Where Time Goes
I imagine my days to be bedtime stories you wrestle your senses to stay awake for but always fail to do so. The kind of tales kids ask their grandparents to tell in a persuasively deep voice by the fire one too many times.
I’m not talking about how Frank the Zebra found his way back to his herd, but rather, a nomad besting the personified henchmen of envy, sloth, and wrath in pursuit of a kind of peace foreign to the world he belongs to.
But, what about the the stories that speak of the same man being humbled by his other wayward advisories? That of pride, greed, lust, and gluttony?
Or rather, what if the nameless hero decided against facing his demons, preferring a life of buoyant denial and seclusion.
Who are those stories told to? Are ears ever eager to listen to tales of evasion and failure?
Bedtime stories are supposed to be captivating and wondrous by nature, filled with loyal steeds who comprehend speech, princes and princesses, a sword that never wavers in its sharpness, a will that always seems to garner the power to push forward and prevail.
To that, I proclaim, every story, bedtime or otherwise, has a right to be told, and heard.
Even if those alleged stories never come to pass, their characters, protagonists or otherwise, deserve to reach at their respective conclusions.
There is contentment in, knowing that, in a fictionally sound world, completely divorced from the timeline that condemns us poor beings to own up to our own poor decisions, our overlooked choices and untaken paths, are, in fact, taken, treaded until they are completely littered with burdened steps and lessons learned.
My uncle, bless his patient soul, used to tell the most horrifyingly detailed bedtime stories whenever he’d visit, of a boy who unshackles himself from his bed to wander into a cemetery at midnight for curiosity’s sake.
The little man would usually be confronted with an obscure spirit of a pale-skinned, wild-haired woman, wearing a white gown, and would, later on, be chased around different sections of that harrowing place, often darker and more so, sinister.
And every time my uncle would visit and be persuaded to tell the same story - albeit begrudgingly, he’d make tiny adjustments and add details to the tale for the sake of teaching me a lesson about staying up late.
I never grew tired of listening to that story and its many variations, its redundancy was comforting in the fact that the ending was familiar, emboldening, and definitively concluding - rather than open-ended and lingering.
Even if my uncle never intended it, every year, I’d be a year older, but I’d still reflect my own self onto this fantasy boy. He garnered a breed of courage not seen often in a small secluded town like Al Ain.
I want to believe those extensions of our true selves, get the chance to experience those unrealized tales and watch them bear fruit - in abundance, perhaps - or deal with the consequences of them not, in a land far away, where time goes.
It’s bizarre, really, how you remember the start of all of them, but rarely the end of them all.
I often wonder if that boy ended up growing up inside that cemetery - and chased away that old hag for a change.
