The Boy Named Fiction
“Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth” -Albert Camus
There is a boy at the end of time who wields words like weapons. If you ever feel lost and alone or like there is no point in going on, you should go and find him.
He will sit you down at his ever-burning campfire and teach you how to fight your foes.
It is said, that he has a way of weaving words into intricate nets that can catch the truth and assemble them into weapons to knock even the most vicious of nightmares to their knees.
He is said to have tamed grief, conquered shame and defied guilt. They say he even put an end to loneliness.
And though he looks human, with his freckles and his disheveled mop of hair, he is something else. If you spend some time with him you will find that he is far too wise for the age his childlike features suggest.
His eyes are a sea made up of millions of sparkling lights. If you ask him, he will tell you that they are what is left of thousands of lives well-lived, as well as the joyful anticipation of the millions yet to come.
All the trials and heartbreaks. All the first kisses and babies born. Laughing until you can’t breathe. The heart-wrenching realization that you will never see that one person ever again. Every disappointment. Every rejection. Every lonely winter evening. Every puppy cuddled and every epic movie anyone has ever enjoyed. Every human experience that ever was or ever will be. They are all there. Summed up in one blue-eyed boy.
He is the human condition made flesh. And when you cozy up to his fire, when he spins his stories, it will seem as if he has composed them only for you.
There won’t be a doubt in your mind that no other living human being could ever possibly fathom their true meaning. You finally feel understood. So you decide to stay awhile.
When you stay, you will meet other weary travelers. Exhausted and cold from their extensive journeys, they come to his campfire for shelter and guidance. Huddled close to the fire with freezing hands outstretched toward its warmth, they hang on the boys’ lips, devouring every word that leaves his mouth.
It is only then that you realize, that his stories are not just for you, but in fact for everyone who will listen. He weaves words into universal lullabies. If sung loud enough, they have the power to touch the souls of every living thing in the galaxy.
If you talk to the other lost people afterward you may find that even though you all listened to the same story, you all understood it differently. You understood them in a language native to your own mind.
You might not always grasp their meaning immediately. Perhaps you have to inquire after it. You can rest assured that all the others will have gotten lost in his elaborate tales at one point or another.
Not all his fables will mean something to you now and maybe they never will. And that is all right, you can enjoy the story for its own sake, nothing wrong with that.
Others, however, will fascinate and intrigue you. So you might find yourself brimming with curiosity at one tale in particular for no apparent reason. That is how you know there is something important there for you to learn.
For the most part, if you ask him for a specific story, he will be more than happy to tell it. After all, he loves nothing more than sharing his adventures.
However, if you ask him about how he defeated loneliness, he won’t give you a straight answer. ‘Oh, that’s a long story. It’s really boring actually, not that interesting at all’, excuse me for a while.” Disappearing behind some bushes, he leaves the group that has gathered alone to their confusion about his sudden change. Silence now filling the room he has left.
After a while, one of the strangers offers a tentative ‘This is a weird place. ey?’. Lots of nodding and affirmative grunts from the rest of the travelers.
‘So why do you think he won’t talk about it?’, someone asks. It’s a young woman with eyes so ancient and weary they transform her into a crone. Her cherry red lips curl into a nervous smile, eyes pinned to the ground.
‘I mean, he has been so talkative about everything else… It just seems weird don’t you think? What are we supposed to do until he comes back?’
This is followed by more grunting. This time it’s a non-descriptive ‘no idea, why don’t you tell us’, sort of grunt.
Five faces are now bathed by the comforting warmth of the fire, giving them the illusion of peacefulness. The conversation has ceased again. All five seem haunted by some invisible threat they are not willing to talk about…
‘I don’t even know why I came here.’, one of the strangers says, avoiding all eyes that jumped to him. Instead, he stares straight into the fire.
‘I was just so stressed at work and I heard this was a good place to relax. When I told some of my friends that I was gonna come here, they all laughed at me. They said it was a waste of time. They’re not really my friends though, more like acquaintances. To be honest with you I don’t even like them very much most of the time. But ever since my wife died last year…’, at that his eyes filled to the brim with tears.
