63. Gremlins

I’m going to tell you a fairy story. Once upon a time there was a little girl who saw something. She happened upon a woman in a bath who was drinking a glass of wine and the woman’s expression said she saw it too but she carried on drinking her wine. The little girl knew she was going to die so she took what was most precious inside her and gave it to the Gremlins who lived in the hollow of roots beneath the trees that grew on steep cliffs behind her father’s house. And then the bad things happened to her, the things she had seen that would surely end her life, and a million pieces of her were split in a million ways, shattered and sent spinning and she put those pieces in a black box marked my first love and then she grew up. She forgot about the box. She forgot about the one precious piece of her she had saved and given to the Gremlins to keep safe. She forgot she had once been whole. Years went by. Voices in her head telling her she was s**t made her run. She left home and picked up speed. She tried every which way to outpace them but no matter how quick or how nimble, the voices chased after, grew louder, and she didn’t dare look behind her; she feared they’d grown into an army. If she stopped she would die so she blocked her ears and closed her eyes and ran faster. But one day, tired and exhausted by the fight to not see and not hear, she stopped. The Gremlin wobbled up to her, delivering its message. Not an army but a single round and hairy beast from her childhood who had lived in the hollow of roots behind her father’s house. She thought it was going to tell her how bad she was, how worthless and useless but instead, as it grew closer, she heard a different voice, and the voice said, Help. The Gremlin stood quiet as she reached inside it and there, trapped but alive, was the one precious part of her that she had forgotten. She held it to her chest. She felt it click into place. The Gremlin wobbled away and the million pieces of her that had been shattered and sent spinning came spinning back.

“Admiration, n. Our polite recognition of another’s resemblance to ourselves.” Eric Jarosinski