Fairies' Children
C.S. Lewis' story, 'The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe' seems now part of my own life story. I lived inside that book as a child, as much as I lived in 'The Faraway Tree' which grew in my friend JJ's garden. Violet, who looked after us sometimes, had shown JJ and me the fairy-toadstool-rings 'up Green Hill' and she'd told us where we'd see fairies dancing when the moon was full. JJ and I were not surprised when we came across hidden doors to secret passages amongst the talking trees of the seasons' days and nights. Magic was part of our expectation.
The dancing toys keep still by day but I travel backwards and forwards through time at night. In a weekly recurring dream, in an attic room I have found by surprise there is a magic door to wherever I want to be. I still believe in magic. I just don't know where the lines are between the real and the imaginary, and I am not certain which came first. There's something just beyond the edge of oblivion, taunting me. My rational ordered self is at war with an inner sprite that would fly through the window with Tinker Bell and jump out of a simmering pan into the Never-Never hot-pot, given the slightest provocation.
My mother used to whisper about the 'fairies' children'. I knew she didn't think I was one. They were as if 'other-worldly' and could not be shaped, as I had been, to take account of rules. They weren't rebellious or awkward, as I had always been; they didn't deliberately question the status quo in a bid for a form of individualism, as I had always done and they didn't do things just to be awkward like me, my mother said. The fairies' children were simply unfazed by the normal rules of engagement. They were, my mother explained, 'in a world of their own'. They lived just beyond reach of anything like the crippling interior critics that mediate between me and my ordinary life. I envied these gifted people who seemed exempt from my mother's rules.
The noise in my head rattles on.
I didn't get it at first. If I had, I would have been certain it wouldn't have made a difference, as if all difference were negative. I wouldn't have recognised the benefits; it would take me months to recognise his gifts. I was too nervous. Self-conscious. I couldn't have thought of it in terms of life clearing, not at first. I was not listening closely.
I thought he was just using the term loosely; fashionably as a form of shorthand to justify a form of non-conformity. I paid slight lip service to the labels that he gave himself but I also raised a number of 'yes buts', which actually he addressed one by one and very patiently. He talks 'factually' but yet is at once the most sensitive and rationally-empathic man I have ever met. I discovered a way to be utterly at peace with him when we were on our own. A miracle. He seemed to understand me and as we ticked through each other’s past wounds, one by one, he asked for nothing. I was bewitched.
It was good. Very good. Life-affirming-good. Healing-good.
But I doubted he was even real. I'd probably made most of him up, as he must have done me, and besides, he was suggestible. I didn't want to feel I had any form of power over him - dreading that he might make a form of change in the hope of committing me to some form of contract. They tell me the single are stuck in their ways and that they like it like that. It was likely we were each experiencing a totally different and equally real 'enchantment' that neither of us had felt before but I couldn't work it out. Neither of us could. It was a magical bird that soared and defied definition.
As my interior script-writers crashed the system with analytical arguments forwarded from diverse points of view, I imploded. I found myself 'on the edge' when we were out with others. I didn't like the way my waking self saw me in daylight. I felt I was living a double life: one when we were together, one when we were apart; one by night and one by day; one on show and one in my head; one that was magical, one that was not; one in a bubble and one in real life.
I could see that magical thinking alone saves him, perhaps many, possibly even me, moment by moment, from slipping through the grid of life's credits and debits. A fairy's child really does live just on the very edge of those systems you need to have some connection to if you hope to have some grasp of what's going on, and survive. Fairies are perpetually juggling and on the move.
Divine-incarnates, fairies live just beyond the curtain that divides the ordered self from the physical in a thundering spiritual-body. His love is made of rocks and ore, salt and granite, minerals and tidal seas which break on shores at dawn. The fairies' children are reborn over and over again, every day anew like this.
There are a hundred forms of and names for Love and if this between us was as raw and as real as it was, which it was, they ask, 'then why is it over?' and I can't answer that easily. My mother was probably right to point out, I am no Fairy's child and neither can I live on crested waves breaking on shores at dawn since I am made of air and bound by the material. I might lay the blame fairly and squarely on 'incompatibility' or I might ‘make like the sage’ and intone wisdom about not pushing rivers.
Late love poses challenges to lovers, each bound to their own collocations of roles, each related part bringing with it its own set of expectations of life's final Acts. We might, quite naturally in another life, have equalised our differences. We might have found the means to live in each other's orbit, but we could not effect such a magical transformation in this life without each of us making compromises so great that they were equally detrimental to us both. And what would be left of magic then? What might be remaindered to us but love's vapours and a series of snatched, isolated acts of love, each framed by the hollowing gape of living separate lives?
When they ask 'what do you miss?' I know precisely what I grieve.
'I miss being adored,' I say. (I don't say, 'I miss soaring. I miss surfing waves. I miss feeling translucent, flying high and falling to earth in a heap.)
'We all turn into our mothers,' they note.
'Sorry?'
'Your mother. She liked all the attention too. Like you,' they explain.
A boundless and unchartered love, free of expectation, space, name or time, even at its end takes flight again and shows itself in strangers' faces, or bears down in the sweep of another's arm brushing across tight shoulders, since love salves suffering. Reality is unbounded, mucky, bloody and prone to flood. Pipes burst; ponds are stagnant and the grim reaper lurks round every corner, cracking arteries. Love comes with friends and furls its cloak around the back of the patient's chest to beat a steady time for just one more hour, waiting for you; and as the cloak unfurls, soft grey doves pillow skies high above the tough lad holding his just-born child.
Love, like water once the damn's unlocked, finds its own way home as do the fairies' children
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Love these explorations, Cherry . . .