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Eleanor sat at her desk and allowed herself to breath, just for a moment, to focus on the in and out of air entering and leaving her body, one of the few logical things about her that hadn’t changed with her life beyond her door to a world of Nonsense. It was grounding in a way that the dreaded real of the reality she currently lived in never could be.
There were days, weeks even, that she debating on allowing herself to dwell in Nonsense and Virtue entirely, to throw herself back into the fanciful in every part of her day to day world.
But it wasn’t fair to her students, at least not to all of them. Those who’d spent time in similar Nonsensical worlds would likely enjoy seeing the head of their school lose herself in such things, but the others, those from world more steeped in Logic would lose their faith in her, their trust that she could bend enough to comfort them too.
She’d built this school from the wealth her long lost family left behind, had devoted everything to it – she couldn’t let her students, the very reason for the school, feel that let down.
So, Eleanor depended on this: her very breath to remind her of that balance she had to achieve.
The school as an entity lent itself more to that Logic than it did to Nonsense. She couldn’t teach everything, could she? Of course not. No, unless more travelers returned to the school as adults, she’d need to continue employing those teachers from the mundane ranks of the towns beyond her property. And they, of course, would question a school that didn’t run on ‘normal’ predictable timelines, on real facts and figures and college prep subjects.
Eleanor had once thought she’d manage everything on her own, but that was just as much Nonsense as believing her mind could survive in the world that was Home to her now that she was an adult.
She remembered the last time she’d ventured there through her ever-open door, the one her students thought of with such misplaced envy. Her mind had raced with rhyme, and she’d found herself fraught with vertigo as her body fought against the sense that up and down and left and right had run all contrariwise and contradictory to the world her body had grown old in. A mature mind couldn’t cope with so much Nonsense, couldn’t measure what was by definition un-weighable.
And so her mind had rejected it, and she’d fallen back through her door to a blistering headache that had kept her confined to a darkened silent room for days with her traitorous door sitting just out of reach if not out of sight or mind.
No, her students didn’t realize what a torture having an open door could actually be.
Just as trying to run this place as a sole proprietor had been. She’d needed lists and schedules and lesson plans and delivery bills and cleaning crews and and and… Every detail set and certain of its perfectly logical position in the grand scheme of things. Every moment ticking along at a perfectly logical predictable pace: second, minute, hour, day, week, month, all in line one after another.
It had been sheer hell for a child of Nonsense, even one who’d aged past childhood.
Eleanor was… adapting, she thought, evolving into the role as best she could. Adaptation felt similar to nonsense in a way; after all, there were many a person even in this modern world who cried “foolishness” at the mere concept of evolution, never mind that some hand-me-down story about a garden and a pair of idiots in the nude with a snake and an apple should have been more properly Nonsensical. If she made herself believe that “adapting” was what she did instead of logically growing up, she could bear the weight of her routine a little easier.
Could pretend to be whole in front of her students, even when she felt like running screaming down the walls and up the bannisters just to prove she could, to dangle from the chandelier or juggle tea cups or climb and jump and just be her old Nonsensical self for a moment.
No, she had to keep herself buttoned up as best she could, especially in front of non-traveling adults, those poor folks so worried for their children’s wellbeing (in the best of parents) or else worried for their reputation’s sake with their oh so peculiar children (in the worst of parents). During those meetings, she found herself feeling more pinned in than ever, in starched shirt and jacket with stockings in just the right shade and terribly sensible low heeled shoes. Her hair all captured and tamed back in a bun at the base of her skull, tucked in so tightly she had to force herself to ignore the cries for freedom she could practically hear over the monotonous complaints of her new clients as they spoke of the child who might be her charge.
Those days she couldn’t bear to return to teaching after the adults removed themselves from her presence after deciding whether or not to trust her travelers to her. Eleanor would watch them leave from her spot on the front porch, waving once and only once if by chance they turned to look back at her, but few of them ever did. Then she’d let herself roam, down to the trees and around to the back door, peeking in classrooms and the kitchen, sneaking down the servant’s stair to the second floor and back up to the attic. Around and around again she’d go, taking a different direction at every corner she came to, allowing herself to be directionless and lackadaisical just for a day. Just for a day.
Then, the next morning, she’d wake to face another day, but usually it would be a week or month or more before another parent arrived, and she could take her advantage of their absence, letting herself have her one tiny Nonsensical rebellion against the world that had taken her back when Home refused her.
Her hair she let fall free or braided back, locks escaping hither and thither with no accounting for tidiness or propriety. Her jewelry was all so much scrap and shine, buttons and bobs salvaged from a rag bag paired with family heirlooms, both meaning as much to her as the other.
Eleanor’s clothes, as one former teacher told her with a terribly bitter sneer as he left the school for good, were the kind of garish color combinations that might leave a professional artist rendered blind. She paired acid green with daisy yellow one day, poinsettia red with pumpkin orange the next. Few item fit her properly, either pulling almost uncomfortably tight or hanging off her too-young frame like a garment meant for a giant instead of a mere woman.
The effect, she was always thrilled to note, was nothing if not Nonsensical.
And with each rigorously ridiculous sartorial choice, she found her breath coming easier, that predictable, Logical in-taking of air balanced by the Nonsense against her skin.
In and out. In and out.
She’d breathe as long as the universes, Home’s and here’s, allowed.