The Stories Never End

When the wind is right, the wise man isn’t half so trusted as the fool.

It doesn’t matter what they believe so much as what you believe.

He’s got his own life now. It’s not much - not by your standards, maybe not even by mine, but it’s his and I don’t want anybody to take it away from him.

That’s what the lights said; that was their secret. Wild lights in the night skies, and domesticated lights, right here on the street, they all told the same tale. It was so plain to see when you knew how to look. Didn’t neon and streetlights yearn to be starlight? To be free.

He was an in-betweener. Most days he could take care of himself just fine, but there was a fey streak in him so that sometimes he carried a touch of the magic that ran wild in the streets, the magic that was loose late at night when the straights were in bed and the city belonged to the night people. That magic took up lodgings in people like Zinc. For a week. A day. An hour. Didn’t matter if it was real or not, if it couldn’t be measured or catalogued, it was real to them. It existed all the same.

He could hear the voices in lights. He knew that there as more to be seen in the world if you watched it from the corner of your eye than head on.

I always believed. That’s why I wrote all those stories when I was younger, because I wanted others to believe. I thought if enough of us did, if we learned to care again about the wild places from which we’d driven the magic away, then maybe it would return.

They were no longer bound to people’s expectations but could now become anything that they could imagine themselves to be. They are still here, walking among us. We just don’t recognize them anymore.

There are no happy endings. There are no real endings ever - happy or otherwise. We all have our own stories which are just a part of the one Story that binds both this world and Faerie. Sometimes we step into each others’ stories - perhaps just for a few minutes, perhaps for years - and then we step out of them again. But all the while, the Story just goes on.

Maybe what he is isn’t so important as that he is…. It’s like it’s not so important that he is or isn’t what he says he is, but that he says it. That he believes it.

She had no proof, only faith, but oddly enough, faith seemed enough.

[Small deaths] are those pivotal moments in a person’s life that change it forever: a love affair gone wrong, not getting into the right post-graduate program, stealing a car on a dare and getting caught, that kind of thing. They’re the moments that some people brood on forever; right now they could have the most successful marriage or career, but they can’t stop thinking about the past, about what might have happened if things had gone differently. It sours their success, makes them bitter…. Maybe one of your parents died when you were just a kid, or you were abused as a child; that kind of trauma changes a person forever. You can’t go through such an experience and grow up to be the same person you would have been without it.

I don’t think the world is the way we like to think it is. I don’t think it’s one solid world, but many, thousands upon thousands of them - as many as there are people - because each person perceives the world in his or her own way; each lives in his or her own world. Sometimes they connect,for a moment, or more rarely, for a lifetime, but mostly we are alone, each living in our own world, suffering our small deaths.

Once upon a time there was what there was, and if nothing had happened, there would be nothing to tell.

And then I understand that it’s all real after all. Not real in the sense that I can be physically harmed in this place, but real in that if I make a selfish choice, even if it’s just in a dream, I’ll still have to live with the fact of it when I wake up. It doesn’t matter that I’m dreaming. I’ll still have done it.

We live in a consensual reality where things exist because we want them to exist. I believe in Goon, Goon believes in Goon, and you, presented with his undeniable presence, tea tray in hand, believe in Goon as well. Yet, if you were to listen to the world at large, Goon is nothing more than a figment of some fevered writer’s imagination - a literary construct, an artistic representation of something that can’t possibly exist in the world as we know it.