There's a certain romance in knowing that there's one last train that can take you home, where your love lies waiting. But consider this, what if your love was not one, but many. As Zafon said in The Shadow of the Wind, there are worse prisons than words, and sometimes the prisons we build are the ones where we are busy with matters of consequence.
And if into this mixture, we introduce a child, what then? Let us consider this child. Pick up a pencil and make a Drawing No 1 for me please. Good, A box. Very good. I see the matters of consequence have not made their way into our relationship yet, and if we are lucky perhaps they never will.
So let me tell you about something today. Let me tell you what I saw in a child's eye the other day. I saw a tear, a tear of pain, for the child had lost its way. The child had wanted to reunite with a person, intending to befriend him, to recognize him again and having recognized him to acknowledge him. But this person, stuck in a loop regarding those infuriating matters of consequence did not even look up from his ledger.
Why do we forget we were children? Why do the adults in our lives make us doubt ourselves? Neurodivergence is a large word to speak of, but an easy word to understand in reality. When we are children, our curiosity makes us be able to befriend such big words, to sit with them and not be imprisoned by them. It is tragic that as we age, we change. We consider words prisons and we consider that there are worse prisons than words. There is a child to be comforted in all of us, if we could look up from our aeroplanes and understand that we are responsible for what we have tamed.
The thing about having a wounded child inside you is that the salve for that wound comes from places you'd least expect succour from. The child you once were may one day meet another such child, only this child he or she or they met may not have these matters of consequence bog them down. But was it easy for this person to remember how to be a child again? More often than not, it is one of the most difficult of journeys. There's so many things about ourselves we wish we could change- our clothes, our hair, parts of our body, the books we read, the people we love, who we wish more than anything will love us back.
Yet, all is not lost. Sometimes we meet children in the guise of adults. Children whom the inhabitant of Asteroid B-612 has visited and spoken to of roses, and in speaking to them of roses, reminded them that although there are many such flowers in the world, the fact that they gave time to one such flower is all that matters really in the grand scheme of things.
Every year, I turn older. Every year, for years on end, I read about the inhabitant of Asteroid B-612. It is because of The Little Prince that I have met my best friend, it is because of him that I have learnt that sometimes all it needs to free oneself from a prison is to look outside the window, to see children playing football in a park, or to pick up a harmonica and make music.
Maybe, just maybe, the matter of consequence is that the Prince has come back from his star and has brought you something you can tame? Maybe that landscape you go to when you are feeling lonely is no longer vacant? Maybe the face you see in the mirror wants you to know, that no matter what and no matter where there is always time to make a Drawing No 1 again.
A piece I wanted to write for a very, very, very long time. This pertains to the novella Exupery wrote called "The Little Prince", and it is a tribute to the people I have met because I read it, the people who remind me that a hat is a boa constrictor who has eaten an elephant. And to them, I just have this to say- thank you for taming me!
The Bilge Master
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