death of a world

Sitting against the dried hard bark of the banyan… the leaves were still green then. And the stiff stillness of midday that coloured the white lilies dull red in our eyes because we were hot from running and we would have run more if we could.
“Imagine…” And that’s how it started. You told me to write them down. My fantasies of colour and emotion that I couldn’t quite make you understand.
So I did. But I wanted more. And my fantasy grew from two pages to ten… the nouns became larger and the adjectives increased… but I couldn’t stop because I had a book to fill.
And the story became a novel.
And I’d created a world. A child’s world… the handwriting loops of indecisive decoration and the characters those well-rounded figures from a child’s bedside story – the fat bald man, the pigtailed little girl in candyfloss pink and the dog who seemed to understand everything you said.
And the days were too short and the plot so detailed…. then once, or twice, the sequence led around a fairy garden only to double back and loose itself in a fisherman’s knot that wouldn’t let go. And neither would I.
Did I tire of those knots? I didn’t let it show. Instead of erasing the entire path I’d ease them out, little by little, leaving behind a trail of growing complications that I’d take in my stride.
And my handwriting became formed and my sentences shorter and more intelligible and my ideas more ambitious than ever before.
And eventually, like a musician with a new instrument, I let go of the last….
I forgot my world… and started another. And another. Till I couldn’t keep track of them all.
And you asked me why I didn’t show you what I’d written of the old story any more and I said because I can’t.
You told me once to put down the world I’d created. That’s what I like doing. Putting down my worlds… so that instead of being forgotten and lost in some unused corner of my memories that has clouded over with cobwebs and dust because I never visit it anymore, they would be forgotten and lost – old diaries scribbled over in an unsure hesitant handwriting – in some unused corner of my cupboards that would be clouded over with cobwebs and dust because I never visited it anymore.
Because that’s what I do. Create worlds. Story? I never bargained for a story. Neither did you.
But at some point of my own story I tired of the candyfloss and the red bulging eyes… the bold staccato of reds, yellows, blues and greens and yearned for cyclamen, hazel, azure and emerald. Because at some point that’s what everyone does.
So I gave up the red world and the yellow world and the pigtailed girl in candyfloss pink stood behind a cast iron boundary fence and sulked at me as I walked away…towards more knots.
And my world died. Because I didn’t want it anymore.
And a little girl sitting under a banyan, looking happily up at you, saying, “imagine a blue world…” was lost to the storms of complexities.