I had seen the shape of her in dreams for years before I saw her standing beside the window. That is the clean version of the story. The difficult version is that I cannot always tell where the dreams ended. I was nineteen, old enough to distrust my own certainty and young enough to think distrust would protect me from being surprised. I remember an ordinary Thursday. Laundry on a chair. Rain starting against the glass.
She was tall, although I have sometimes made her taller in drawings than I remember her being. Her hair was pale and long, with a weight to it that kept it from looking like light. She wore something white that folded at the shoulders. When she moved, the fabric revealed a woven pattern too fine for me to follow. There was nothing theatrical about the way she stood. She seemed concerned that I should have enough space.
I thought first of the door. She noticed before I moved. Very deliberately, she stepped further from it. That small courtesy has remained at the center of my account. Whatever else I later believed about her, I began with the observation that she understood I might want to leave. I asked who she was. The name came as a sound inside a larger feeling, something like a hand laid against a sun-warmed wall. Sael is the nearest spelling I have found.
Her eyes were gray, or gray-green, depending on how the light caught them. They did not glow. I write that because I once drew them glowing and disliked the picture immediately. It made her into a symbol instead of the person I remembered. Her face had an unfamiliar balance: a long upper cheek, a narrow jaw, eyebrows almost invisible in the window light. She looked tired. I had not expected that.
We stayed in silence for what felt like several minutes. I asked whether she had been there when I was little. A memory opened behind the question: the field, warm hands, an amber light lower than the others. I recoiled from it. She stopped at once. I do not know how to explain the stopping. The room simply became less crowded inside my head. I heard the rain again and realized I had been clenching a corner of my blanket.
I asked her to speak normally. She tried. The first words sounded careful and a little unfamiliar with the shape of my language. She said that remembering everything at once would not help me. I was angry at that. It sounded like the kind of explanation people give when they intend to keep making decisions for you. I told her so. She listened without defending herself. Then she said that I could decide what happened next.
Nothing happened next. We sat. She took the chair after I moved the laundry. The absurdity of folding a sweater in front of an extraterrestrial visitor made me laugh, a sharp nervous noise that embarrassed me. She seemed to understand the reason without sharing the joke. I asked whether she needed water. She looked at the glass on my desk for a long moment, then said no, thank you. I remember being relieved by the thank you.
Before she left, she looked at the drawing pinned above my desk. It was a ring with three incomplete circles beside it, something I had been making since school. She did not tell me it was a map or a message. She asked what it meant to me. I said I did not know. She replied that I did not have to decide yet. At the time that answer irritated me. Now I think it may have been the gentlest thing she could have said.
The next morning the chair was where I remembered it, but that proves nothing. I wrote the encounter down before breakfast and left spaces where I was uncertain. Over the following weeks, those spaces tempted me. It would have been easy to fill them with a better story. I have kept them open. There is a place beside the window where I remember another person waiting. For now, I am willing to begin with that.
Anna