After a pause, he went on: ‘She died of cancer, you know. All very quick. It was only ever us two. Us against the world. And now she is gone… We didn’t have a big family and we were never close to any of them. No kids either. So now it’s just me.. just me. I’m sorry, I don’t know why I’ telling you all this. I’m Malcolm by the way.’
‘Don’t worry about it’, the red-lipped girl said, the rest of the travelers nodding in agreement. ‘I understand what you are going through. Well, at least a little bit. My father died three months ago. He was the only person I had left. I know it’s not the same as losing a spouse but still, he was my only real friend in the entire universe.’
The red-lipped girl’s name was Sarah. She went on to tell us all about her father and how he had fought in the war for a long time and sometimes drank too much.
She also told us how he always decorated their house at Christmas with so many lights that it was common for neighbors to come over to ask them to take some down. The lights would be so bright that they illuminated the whole street, making it difficult to sleep at night. She told us he allegedly made the best hot chocolate on the entire planet, using a secret recipe. He got it from his grandmother who emigrated from some freezing cold foreign country a long time ago.
And when he was in a good mood, he would tell Sarah and her baby brother bedtime stories of epic lengths, often keeping them up long after midnight. Sarah admitted that she never felt more at home than when her dad was telling her stories. That was probably why she came to the campfire on that night. She yearned to feel his presence again.
After Sarah had finished other people started telling their own stories.
There was something about the fire that made everyone offer up their most private thoughts to the group. Maybe it was the comforting light that kept the darkness at bay. Maybe it was the fact that all of them had come here looking for something. Something they could not find elsewhere. There was a kinship between them. No one pretended to know all the answers. No one pretended to be someone else. They were a diverse group, yet there was an undeniable familiarity there.
So they sat, for hours and hours just talking, laughing and occasionally crying. A group of strangers had become a group of unlikely friends. All it took was complete honesty on the individual’s part for the group to meet and accept them with all-encompassing empathy and love.
After what seemed like an eternity to the friends, the boy came back from wherever he had been hiding. With his chest all puffed out, he proudly proclaimed: ‘See, that’s how I did it! And I did it again tonight!’, he beamed at them. The friends shared confused looks.
‘Sorry mate, how you did what?’, Malcolm asked.
‘Defeated loneliness of course!’, the boy exclaimed now obviously irritated at their slowness. When the group still looked at him with confusion written all over their foreheads, he let out an exasperated sigh and explained.
‘I had to leave to defeat it. See, I can keep it at bay with my stories but never defeat it. If I want to do that I have to leave, so my sister can come out. Her name is Honesty, she is kind of shy and doesn’t come out much. You probably didn’t even notice when she got here. She can be very stealthy.Loneliness is pretty afraid of her, though… She is the only one who can truly defeat loneliness, everything else is just a temporary fix.’
When they left that campfire, they left knowing that a group of former strangers had turned into a group of friends. And all that by being in the presence of complete honesty for one night. They left knowing they had formed special friendships that night. Friendships that were based on honesty and trust. And all of a sudden, the world felt a little less hostile.
We are not alone. We are exactly where we are supposed to be. At our core, we are akin to the eagle soaring through the heavens and the blue whale floating through the mysterious depths of the ocean. We share particles with our sun and all the stars in the night sky.
Every human you meet is equally as miraculous as you are. The chances of atoms making exactly that human are just as slim as they are for making you. So even though you might feel as if you are poles apart, remember you are all made of the same cosmic particles that make up everything and everyone around us.
And these humans we share our green-and-blue spaceship called earth with, are the only living beings out there, able to understand the human condition. So no, you are not alone. Even though it might feel that way sometimes.
The best way to experience the deeply rooted connection we have to each other and the rest of the universe is by honestly sharing our truth; By sitting next to a cozy fire that keeps the darkness away and tell our stories.
It is by craning our necks and taking in the vast canopy of glistening starlight above us that we realize: we are indeed at home here, on the only planet we can call home. Tucked away in our tiny corner of the milky way, in this impossibly infinite universe, we are home.
