Treehouse

I'd been using the new augmented reality glasses for months of course, playing games and doing silly stuff. The home-buying app was the first serious use I'd found for them. After work I parked in a neighborhood I'd driven through a few times and just walked around, letting the app tell me about the sales history of each place and the odds the owner might be considering selling if the place wasn't actively on the market.

There weren't many properties hi-lighted in green, currently for sale. As I paused to snap a photo of a place I reluctantly labeled 'maybe' for want of something better, I noticed something flicker between it and the next property. I walked over for a better look, staring at the two patches of lawn that served as borders for these little suburban fiefdoms. There was nothing there but a couple notes about crabgrass and a bit of digital graffiti on the curb.

I was about to leave when I caught the flicker again. Was it just in my peripheral vision? I carefully turned my head until I could barely see the space out of the corner of my eye, then took a few steps onto the lawn, experimenting.

I almost fell on my ass when an electric-blue building leapt into sight, narrow but several stories tall, straddling the empty space between the two homes.  "Can't be real," I mumbled, peering over the AR lenses for a dose of good 'ol fashioned reality.  Stubbornly, the building persisted. Instead of stairs, a pink ladder led to the front door, which had been covered in a ransom-letter of sliced-up welcome mats.  The message was intact, but jarring.

Unsure why, I climbed the ladder and discovered it was impossible to knock on the door. The mats absorbed all sound, and there was no bell. I gave the door a push and it swung inwards easily with a middling-loud creak.  "Hello?"

"Come on in! The door means it. We promise."

I walked in and wound up in a tiny sitting room decorated like a 70's dinner party was imminent. Orange rug, wood paneled walls, a fuzzy couch that was probably dandelion-yellow at some point but now a faded twinkie-gold. An elf waved from the corner. A chubby shark boy wearing glasses and suspenders offered me a lemonade.

"Uhh. I might be lost."

"Quite the opposite, friend. If you're here, you're supposed to be." A gorgeous woman with a voice like Idris Elba's waved a reassuring hand a few inches from my face.

"Is this...a party?" I tried my best to contextualize what I was seeing, but these weren't just costumes. I kept peering over and through my lenses, but everyone looked the same either way. The only thing the lenses did was add some entertaining emojis.

"If it is, it's one that never stops. You're familiar with augmented reality, plainly," the woman said, gesturing at my lenses. "This is optimized reality. A bubble where everyone is their true self, for better or for worse."

I swallowed. Nudity would be less revealing than that. I gasped and looked down at myself, but saw just my jeans and windbreaker, nothing special. "Then am I just--"

The shark finished chewing on a piece of jerky and shook his head. "You'll need to steep here awhile before it takes effect. It's a consensual thing always, revealing yourself to everyone. If you don't feel ready, just step out. The door is always open to you."

My eyes and nose burned as tears tried to well up over that simple, unqualified acceptance, but cynicism dried them.  "What's the catch? A fee? Camshows or something?"

The elf slid off the twinkie-colored couch and seemed to flow across the floor. Walking doesn't do the movement they performed justice. "May I give you a hug? I think it's badly needed."

When I just wordlessly held out my arms, they folded their own around me, drawing me in towards their slender frame. I smelled wild growing things, scents that translated as 'green' in my mind in bold size 120 font letters, with subtler hints of polished nut hulls and a splash of...Dr. Pepper.  "They don't burn witches anymore. They just grow up packed so tightly together that the witches have room to bloom."

A black bubble of mental bile rose up inside me. Societal programming. Mass-produced snark, dismissing the elf as the very personification of 'hippie-dippiness' that was so very unfashionable in a world where free love and peace were sneered at as childish ideals. The adults had learned these things were impossible to achieve, and built a world that made sure of that.

The elf must have felt me stiffen.  "We know there's a staggering amount of work to do out there. Don't think about that now, and don't let it reel you back out the door. One day our reality will be everyone's." They held me tighter still.

I shook as I felt armor, masks, scabs and scars begin to soften in the bizarre little room. I could hear laughter from other floors, crying from some, even an unmistakably orgasmic moan.

"Will you share your gifts with us?"

The fact that they would even think my silly innermost desires, my deep-down desperate and dark-shrouded self would register to them as a gift they'd be privileged to see rather than something to be at *best* patient with or tolerant of, shook my tears loose.  They ran hot and fast as I stepped back from the elf and felt my skin match my soul for the first time in my life.

The way their eyes shone, the thrill in their voices as they called over friends, the laughter as I became part of the greatest in-joke in the universe: I've never been more broken and I've never been more whole.