A blank page has no history. It’s face is unmarked by any scars of life…it’s limits not yet defined. And then, the words spill over…slowly marring the emptiness, it’s snow-like clarity and the silence is no more. One bare neat page, before a life claims it for it’s own.

If only, our own lives could go back and reach that point – that first moment of absolute beginning…before words gained form… the scars came…before something broke within.

Where does one begin...at what point in time? Most mothers mark the moment of their child’s first steps...those first faltering words...the first smile of recognition. But what of that first moment you realized you were no longer a child… when the first tear of real personal grief broke through...when the first illusion crumbled? There ought to be a record of these firsts somewhere...those little disappointments, hurts and losses unaccounted for...the subtle changes beneath the physical ones. When that ‘happily ever after’ promised at the end of each fairy tale, turns out to be….well, just another lie.

Yes, they lie about Life. Little fairy tales that they feed us bit by bit. Of frogs changing to princes…of kisses of life that erase death…of evil spells broken and love found after all. The endings are always good, happy ones: Unions, victories, forgiveness, happiness that lasts forever. All loss is restored; all pain as if it never was. There is never an anti-climax in this world of fairy tales; witches are banished, giants and dragons killed. No tear is ever shed for them…because…well, it’s a simple world, where only black and white exists. It’s only later, that the lines turn hazy…and it’s what lies between them that matters the most.

Simple stories all of them…innocently passed onto our children. Seemingly harmless when told, yet rooted in empty hopes and illusions. Why do we keep buying into them, this deliberate misleading into innocence, this willful evasion? Can we not face life as it is…without believing that a ‘miracle’ is always waiting to happen…that everything will be all right at the end? For the truth is, it hardly ever is. But were we to face this reality, it would stagger us with it’s steel like gleam; it would make bitter adults of all children.

And most of us are children still at heart…. at least a part of all of us is. The part that never wants to grow up…..that cries each time it has to…. that secretly wants to hold onto those ‘forevers’ and ‘happily ever afters’ despite all the times it was otherwise.

And maybe, in every human life, there is that one shining moment always….when life could not be more perfect…when feeling on top of the world, it does seem that happiness could last forever and nothing would ever change. Except, it always does.

Had I the heaven's embroidered cloths,

Enwrought with golden and silver light,


The blue and the dim and the dark cloths


Of night and light and the half-light,

I would spread the cloths under your feet:


But I, being poor, have only my dreams;


I have spread my dreams under your feet;


Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

William Butler Yeats