Once there was this woman, she lived on my bedpost.  Well actually I don't suppose lived would be the proper term, but she stayed there.  Morning, noon, and night, there she was.  Sometimes she would be watching me, other times she would be all misty, like she was hardly there.  I always knew there was something a little odd about her.  Why else would she live on my bedpost?

In any case I heard her, well I thought it was her.  I still think it was.  Everyone else told me she wasn't really there.  No one else understood.  You had to look beyond her to see her, or out of the corner of your eye, you couldn't see her straight on.  She kept whispering at me.  Whisper, whisper, whisper.  I couldn't hear the words.  I kept trying to catch her looking at me but as soon as I looked at her she would disappear.  It's very hard to see something you can't really look at. 

It took me a very long time to understand you could only hear her if you weren't listening directly, the same as seeing her.  When I finally began to hear her she told me she needed help, needed to get out of the bedpost.  I tried to tell her I didn't know how to help her but I don't think she understood how to not-quite-listen either, not at first.  She learned though, and she told me to get her a wizard.  I asked her how it was I was supposed to do that.  (Can you believe she thought wizards were real?  Well I suppose I might too if I were stuck in a bedpost but I'll never know.)

It was soon after that that my parents decided I was too big for my baby bed and that I should get a new one.  By that time we not-quite-talked to each other quite a bit and I was devastated by the idea of her leaving me.  I think they were also glad to get rid of it because they didn't want me being unusual, all their other children had grown up just fine.  They couldn't think what was wrong with me. 

Despite my wishes they got rid of the bed and I soon began to fill the shape they expected of me.  When I thought about the lady in my bedpost I alternated between calling her a childish daydream and, as I got older, wondering if I was sane.  I dismissed all those thoughts but the dreams were harder, especially all the ones where I worried if the not-quite-there lady had gotten out. 

Then, after enough years had passed, I forgot entirely.  She even ceased to haunt my dreams.  Then one day I was going to class and I saw her.  Right out of the corner of my eye.  She was wearing the same robes; she had the same hair.  It jogged my memory back all those years to my early childhood immediately, but I swung my head around forgetting to not-quite-look and lost her in the crowd. 

All that week I saw her everywhere.  Every class I took, every time I ate, when I did my laundry and my homework, she was there, just out of sight, sometimes misty, sometimes not.  She began to haunt my dreams again and I could finally see and hear her perfectly. 

Apparently her knight in shining armor managed to find a wizard to reverse the spell that trapped her in the tree.  She explained that her knight's wizard had contrived a spell that would work until she managed to speak to me and tell me in her not-quite-there way that she was safe.  I haven't seen her again.