You tune in to a radio station. There’s static, dead silence. But then again, there’s always static on this channel these days. This isn’t a surprise anymore. You listen to it for a while. It’s almost comforting — this aural representation of absence.
But then, faintly, you hear a voice.
“It’s hard work becoming yourself,” the voice says. It sounds like a girl that you used to know. “If becoming yourself is like going on a journey, it’s a journey where your GPS broke, you don’t remember the name of the place you’re going to, and all the road signs are too weathered to actually read.” Her voice is getting louder now, winning out over the crackling of the static. “Even the ‘road less traveled’ test can lead you astray. Because what if your destination is at the end of the more traveled path? Or what if it’s on the less traveled one, but you get lost in the woods because you skipped the day that they taught Survival Skills in PE, and don’t know which berries are safe to eat? There are absolutely no guarantees that you’ll get where you’re going — or any guarantees that your destination actually exists, assuming that you even have one in mind.”
You stare blankly at the radio. Well this is new, you think. If this is the voice of the girl you knew, why does she sound so uncertain? What’s happened to her, in the time since you last spoke? But she keeps speaking, so you keep listening. Trying to figure it out.
“The only comfort is that, in such a confusing world, you get to make the map and plot your course. If you decide to go down one path, and then later decide that you were wrong, no one is stopping you from turning around and going in the other direction.
Sometimes you’ll meet someone else, and you can travel with them for a ways. The only danger there is that you walk too far with them and end up at their destination, instead of your own. And then there are the people who you meet at crossroads. Usually they’re going somewhere else, but they’re happy to stop and chat for a minute, to compare their map to yours, to help you fill in the blank areas (you know, the ones where you scribbled ‘Here there be dragons!’).
My favorite, though, are the animals. On metaphorical journeys, they’re always the most helpful. They can tell you which berries are safe to eat, or when it’s going to rain, or if you dropped something shiny, and can they have it because they really like shiny things?
I actually met a really interesting magpie recently. It came up to me and said that I had, in fact, dropped something very shiny further up the path. They’d picked it up, but I would I like it back? I stared at the shiny thing in its beak for a moment, considering.
‘Yes,’ I finally said. ‘Yes, actually. That’s very important to me. Where did you find it?’
‘You dropped it,’ the magpie repeated, as if it were that simple. ‘But if I give you such a pretty, shiny thing, you’ have to make me a promise.’
‘What kind of promise?’ I’d read fairy tales when I was little, and I wasn’t stupid. I wasn’t about to promise this bird my first-born child or anything, not least because I wasn’t planning on having children to begin with. And promises of purely hypothetical children could get… complicated.
‘You have to promise not to drop it again.’
I blinked in surprise. ‘That’s all?’
‘And to use it.’ The bird thought for a minute, then added, ‘And polish it sometimes. Shiny things like to feel appreciated.’
‘Ok,’ I told the bird. ‘I promise.’
‘Are you sure? Because if you’re just going to neglect it again, I think it’d be better if I kept it.’
‘Please give it back,’ I said. ‘I really do promise to take care of it.’
‘Don’t forget that,’ the bird said before dropping a shiny white fountain pen into my hand. Carved into the cap were the words ‘Dream always. Write often.’”
The channel goes back to static after the last word, but you don’t turn the radio off. Instead you sit back in your chair and look at it for a moment.
“Welcome back,” you finally say. “It’s been a long time.”
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