Chapter Text
All water is magical. That's the first thing to understand. And all bodies of water, from puddles to oceans, have played a huge role in the lives of all people, since the dawn of time. Rivers and seas first enabled people to travel long distances, and oceans allowed them to travel around the world. Travel connected people to one another. And water was the enabler of travel. That has always been a part of its magic.
Water is connected to people, as well. Water is the beginning of life, and people themselves are mostly water. The water calls out to people all the time, although not everyone listens. But any time you see a toddler run and jump in a puddle of water, you can be sure that the puddle was calling to them. "Come play with me!" it said, and they heard it and they came.
Water also transcends time, because all water drops everywhere are alike, and always have been. They are all connected, and connected from the beginning of time to the end of the universe. And not just connected to all of time, but connected to all possible times. Anything that is possible has been imagined by the water.
I haven't always heard the water calling, but I often responded to it just the same. I thought I was jumping into Landry pond because I wanted to go somewhere, but it was always the pond that had called me there. And the pond would decide where I needed to go, and send me there with a purpose.
At first my mother didn't understand. "Where have you been, Alice?" she would say. "And why are you…damp?" And I would come up with some excuse. But eventually she joined me and we often traveled together. Travel enabled by the water. Enabled by the pond.
We didn't realize that it had always been that way for us Landry's, or that other Landry's had heard the pond calling, too. And we didn't realize that all Landry's had also been called by the earth. But that's why the Landry's had always been farmers, and why we heard the call of the pond more than the call of the ocean. We were connected to the earth just as much as we were connected to the water, and we were at home on the land that held Landry Pond.
Even so, the magic of the water and the warmth of the land didn't rule my life, because music had always been my passion and my dream. I was blessed with a talent for playing music and singing, and that's what I wanted to spend my life doing. I began my musical journey as a young person, and focused on learning all I could through high school and college. My dad had wanted me to study something more practical, so when he finally accepted that I was going to pursue music no matter what he said, he made me promise to at least include some business courses in my studies. I went to music school in Boston in 2026. I toured Europe, performing with a group from school in 2028. I interned at a music PR firm in New York in 2030. And then I finally got my start with a group of my friends from college who were singing in small venues on the US east coast between New York and Boston.
Although that group didn't last long, my music started to get attention on my social media. I ended up working with a management company that wanted me to go on tour as an opening act for one of their other clients in 2032. That tour was a lot of fun and I learned a lot, but I was also starting to get more serious about writing my own songs. By 2034 I had enough material to put together an album and my management company hooked me up with a record label that wanted to publish it. To promote the album, a nationwide tour was organized and in 2035, at the age of 27, I sang on stages from New York to Toronto to Philadelphia to Chicago to St. Louis to Denver to Los Angeles and maybe some more that I don't remember right now. And while I was singing and flying from city to city, my album was rising on the charts. That was my "Water Rings" tour. It seemed like everyone knew the name "Alice Dhawan," and I was pretty much on top of the world.
During all of these years, I had spent the majority of my time in New York and Boston, but of course I also took time to visit my dad in Minneapolis and my mom and her family in Port Haven. On my Port Haven visits it seemed like I often heard the pond calling and for some reason or other would end up diving in. I would end up in this past era or that one, sometimes to a time and people I had seen before, and sometimes to world that was completely new to me. Or sometimes I would simply sit down on the soft grass at the edge of the water and talk to the pond, or listen to try to hear what it might want to tell me. A lot of my inspiration for the music I wrote would come to me on those days, and I would take out my phone and hum or sing the pond's revelations into it, recording them to be made into a proper composition at a later date.
But after the "Water Rings" tour, my luck just seemed to change. Expectations of me were higher, and a lot of people came into my life who seemed to be my friend but really weren't. I ended a relationship that I thought had meant a lot to me, and it left me with a bitterness that seemed to permeate everything I did. I couldn't write a line of music that didn't come out sounding angry. It was hard to complete anything, and the songs I did finish, I hated. The label was pressuring me to produce something quickly, but I wasn't ready. They couldn't wait, and moved on to another new, promising young voice.
I'm not one to get stuck in a spiral, so I reassessed myself and what I wanted. If I couldn't make my own music right now, then maybe I could focus on other people's music. I turned to a friend, a true friend, that I had met at the PR firm that publicized my album. After walking past all the curious looks from people wondering what a musical talent was doing trying to work on this side of the industry, I proved myself to them and began to build a career in music publicity. To me, it was actually similar work, trying to figure out how to make people feel something. Still a challenge, but I could keep it at a distance from my personal feelings.
Although it was demanding, my new career provided a certain stability that I found comforting. It kept me in the music world, which I wanted, but without as much focus on me, which I needed. I still kept writing music on my own time, but I kept it all for myself and didn't try to sell any of it. And mainly I concentrated on the job at hand, which allowed me to hear lots and lots of new music before anyone else, and required me to put the creative work of other artists as my first priority.
Months on the new job soon turned into years, and before I really thought about it I had racked up five years in the PR business. I was content with what I was doing, but I also knew that I missed performing music, and I felt that I had music within in me that I wanted to express. So, in 2041 I quit my day job and set my sights on restarting my performance career.
I found that people still remembered the name "Alice Dhawan" from when my music was popular a few years ago, so I did not have any trouble getting booked into small local venues. But people seemed to expect me to play the music I had been famous for, and the audience always seemed to go quiet when I started to play one of my newer songs. Regardless, I enjoyed performing, so I persevered and experimented with rewriting some of my newer music. I continued in that manner for about a year before I decided that I needed to rethink what I was doing and find a better path forward.
Near the end of 2042 I called my mom and asked if I could come back to Port Haven and stay with her for a while. I needed a change, or a return to my roots, or something that could restore my soul. I returned to Port Haven looking to start a new chapter in my life.