There Are No Guards at the Borders of Faerie

There are no guards at the borders of Faerie. No one will ask for your passport, or if you have anything to declare. You won't have to take off your shoes, place your laptop in a separate container, and stand--arms raised--inside a scanner that bathes your whole body with millimeter-wave radiation, creating an image on a remote monitor of your naked body that has supposedly been anonymized to protect your privacy. Whether the purpose of your visit to Faerie is business or pleasure does not need to be revealed. You will not need to pay an entry fee. No one would have told your child she needed to wait for her mommy or daddy.

There are no signs on the borders of Faerie. No placard proclaims: Welcome to Faerie. Nothing warns: Now leaving the human world. No notice declares: You must be at least this tall to enter Faerie. There's no red circle with a diagonal line through the silhouette of a child. Nothing would have let your child know not to take one more step.

There are no maps of the borders of Faerie. It is not possible to draw a line in the sand between Faerie and any human land. Siri can't give you turn-by-turn directions to Faerie, and it's not on Google Earth. Even if you could hack your GPS to accept imaginary numbers for latitude and longitude, you wouldn't get anything from it except an endless repetition of Recalculating. There is no point to pinpointing possible locations based on news stories of mysterious sightings, of unexplained occurrences, or of missing children. You will never find the border of Faerie if you are looking for it.

There are no walls along the borders of Faerie. Neither barbed-wire nor chain-link fence lines the edge. Nobody ever promised to build a wall and make Faerie pay for it. No no-man's land filled with land mines separates the human world from Faerie. There are no entrance gates beneath the inscription Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate, for it is not those who enter who should abandon all hope.

There are no cares within the borders of Faerie. Nobody wants to click their heels together three times while saying "There's no place like home." No human tears dim the gleam of Faerie cities, be they alabaster or emerald. And your little girl definitely does not cry herself to sleep each night calling out for her mommy. You would no longer regret losing her, if you ever crossed the border yourself. But you would not care if you met her again, if you ever crossed the border yourself.

Fortunately for you--or not--there are no guards at the borders of Faerie.