Sylvia could see nothing in the darkness, except a drawing on the wall, lying there inert. She walked up to it in the gloom, and as she looked at it closely, she recognized it instantly. It was a drawing she had made when she was a child.
Suddenly she found herself in the dining room of her house. Everything was already bright, the lamps illuminated even the flowered tablecloth on the table. She stood up suddenly and looked all around her: “What the hell is going on?” was the last thing she said before she appeared in another part of the house.
He was now on his bed, looking up at the ceiling. A book was being held by his left hand, exposing page thirty-four. She stared at it and noticed an underlined sentence, “Everything you ever loved will come back the day you least expect it.”
Sylvia was even more confused, closed the book, and lay in thoughtful mode, lying on her side. She closed her eyes and happy memories from her past came alive. They were good memories, but also painful ones.
When Sylvia was a child, she liked to lie on her father's lap while he read. He would tell her rather strange stories about distant worlds and characters with interesting lives. She listened to them and imagined those places, people, and situations with the limited mind of a child. She said nothing, for she always liked to listen to her father talk.
Then she remembered the last story her father told her. It had to do with a singing bird and the emperor of China. She remembered that two days after that, her father disappeared, leaving only a jet necklace on the porch.
Sylvia knew it was his, she felt it in the hollow of her chest. No one could find Sylvia's father, so the authorities closed the case. His wife said he had run away, but Sylvia never believed it.
From a child, she grew into an adult, still holding out hope that she would find her father again. She looked everywhere and assumed he was there, but they were only illusions of her hope.
Sylvia wanted to hate him for abandoning her. She cursed his image and the fact that he was her father, but the jet necklace she never took it off, for on the other hand Sylvia still held out hope.
“Damn hope and all those who suffer from it!” She would say every Monday before the start of the week. She wanted to hate it, but she couldn't, the memories kept her from being someone else.
The day things transformed, changed the color of the walls and objects. Sylvia was suddenly in a different part of the house. There was gloom emerging from the floor and covering everything, to show her other memories, painful memories when she was happy with her father by her side.
“No! What the hell is going on, why is he coming to my mind now, why could I never hate him, I want to loathe him, he didn't care he abandoned me! Why, damn it, why, why now?”
The jet necklace vibrated around her neck. The force that manipulated it ended up breaking it and the stones ended up scattered on the floor, then they sought to unify again as if attracted by a magnetic force.
Sylvia watched in amazement as they merged, thought she was dreaming, and was petrified. The stones created a glowing black sphere, which grew to a colossal size and was more significant than Sylvia, then exploded and a curtain of smoke flooded the atmosphere.
Sylvia was blinded, she felt suffocated and disoriented until a hand suddenly grabbed her arm. Sylvia wanted to scream, but the arm holding her revealed a body and a face she recognized instantly.
She cried as she had never cried before in her life. She hugged that person with the intention of not letting him go: it was her father, who had come back to her, but all this time he had always been by his daughter's side.
