Stories

The sky threatens rain. There is a pre-ordained prick at the back of your eyes, threatening tears in light showers later. Or maybe sobs. It depends on the particular hormone mix. But you know some sort of precipitation will occur.

An aeroplane passes overhead with a noise like wind, and you wonder who there is on board; someone who might be starting an adventure, maybe.

A memory hits: someone running one word into another to form a third, nonsense word; a word that makes an impossible sense, and made you laugh once. But the muscles in your face are all set to down and no impulse, electrical or otherwise, can persuade them to change position.

You've stumbled on a truth defined by its absence. Life in its impossible colours and cadences stopped racing through your veins when you tripped over the obvious. Childhood is gone forever.

One week, reminding you of how it felt to be young and full of possibility, book-ended by weeks either side where you had a clear sense of adulthood having begun. Now, after all this time, it decides to begin in earnest with choices and desires finally embraced, in spite of (because of) their ferocity and rawness.

A truth that shocks you and strips you of your meaning for seconds that are ticking on into forever, with you rendered immobile.

You were always one step removed; the oblivious protagonist, backed by a Greek Chorus, pointing fingers and telling your story in their terms. People observing. People, with their hints and looks, their questions. Your story one part of a song-cycle: yours joined to theirs in ever expanding circles from a single point of disturbance. 'No harm done', you would have thought at the moment of impact. Had you thought or even realised what you were doing. You didn't think. You acted, oblivious to the Chorus' wail of observation behind you. Ever expanding ripples, an extended network of stories built and building around specific themes: pain, loss, betrayal; desire; Judas fulfilling his destiny; funerals, wakes, and flowers dancing in a breeze. Stories spreading out to a far distant horizon where the silent observers sit.

And you at the centre. Not paying attention, not considering that this is a pool, and was a still pool at that when the impact fell. Anything dropped (not just by you, by anyone) was bound to ripple out and out and never seemingly reach an end.

You were just unlucky, or unknowingly (unconsciously?) calculating. And there was an end, but you were one step removed, oblivious, until (as in a pantomime) you heard a voice from the outermost reaches yell, "Behind You!!"

You look, and you see, and the Chorus puts its collective hands in its mass of pockets and whistles as though there is nothing going on. Their chattering discourse on all things You drops to a hum, a murmur of contamination, seeping into your awareness. You look, and you see, on the far off horizon, a bank of observers waiting for the moment when their currency will be withdrawn and they will be allowed to join the fray, passing from hand to hand in exchange for goods and services. Bit players in the expanding story of You.

Here the truth, defined by its absence. That one voice, yelling from the remotest horizon its simple but effective word-pair, tells the truth. You are not alone in a secret world of your own construction. Your observers are drawing their own conclusions, and dropping them into a thousand different ponds to ripple out to other horizons you cannot even begin to comprehend. Ripples begetting ripples. One simple action that you thought was unobserved, the seam for all this mining. Motherlode of creativity and destruction.

So childhood is gone forever, and the spotlight's glare, that you now see is trained on you, will blind you if you do not move. The spotlight of performance and interrogation. That burning disc that focuses attention directly onto you. You look, and you see, that the beam is directed by you. Your choices and desires exposed for all to see by your own fair hand.

The Chorus asks of you two questions, both of which assume the answer 'No'.

Are you proud of yourself now?

Would you do it again?

You buck the trend, though. Answer 'Yes'.

Childhood not quite over yet.

© J R Hargreaves 2006