Do you love your Art? What would you do for it? I am breathing art 24 hours a day. I am also a writer of fiction, in addition to my music. Here is just a snippet of something with which I am working. Whew. Ok, read on. Hope you enjoy.
The Gift
Little Merryl curled her small, tan knuckles around the scissor handles. She gripped a box corner in her tiny hand, wedging the other edge against her abdomen. She was wrinkling the already crinkled folds. He reached over and steadied her grasp. He was dark, much darker than Merryl, and gentle. He glowed tender blue eyes at her, an abnormality to his race. His breath caressed her sun kissed cheeks as he leaned in to assist. “This one isn’t wrapped with all your love” he scolded. “I don’t want to wrap, it takes too long” she whined up at him, batting smoky eyelashes over enormous black pupils. He was a wise man, beyond his years. So, he never taught little Merryl the way an adult teaches a child. He spoke to her as a peer, an equal.
“A gift is best when its purpose is to validate the receiver” he began, with almost rehearsed cadence. Merryl’s eyes lit up. She adored his words. Delicious, amazing, profound words. She lived for them.
“The gift speaks to its holder” he said, snatching the package out of her fingers and holding it on a platform.
“It says: ‘I see you, I know you are there.’
This message translates in volumes to the human soul.
Mommy’s soul is a little, screw-faced girl; tugging at your skirt.
She is crying out ‘look at me Merryl, see me! I am right here!’
You have looked down upon Mommy and embraced her soul, swooping her off of the ground and up to your level.” He reached down and picked Merryl up, holding her on his left side and the package on his right.
Hoisting her high above your head, you told her ‘I see you Mommy, there you are!’
“And that” he paused for effect, placing the package back into Merryl’s grasp.
“Is that, little lady. ” He set Merryl back on the earth to re wrap the package.
Merryl stored this lesson away in her brain. She intended on keeping its essence alive, by accessing this file for use on any giving occasion. Alas, it was one of many files that would lie dormant among the cobwebs of nursery rhymes, first kisses, and sandboxes. The time was a Christmas, some twenty odd years ago. This particular year was filed neatly away in Merryl’s memory banks. This was the season that the man had left her. She called him Anil, never daddy or father. He liked that. And so, this was how they spoke; two young adults, one more traveled and learned than the other. But each taught the other valuable lessons. And both played a critical role in rewarding the other for doing good, giving back. Little Merryl knew that, with big Anil by her side, she walked down the path to enlightenment. But something had happened. Anil wasn’t with her now. He hadn’t been since that fateful Christmas day. She didn’t call upon the memory file, but it was there, flashing a critical warning. “Wake up, Merryl” was its alert. If only she recognized the message.
Anil had told her so many things. “Never bleach your hair” he had instructed, over and over. He loved to see her shiny chocolate locks bounce about as she flitted from one thing to another. “It is you” he would reiterate. “Keep the kind way about you” he had urged her on another occasion. “The positive energy is perpetual; it will come back to you.”
It was silly to her now, as she thought of it, that she, a small poor child born of nothing thought of herself as extraordinary. At the time, he had her believing she was more than human, mystical, and supernatural. A bantam, curious creature, she would dash outside and fling herself flat to the front yard, in the grass. Still and quiet as a hunter, she would wait, pressing a runty but keen ear to the earth floor. There she hearkened the palpitation of her greatest grand mother. And in the belly of soil, below the knotty roots and dirt, she acquainted herself with a thread, a common link. This string traced a circle; the repetition of historical follies, great and small, that occurred within this worldly pendulum. She studied its criss crossed pattern in order to assume what might occur again. Here at the earth, with her miniscule stethoscope thrust deep in the hubris, she heard whispering desires at the hearts of men whose lively patterns mimicked those who tread this land, ions prior. Merryl eavesdropped on steps of the sweaty, round man who brought the packages, days before he came. She even attended to sounds of children boarding the January bus, long before the Christmas holiday was over. If there was a god, and Merryl was most certain there was, she was here, deep in the ground. And this was where Anil would find Merryl, often crying, as she recounted the evils men have done or would do again. On other occasions, she would be laughing, tickled to find how clever or kind a body could be. Anil would sit in the grass, stroking Merryl’s chestnut mane, waiting, untiringly, for her daily lesson to end. During these sessions, Merryl would often speak aloud, unmindful that she shared her knowledge with Anil. After, she would bolt upright, saturated with abstract droplets of data that boomeranged from one side of her cranium to the other. At these times, she was overwhelming, speaking with the presence of a historian, or world leader or Pulitzer winning scientist. And so, this was how they spoke, two young adults. She was merely eight years old but through these experiences, more traveled and learned.
How silly, she thought now. How nonsensical, to waste time on, to have believed in all of this. And what of the dangerous way Anil had indulged her?
“Imagine,” she thought, “just think of the damage reality might have caused if I had not figured things out so early on.” To Merryl it seemed so real at the time. But now she was sure it must have been her age, her creativity manifesting itself, or a combination thereof.
“Maybe it was best that Anil left” she reasoned.
“Look at me, I am a millionaire. I speak and millions listen. I am stronger now, I am in control.”
