I step into the Imp King’s chamber. He lay asleep on the bed.

“Hello, my love,” I said. I came to the side of his bed.

“How ironic… How many times had I said to you, “If ever you are in a coma, I will sit by your side every day and take care of you. And here we are. Your Spiritual Coma… Your Conscious Awareness awake, but empty. Your Energy… I knew better now. That wasn’t your Energy.”

Your Essence.

“When I can speak the wishes I want in this world, and I know they all will come true as I bade them… When you know that Fiction does not exist, that this is just a story within the Abstract…”

I picked up your hand and kissed it gently. I held it the way you loved as you slept.

“When I can will whatever I want into being with Logical Code… I love you exactly as you desire and want me to love you. And I will myself into being the Woman of your Dreams. And I wish for all your Dreams and wishes to come true,” I say as I remember the wishes you spoke to me.

“All of your wishes, I grant to you, all you have ever dreamed, you shall have.”

I felt the words leave me and move into the air, pulling on the threads within. I felt them already at work.

I thought of my wishes and dreams. I thought of what I wanted.

I wanted my Love. I wanted the Essence that was matched to mine. I want the Essence that belongs to mine to come to me. I want the Essence who is mine to find me.

I want the Essence who is mine to awaken and remember me.

I released your hand and walked out of the room.

***

I walked down the hall. My legs growing weaker until the weight in my chest dropped me to the floor. I sobbed. Letting it all just pour out of me. The hate, the pain…

“Imagination.”

“Go away, Bergen.”

He sat himself down on the floor beside me. I shook violently under my sobs.

“Either he is my Love and he won’t come back, or he is not my Love and I have a stranger sitting in my bed… who I’ll have to reject if my True Love comes along… Or there is no love for me… And I don’t know which of these situations is mine!”

I cried. I cried until all of it came out of me.

I stopped. Quite suddenly.

“Laughter,” I whispered.

“Laughter?”

I was up on my feet, running back to his room.

All I had to do was say his name. If only I could remember his Name, I could say it and then Awaken him and release him.

I had been doing nothing these last few months but looking for his Name. I was looking at the Gods of Greece, Norse, and Ireland… But that is not where He and I came from.

For we came before all of that. He and I came from a Place outside of Time.

My Name was Imagination.

Before him, I never laughed. When he left, the laughter stopped, and all I did was cry. Every day, I cried where he had made me Laugh.

The Sun was made of his Laughter, which he made for me.

I burst into the room where my Imp King slept.

“Laughter!” I gasped. “Your Name is Laughter.”

Imagination and Laughter to light up the World in Play. My Imagination, which he lacked, to his Laughter which I lacked. I found your Name at last.

The Imp. The Pan. The Mischievous Devil. The Trickster. The Comedian.

Laughter.

I fell to your bedside and took up your hand.

“Your Name is Laughter,” I said.

Imagination and Laughter… Every time I laughed, I spoke your Name.

And he went away when, instead, he made me cry. … Now that is one thing Laughter cannot bear.

I kissed his hand. I kissed his brow. I left him there to sleep.

I walked back to the hall.

Bergen was there to greet me.

“We would figure it out,” he always said to me. With him, there always was hope. He and I, together, we could do anything.”

I looked at Bergen.

“That man will wake up,” I said. “He will remember me. He will tell me, “I just needed time to think.” I’ll nod and say, “Okay,” like no time at all had passed and then, “What Adventure shall we have today, My Love?”

And then we’ll play again in story and in Make-Believe in Dreams.