Once upon a time…
Once upon a time there was a very happy little boy. He spent his mornings hidden behind the door of his bedroom waiting for someone to come so he could jump out and shout “Boo!” He would get carried away, lose his balance and topple over at the slightest gust of wind. When he got up he would explain, “I fall down and go boom.” Immediately resuming the horseplay. This was so frequent a display that the second family nickname he was given was Boomer which stuck, and was what everyone called him until he was at least seven or eight years old. He spent the rest of his time reading, drawing, and dreaming of being a singer, a musician, a super hero, doing good in the world, and rescuing beautiful princesses from car accidents, helpless little creatures from trees and traps, and going up against the gigantic and impossible forces of evil in the world (and in outer space too.) He spent summers on Lummi island in the Puget Sound collecting unpressed bottle caps, trying all nine flavors of Crush, reading Mister Miracle, and the New Gods, and refused to take off his electric purple, short sleeved, zipper front, mock turtle neck.
From as far back as he could remember, and ever since as well, this little boy dreamt of a beautiful girl with mousy brown hair, maybe even a couple of freckles, who also liked cherry popsicles, singing out loud together, and laying quietly for hours just listening to music. Once, out of frustration he cut the photograph of the girl from the kool-aid package out of the package and put it into a frame and showed it to everyone, describing this girl as his true love, the very woman he would marry one day. He described her as pretty, tender, but strong and smart. The little boy could tell stories of all the amazing things they did or would do together. He went on and on and on…
No one believed him. Everyone knew that this was the girl from the kool-aid package. But he didn’t care. The little boy knew that this was the girl from the package, but was perhaps too young to express that this was only a metaphor, a symbol of his future love. No one understood why he threw the picture away, ripping it from the frame when he’d wept all the way home from the renaissance fair after looking into the eyes of beautiful girl with strawberry blond hair who was waiting at the gate by herself. He simply threw the photo away, after smelling the tropical fruit powdered kool-aid from the back of the foiled paper backing first.
The world didn’t seem to work that way, and perhaps love was not going to appear like magic. Not like he’d expected. Not at all like he’d hoped. So he tucked his dreams away into a safe place where even he would eventually forget how to return to, and carried on with the business of growing up. No one was more surprised than he was that life had other plans, that there things which we place into ourselves for safe keeping might outgrow the locations we have stored them in. No one was more surprised than he was to find himself a man, with fireworks exploding around him against his will, against his wishes. Nothing was more confusing than the silence which followed the bursting of his containers, and the slashing of the paper walls within his heart.
And the wind carried strands of mousy brown hair from what felt like continents away and they danced in the sparkling lights before his very eyes. The child climbed the leg of the man until he hoisted him up over his shoulders to see the display. And when it was over, they gazed into each other’s eyes, smiling beautifully with almond eyes, warm and brown, until they were one.
And love was awakened within the little boy, his dreams revived with the kiss of life from all this beautiful light.