Arts and Crafts …Part 7 …Improbable Outcome

I could hear Stella's voice calling me from afar but I felt groggy and was struggling with brain fog.

I strained to make sense of what was happening to me and it took several minutes before the mist that was obscuring everything gradually began to clear.

I found myself lying on the floor looking up into Stella's worried face.

"Thank God, you're okay," she sighed as she pushed my damp hair back from my forehead. "You had me worried for a moment , Theo."

She helped me sit up and made me sit still while she fetched me a glass of water.

I gulped the cold liquid and felt my senses returning.

"I'm sorry, Theo," she sobbed, "I shouldn't have followed you but I didn't want to lose you."

"It's okay," I rasped, "you did the right thing. I couldn't have made it back without your help."

"Do you think you can stand up?" she asked.

I nodded, "I'm okay, just help me back downstairs to the couch."

Once again, she came alongside and dipped her shoulder so I could lean on her, and in that fashion we somehow managed to stumble back down to my front room.

I felt exhausted and knew she was desperate for an explanation, although I wasn't sure I could adequately provide one.

"You're probably wondering how we were able to go back to Blythe's time and to be farnk, I don't know myself how that works, I only know that it happened."

She shook her head slowly in amazement. "It makes absolutely no sense, Theo― the past is dead. What just happened is impossible."

I shrugged, "I agree, logically, it's absurd, yet there we were, back in the Roaring Twenties with Blythe Summer― and there I would have permanently remained if you hadn't followed and pulled me back."

"I'm still shaking with fear," she moaned. "How the hell could that occur? It just flies in the face of reason and common sense."

"I does," I smiled, "But it's obviously not a delusion because you were there too. Now you know what I was going through and why my plan to be with Blythe was not some hallucination."

"It's not some kind of delusion," she agreed, "but it's not a wholesome thing to experience either. We could have both been killed."

I grinned cynically, "We only were in danger because you recklessly decided to pursue me"

"I only came after you because I was concerned and yes, because I care about you, Theo--and I'd risk my life again to save you, if I had the same opportunity."

"Why would you do that, Stella, when I was obviously in love with another woman?"

"Because I think you're in love with a celluoid character of a woman long dead--I think you were desperate to connect and were running away from reality, endowing this woman you were contacting in a weird type of seance with the attributes of a real person--but her life has already been llived, and you can't connect with any part of what she became without you."

My head began to spin again, but not because I was experiencing vertigo--what Stella was saying made perfect sense and what I had been attempting to do seemed absurd when seen in the light of cold reason.

I felt my grasp on things was tenuous and my whole world was coming apart before my eyes with nothing to replace it.

My whole quest was mythical, not because I didn't go back in time, but because I did and what I was attempting to do was to alter the established facts of Blythe's history and try to insert myself in it.

I felt completely absurd and totally lost and had no idea where to go from here, or what world I could occupy going forward that would justify the time I spent pursuing this dream.