I heard audible sniffing and a choked gasp.
“Mi- Michael? Are you…are you alright?” I asked shocked.
“Yes. I’m sorry. It’s just, everything you said is what I’ve always thought and felt in my heart. I love that book and that movie and I have always related to Peter Pan because I felt like I never got to be a kid, a normal kid. All the things I long for now are so simple. What my heart, like, really desires is not stuff my millions can buy. It’s lost. It was stolen from me. No matter how hard I try to recapture it with my Neverland and my rides and arcade games, it’s not the same. A part of me is missing; because he stole it…Joseph took it and replaced it with my fame. And to hear you say those things…I’ve never met someone who ‘gets’ the story the same way! I feel like I am a kid, and I don’t ever wanna grow up. I want to prance around clouds and fly around the stars, fight pirates and run around with Indians…wouldn’t that be fun?” he said with excitement raging through his voice, replacing the sadness that had leaked through every chord of his voice as he spoke of Joseph stealing his childhood.
In these short moments, my heart had been torn apart at his words. Then my heart was stitched back together after he mentioned the clouds and the stars…the pirates and the Indians…but the prancing through the clouds…I leapt out of bed and walked towards the French doors leading me to the veranda. I sat on the loveseat, and gazed out at the jet-black sky, watching the Milky Way and the moon. If I looked hard and long enough, I could see the craters in the moon.
“That would be so fun. Michael, I have to tell you something. You know how you mentioned prancing through clouds? I saw us doing that, in my head, moments before you rang. When were leaping through the skies…and it was so pretty.” I said, watching the skies, and swinging back and forth in my loveseat. I had completely forgotten, due to the bizarre reality I had fell into, of Neverland and Michael’s love of Peter Pan, and I realised, as I waited for Michael to speak, that we had both bared parts of our soul to the other, over the phone, and we had only just met. It had only been hours since the concert and we were exposing ourselves…I wondered if it was because we seemed to connect and click, as I had with no one else, ever. Michael Jackson seemed like the least likely person to click with, yet perhaps a misfit and a highly misunderstood man, maybe it was not at all unlikely.
His moments of silence once again unnerved me.
“Michael?”
“I was seeing the same exact thing. This is the most unusual, strange night of my life, Lucy. We…we don’t know each other, we met once…on stage. Now we have talked, on the phone. That is it. It is as if I’ve known you forever, though. I hate sounding cliché. I trust you. I…I have to admit, I was intrigued by you. There’s something about you, I can’t place…can’t put my finger on. I like you so much.”
“I like you so much too.” I said, smiling and feeling so warmed by his words but also guilty because I was so ordinary yet extraordinary, as I was literally from another place and time. This was the catch, wasn’t it? This was the little snag, the mystery about me and the horrible doomed secret.
“This is completely out of character for me, you know. I don’t usually ring up fans and express these kinda things. People roll their eyes and think I’m being stupid when I complain about how hard it is to find someone. Someone to be mine. Someone to be my girl. They say, every girl in your 3.5 million person concert loves you but it’s just like friendships. How do I know if someone is my friend for who I am or for what I am? Same with relationships. It’s so hard. You’re a fan, too, yet all the other fans…are in love with what I am aren’t they? Or…well, that’s not fair. I know they love who I am too. I just had a hard time conceiving of choosing one…choosing who and why? And I wouldn’t want the one I chose to be always in awe of me, always idolising me. So it is so hard when you’re famous. Famous people are lonely. At least, I always am. Another thing…they…people say, you have all these fans, all your family, all your friends, so how can you been lonely? They don’t get it.” Michael said so quietly, so softly.
“They don’t understand that loneliness and being alone are two different things. You can be surrounded by people and be lonely. It is an awful feeling. I understand it very well.”
