The Story of Hours

 

It’s funny, comparing who I used to be with who I am now. A boy afraid to commit, to grow, to choose any path beyond those delights and adventures of the moment. Wise beyond his years, some said. Yet not wise enough. It’s easy to be brave most of the time. A simple trick of perspective. Just don’t fear death. But not fearing death doesn’t necessarily mean a soul is enamoured with life. It can seem that way to an untrained eye. An adventurer; bold and brilliant. Like a second star in the firmament. Righteous, and straight on till morning. Skating along each glittering surface, leaping from world to world. Never investing beyond the briefest encounters. Hoping charm and imagination would be enough. Often, it was. Often, it still is. Especially among pixies, tinkers, and maidens of the sea. Eye to eye with pirates and wraiths, tomorrow is only a distant, hoped-for dream. Sometimes the morning ended in terror, spilled claret, and the evening came like a devastating shadow.

Is it still an adventure when you must bury your brothers on the shore? It wasn’t for a lack of care, you see. Never for a lack of love. But it’s easier to brace yourself against the terrors of an infinite dreaming by turning your back on boredom. Choosing to engage not at all with the banalities of the waking world. Growing up, paying taxes, the cruelties of realpolitik. Or even worse—the simple joys of ordinary consequence. No, I wasn’t enamoured enough with life for any of that. Better to be a flighted dreamer among dreams. Rebel, trickster. Architect. But things change, my friends. Never is such a long time. I thought I could halt such time. Suspend causality itself. If I was imaginative enough. But love often cracks the firmament and upends everything we thought we knew. Wolves, and the wending lanterns that steal their hearts. There’s a reason we howl at the moon. The silver sun of the night sky. We’re calling to the Keeper of Dreams. Moira, I call her. Angel of Hours and Fate. My angel, and my darling.

It makes me laugh when I think of how little we grasp of storytelling. How true our fictions have always been. Hear me, beloved ones. You share worlds with beings of paint and pages, celluloid and screen. A different order of reality, but no less true than our own. I once dismissed the waking world just as many of you dismiss the world of dreaming. Briefly entertaining, but worthy of no real regard. The joke’s on me, I suppose. I fell in love more than once, and the world of consequence came knocking. I could do nothing but commit to it. The wending lantern of All Saints still has this lost boy’s heart. Do I regret my time amidst the trees and chlorophyll, as a feathered native of the First Dreaming? Not at all. Time, even when suspended, defines us. It helps us measure ourselves. Our growth. The nuance and evolving depth of our love. And it’s the measure of our love that allows us to tell the most beautiful stories.