Fairy Tales

We grow up listening to tall tales of places faraway, of long begotten times, of worlds that resemble ours yet are filled with such magical disbelief. We consume the make-believe, the stories of heroism, the romanticised romances, the happily-ever-after, the days after tomorrow.

And as children, we believe them we such fervour and poisonous curiosity. We make life to become fairy tales we've heard so often. We inhabit the make-belief, we role-play, stage stories in our heads. Life is fiction and the boundaries between the two bleed into each other. For the child, the real and the imagined are one and the same.

But something happens, at some moment, in one ordinary morning like any other mornings. This morning brings with it a dawning realisation, one that falls not gently as a feather but crashes like concrete. We wake to realise all that we've come to believe are fables and fictions, none of which are real. We wake to recognise the world we live in is one which we will constantly seek to flee from. Because living painful. We wake to find that the animals have all gone, the harsh winter of a brutish reality blows in their place, into the empty house of imagination. We come to learn that Santa Claus isn't real, that the tooth fairy wouldn't visit tonight to claim the broken tooth hidden beneath the pillow. We come to realise Dreams aren't mystical, they're merely a consequence of physiological biochemical changes. Like any enlightenment, the knowledge that fairy tales have always been lies and will always be rips apart childlike innocence with grown-up soddenness.

Beneath the pillow the teeth will lie safely there. And so we are thrown into the cruel reality called life where there is no happily-ever-after.

We awake to the horror that death comes at the end of this oxymoronic life. We sit in quiet to hear the hypnotic lure of silence's hum. In the hum we hear space, nothingness, hollowness. In the hum we hear a reverberation of our own lives.

And so we create fictions fantastic, fairy tales more absurd, fantasies phantasmagoric to escape the defeaning silence of our lives. Because sometimes living a lie is easier than the face-to-face encounter with the hollow man that stands in the murky reflection.

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw.  Alas!
~ T.S. Eliot