Michael asked me about my loneliness and I described how empty it was, sometimes. Sometimes I was alone, not lonely. Sometimes I yearned for company when other times I was with people, but lonely, because we were worlds apart and we were not the same. Michael and I talked about everything and anything and we both laughed so heartily, so readily, it burst from our souls like a joyful dance and glittered off into the skies, perhaps to sprinkle some dust into the creation of newborn fairies. I voiced this and Michael said he dreamed of it, so somewhere out there, in the infinite universe; it was true, since we had willed it. He told me, “Whatever can be imagined, is possible. To think it, to create it, gives it life.”
We both got so carried away that we had lost time. Time itself was a strange concept, especially to me, as I was caught in this time warp, but time wasn’t important. He asked me where I was and I told him I was gazing at the millions of stars, at the shining moon, on my loveseat and I asked him in turn. He said that ever since we had talked of laughter giving birth to fairies that he had been sitting on his window ledge, staring out into space, too. We were miles apart but I felt like he was here with me.
Time was irrelevant. All that mattered was his voice, his sweet voice. And my voice. And every single important and sometimes unimportant thing we talked about. We both realised that how you came to feel like you had known the other ‘forever’ was often because of the substance, and length of time, you talked to that person. You could discover aspects of a person in mere hours and you could learn more about that person in those hours than perhaps years. The sun was rising, and I heard birds chirping. I yawned.
“The suns rising, Lucy, the light of the day. Hey, Lucy means light, right?”
“Yeah. And Michael…Michael was the highest order of Angels. Archangel actually. Means ‘Like God.’”
“Aha. Although, I don’t like my middle name.”
Joseph. Yes. We had discussed Joseph in length and at times, I had been reduced to tears so severe I needed to sob, to gasp. I held the phone away so that Michael wouldn’t hear but the strange tone to his voice, shaky and odd, made me believe he heard. He cried, speaking of how he wanted to play with the children in the park and how his dad had beat them all up, standing their with a belt in his hand as he stood over them, whilst they practised performing. Michael didn’t want to look like that man, and Michael never did look like him. So I told him.
It was nice watching the sun glisten over the sleeping town. Today was Sunday so I could sleep in and not worry about dancing. I yawned and Michael laughed, saying that he was tired now too and that we should both sleep.
“I will call you soon and we can arrange to meet somewhere…sometime…soon. Is that, um, alright…with y-you?” Michael asked hesitantly.
“It’s more than alright. I’ll see you later, Michael.”
“Sleep well, Lucy. Even though I’m one to talk, please remember that there’s no need to feel lonely because we found each other and we, er, we connect, and I, well, I had better sleep now. I have dance rehearsals later.” He paused. “Oh, and Lucy?”
“Yeah?”
“Laugh as much as you can, so that millions of fairies are created.”
“Only if you do, too.”
“I promise.”
“I promise, too. Sweet dreams, Michael.” I said and paused. I hung up. I hoped he wouldn’t think me rude but I felt like there was nothing more to say. I looked at my watch. It read 6.04 am. We had talked all of those hours…about Peter Pan and loneliness, laughter and fairies, the universe, the stars and the moon, human nature and our joys and our sorrows, from our compassions to even our flaws. I learnt about Michael’s anger and how he sometimes gave in to anguish by swearing and breaking things. It was hard to imagine Michael in such a state. I had cried and I had laughed. It was important to laugh, not cry. It was important to smile, even when my heart was breaking. I missed my family, my friends, my world, yet I did not miss the anguish and pain that world brought me. I did not miss being ordinary. I did not miss being another stone, when I always wanted to be the special gem amongst the ordinary rocks…but now…now my heart was breaking for Michael. With his fame, came so much pain. I wished, as I crashed onto my bed, that Michael could have been a normal small child. I wished he was getting dirty in the mud with his friends, squirting each other with water pistols, playing in the park, riding his bike and falling off it. My heart cried for the fact that, as a boy, Michael never collapsed into fits of laughter so powerful that he could scarcely breathe with childhood friends. He never had childhood friends and I really, really wished he had.
I fell asleep as my head began spinning with too many thoughts and suddenly I had the wings of a fairy. Bright and glistening, red as the flames of a fire. I was soaring through the sky and was at total peace with everyone and everything, including the calm world beneath me.
