Going home was a good idea indeed.

She went back to her apartment, a tiny one-bedroom apartment that she had lived in for a few years since the beginning of her grad school years.

Meeting her friends again, getting busy with helping Dad and Ellie plan their wedding—which they finally decided to be a garden wedding, not a beach wedding (too much wind and sand for Dad's liking) or a castle wedding (too expensive for Dad and Ellie's budget), and moving to California to start her new job as a developmental psychology research scholar at a prestigious university there were good for her.

She had decided to pause her MissCharLee activities until her move was completed.

Moving to California was hard for her though.

She ended her apartment lease, packed up her stuff, and planned some goodbye events with friends. She hated goodbyes. She really hated it.

Her tears fell on the last day of her stay at her apartment.

Why does a goodbye have to be so hard? she kept asking herself. "It's not the first time you have to say goodbye to those you love, silly girl," she whispered to herself that night as she squeezed the last box into her car. She would do the 8 hours drive to the California town where her new workplace was located. Her tiny Corolla packed to the brim with stuff she would need the first few weeks in California, and the rest would be sent by some friends through an interstate moving company.

Her new apartment in California was an old one-bedroom apartment located about fifteen minutes walk from her work. It was on the third floor with the kitchen window overlooking a small urban forest with rows of old oak trees across the grass lawn, it was not a great building but she would take whatever she could so as not to have to sleep on the street or on someone else's couch.

For a few days after her arrival and moving into her new place, she was just busy from sunrise till far into the night, cleaning up, unpacking, making her new place feel more like home to her.

All her hectic schedule and busy activities did help a lot in helping her feel more like herself again after her strange feelings and experience during her vacation period. Dad and Ellie's wedding date would be next year in the spring, and Charlotte had been involved in a lot of aspects of the planning, albeit from e-mail, chat messages, and videocalls.

That night after another day of unpacking and organizing and cleaning, Charlotte sat on her kitchen counter, eating spicy ramen straight from the saucepan, her eyes watched her fridge door where she had taped the various farewell-good luck cards she got from her friends and colleagues back home. One in particular caught her attention.

A small card from the secretary of the department where she earned her Ph.D from. Mrs. Bartlett, a kind middle-aged lady who was so efficient it was hard to believe she was a normal human. She gave Charlotte the card when she attended Charlotte's farewell BBQ party. A card, simple in its blue-gold colour, and in beautiful cursive letters, a sentence was written on it: "May You Find Love and Happiness Wherever You Are!"

May You Find Love ... for some reason, Charlotte felt blue when she read that. It was a good wish, a heartfelt wish for love for her. But she felt just ... sad.

"I don't think I'll ever find love ..." she started talking to herself, throwing the rest of her noodles and grabbing that one card from her fridge door. She read the sentence over and over again before taping the card back to the fridge door.

Then she went and just laid on her bed. A single bed that creaked whenever she moved. Her mind traveled back to the vacation time.

She missed the forest there, the gentle hills, but it just felt strange to her that even though she missed all those but she did not feel like she could go back. Like something that made her feel like she was not supposed to go back again.

So strange.

She closed her eyes, tried to rest her mind, though she ended up thinking about a list of things that she needed to get done before her first day of work began.

Her phone vibrated and rang, and she jumped out of bed to get it.

A videocall from Dad and Ellie about a potential problem with their catering choice.

That kept Charlotte busy for the next hour, to which she was thankful because quietness seemed to exacerbate her feeling of uneasiness, of missing something she was not sure what.

When the catering crisis was somewhat solved, she laid on bed again, trying to fall asleep.

Her muscles were sore and she was just plain tired, which helped her to actually fall asleep quickly enough.

And she had a dream.

A strange dream. Strange and it felt so real.

It was a dream about a man.

A man with such mesmerizing light blue eyes, pale skin, and raven-black, wavy, neck-length hair. There was a black tattoo in the shape of a jagged thick line that went from his left temple to his left jaw. His body towered two arm-lengths in front of her.

A silver necklace with a sun pendant dangled on his chest, the sun pendant glowed faintly, so faint was the glow that it was almost imperceptible.

They were standing face to face in a darkened room that smelled like rocks and molds.

"You ..." Charlotte could not remember his name.

"Charlotte, it is me," he answered in hoarse voice and Charlotte realized how tired he looked.

"Who are you?" Charlotte tried to step closer to him but it was like there was an invisible wall that prevented her to get closer to him.

"It is not important who I am. I have missed you, Charlotte. I am fighting hard to stay in the light. The thought of you help me to be strong, but it gets so much heavier to stay in the light now."

"What do you mean?" the shiver in her voice was obvious. "I don't understand."

"I am sorry, Charlotte. I am sorry if I fail. I want to see you one more time even though just in a dream like this."

"Tell me who you are!"

He shook his head with sadness in those blue eyes that pierced Charlotte's heart and shattered it to pieces.

It seemed like he was going to say something else, but no word came out of his mouth. He took a heavy sigh, turned around, and walked away ...

There were so many words swirling in Charlotte's mind at that point. Words she knew were important but she could not say them out loud because she was not sure what the exact words were. It was like she was going for an important mission with a list of words that could help her, and when she was actually in a critical moment of the mission, she knew there were words that could help her, but she could not remember the exact words.

"No, don't go—" was all she could muster to say.

The man kept walking away from her, head bowed down, and she shouted for him to stop walking.

He disappeared behind a thick mist that suddenly fell onto the room.

That was the end of the dream, and Charlotte shot up sitting down on the bed when she was awakened. Her breath was so fast she thought she was just running for kilometers.

"Who are you?" she whispered to herself in between her breaths.

She looked at the clock. 4AM.

There was no way she could fall back asleep, so she got up and decided to take a long shower.

The dream stayed with her. It kept getting replayed over and over again in her mind, and all she could remember was the man's sad eyes and sun pendant that glowed so faint it was almost imperceptible. The room where she met the man. It was made of rocks, she could gather as much. The smell of molds, of certain oldness. A castle?

She shook her head.

Today was her first day at work. Her new job. A research scholar of developmental psychology. Her research would deal with toddlers and their language development milestones. It would be so exciting to work with those little ones!

But her mind was too busy to remember the excitement now.

As water from the shower fell on her body, she tried to calm down. She counted her breaths, she imagined beautiful places, she struggled to relax her tensed up muscles.

Her mind tried to paint a clearer picture of the face of the man she saw in her dream.

He was handsome in a rugged way, the way he looked at her, beyond those sorrowful eyes, was almost sheepish.

Though there was something else that she felt when she saw the faintly-glowing sun pendant on that man's chest: Fear. Desperation. It was as if the light of that sun pendant was related to that man's struggle to stay in the light. Faint glow, harder to stay in the light. Why? What has happened to you? Who are you? Charlotte wondered.

She finished showering and just sitting on the floor in her living room. Her couch had not yet arrived. She made herself a cup of tea and peanut butter and jam sandwich. Taking deep breaths and the warm tea helped in further calming her down.

Then she thought of something. She rushed to a corner of her kitchen where a big carton had not been opened. She took a scissor and started opening the tape of the box, and when the box was open, she rummaged to find something inside.

She smiled when she found what she was looking for.

Her clown costume, and the oversized clown pointy shoes. She also grabbed a box with her clown makeup. It was all there.

MissCharLee would be back. Here. It would be good for her.