amazing what got said then.

But she got back, and there was all this stuff. Cell phones and chat rooms and internet conferencing and voice mail and billboards and blogs and ...

Why wasn't anyone saying anything.

Why wasn't anyone sharing anything.

She didn't get it.

Her walls did though. Those four lovely walls, with all the room in the world. For her story and her fears and her life. It listened without any ears at all. It wanted to know about the her she was, not was, or was supposed to be. So.... many different Freds.

But only one her. One room.

And it was enough.


Home I have known
Have a ship where they sleep
With sounds of rocks on the coast
They sail over oceans five fathoms deep
They can't find what they want the most

They were, Fred knew, the most amazing people she would ever meet.

She knew that with absolute certainty. That even if she lived to a hundred, and traveled the world back and forth and back and forth again and need it a different way each time? Back and forth again just for the change in perspective and understanding? She'd never know anyone more special than the four people she worked and lived and loved with in that hotel.

And even as she left her room, let the walls go and felt herself becoming one of them. Not so much thinking that she'd wake up and be amazing too, but that maybe one day the next person that walked through the doors wouldn't look at them all and immediately sense she didn't belong? Even as she felt all that happening about her and in her, she knew.

That it wasn't ever easy, and it was almost always impossibly hard.

There's so much time consumed in helping others, until there's nothing at all left to help yourself. They stopped talking to each other. They stopped listening with each other. They stopped helping the people they valued the most.

Everything shattered.

And five seconds of loss hurt more than five years.

And even now
When I'm alone
I've always known
With you
I am home

Everyone's so worried about finding it.

Home.

Fred could always admit that she was. Maybe because she remembered what it felt like...

Like nothing else.

And some live in towns
Cardboard shack on concrete
All blustered, and bustling life
They search for the color
You can never quite see
Cause it's all white on white

White on white and glass on glass and body next to body with all the wrong pressed between, slipping into the cracks and into them, almost always to distracted to sense it. It was the stuff that didn't wash off at the end of the day. The stuff that started to make them less amazing.

All of them.

That's what that place was. The furthest from home, in the whole of the world. Worlds. And Fred had known more than one.

And even now
When I'm alone
I've always known
With you
I am home

Until it all upended itself again. The building and the sky and the time. Maybe, Fred thought, it's what it took to see, to really see. That sort of change in perspective. In a place that wasn't quite her own and quite what it was supposed to be and quite what was left behind she was able to be amazed again.

To be amazing again.

To be in love.

And even now
When I'm alone
I've always known
With you
I am home

Two times over.

For me it's a glimpse
And a smile on your face
A touch of your hands
An honest embrace

Stories don't have ends. Not the real ones, and not the ones in books either. Because even after the page is turned the characters are still there, in your head. Still moving and talking working through their problems. And you like that.

When they work the problem.

Because it's not worth anything of anything if they don't.

Your problems were ones you never could have dreamed of having. Not even in your wildest thoughts in your wildest times, which says a lot for a girl that one lived in a cave. But how does it all work, then? Really work?

Loving two men at once, when you'd never managed a life with one before without things falling apart. Men that will continue loving each other, long after you're gone.

Struggling to make a life that felt like yours, in days that never really felt like yours at all? It all started so suddenly. Who was to say it wouldn't stop that way as well? Certainly not the universe. It just didn't work that way. You knew, because you'd spent a lifetime studying one another.

And what about that home? The one from before that your remembered? That you were left once voluntarily, were taken from twice, and left a third time in the face of all that amazing? What about that home? With its two parents and one front door that was always open?

If it belonged to you, and you belonged to it? Well then, how did that girl belong in turn to two men, who were already married. Two men, already so good about loving one another. Saving the world was one thing, but deep down Fred had always thought it was always just a matter of time until she ended up back there. With a dress and a ring and a door that was always open of her own. How do you tell your folks you've let that go when you're so so sure you have.

More that --

As much as you valued it.

You valued other things more.

You loved them more.

For where I lay, it's you I keep
This changing world
And fall asleep
With you all I know is
I'm coming home
Coming home

No, stories don't don't have endings.

But they have pages. And people.

And that's when Fred learned that home wasn't where the heart was, or even in her own backyard waiting for three clicks to take her there.

It'd been inside her all along. Waiting, just waiting. For the right men and the right time and the right catalyst for all sorts of chemical reactions.

The single most beautiful, unexpected bit of amazing she'd ever known.

Tucked into arms that fir around her perfectly because she'd been born into them and made of them and loved by them. And she might've been a lot of things. She might've been Fred's walls or her memories or her door or just hers. The first thing that truly belonged to her, in the time, this new life. She might've even been home.

But she wasn't.

She was just Evie. only Evie.

She was.

Fred understood again.