Once upon a time there lived an ordinary, almost unremarkable man. He had strange dreams: as if he just remembered that in fact he was from some amazing distant country, where he was loved and awaited. He wrote poetry about it when he went for walks in the swamps. From the childhood, when he was still cheerful and self-confident, for some reason, he loved these foggy places that smelled of wild rosemary.
He was told that at the age of four he fled into the swamp and nearly drowned. And when with his teenage friends they went on a bet as far as possible, it seemed to him that the heavens opened and his heart was ready to burst with happiness … When he returned, our hero changed a lot and felt lost, he did not know how to live on. Why, he did not understand.
He also wrote poetry about a beautiful, strong woman, whom he could easily imagine, and thought that he would fall in love with her, but every time he met someone like her, he seemed to find a best friend, almost a sister.
Once our hero met a famous hypnotist, who immediately told him that in a past life he was an elven prince. Everyone knows of course that the souls of elves migrate after death to humans.
One day the young prince followed his sister to the swamps separating the land of men and the land of elves. The prince was lost in the fog and no one saw him again. The princess called and looked for him, but to no avail. Now that princess has become the queen of the land of the elves.
Before leaving, the hypnotist presented our hero with an old elven book. The man cried all night, touching the yellowed pages. He thought he heard the strange sounds of the Elvish language. He looked at the faces and landscapes in the book, and at his childhood drawings, clumsily repeating the images, over and over again … Aparently, he spent his whole life dreaming of a completely different, but real world.
The man thought for a long time what to do. He had almost left for the land of the elves. More than anything, he wanted to hug his ex-sister and whisper in his newly discovered language: “I found you.” But will she recognize him, a human? Will he be able to breathe the air of that country at all? Is it true that swamps are impassable and deadly for both men and elves?
Having weighted everything, he threw his poems and drawings into a funeral pyre at the edge of the swamps. The elven prince died, drowned, he was no more. Finally, our hero was free, his own life lay before him like a blank sheet of paper. He turned his back on the misty swamps, inhaled the scent of wild rosemary for the last time, and walked towards the city.