I am standing there.

At the foot of the stairs behind my office building. A slab of concrete bordered with mulch and the remains of last year's flowers. Beyond the empty flowerbed, a strip of carefully manicured Bermuda grass. Beyond that, another world begins. A picket fence of live oak trunks, a canopy of entangled greenery, deepening into darkness. 

A slight mist is falling. No, it's hovering.

I am smoking a cigarette. I started smoking again when my second daughter was born, four months ago. I've tried to quit about a dozen times since then. The smoke from the cigarette swirls outward in all directions, a fractal ballet.

A voice in my head says, "This smoke is the mystery that I am."

Looking at the neatly-trimmed edge of the forest, I can see a deer path. I've never seen it before. It recedes into the wood; after a few feet, it vanishes between the branches.

The voice says, "Come up the deer path. Come and see where it leads. That is also the mystery that I am."

Raindrops hang from the scoured branches of a crape myrtle tree. They depend from the fragile, bony branches like gray-white Christmas lights on an invisible string.

"Come and see."

Behind me, I can hear cars on the road, cell phones ringing, doors opening and closing. Before me, only silence.

In the grass there is a discarded Dr Pepper can; a candy bar wrapper a bit further on. On the concrete slab, a thin layer of graygreen algae has sprouted, making the best of a bad situation. I am on the border of something. Between what is real and what is Real. It is not a comfortable place to be.

I look down, and on my shirt there is a strange sort of insect; a winged thing, very ugly, I think. Not wanting to hurt it, I pick up my shirttail and blow on it gently. The thing doesn't move. I blow harder and it remains fast. It looks up at me as if to say, "Is that all you got?" I blow again, fiercely. Nothing. Unhappily, I flick the thing hard with my finger and it lands on the top of my shoe, dead. In death, it makes no sense. Its angles are misaligned and improper. I have to scrape it from my shoe.

The voice in my head says, "You are standing in a doorway. You have to make a move."

I look up the deer path. I want to follow it, but I know I won't. Not today. Still--I want to.

Turning back, my hands are shaking, literally shaking. This is not a dream or a fiction. This is real. Real hands, real shaking. I go inside, keeping my head down, not wanting to see anyone or speak to anyone. It is nearly an hour before I feel myself again.

"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.

"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."

"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"

"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time."

--The Velveteen Rabbit, by Margery Williams