Unto The Child

I never knew what to say, so eventually I stopped saying anything. People accepted my silence so easily, as if they had forgotten they had ever heard my voice. Since I could reply, there was no need to hear the endless voices around me. I shut them out and met conversation and connection with silence and vacant stares. It didn’t take long for people to accept that, too. I was alone in the world, like a moving art piece. People saw me and moved along, recognizing I was not one of them. Understand without knowing that I couldn’t contribute on any level to the lives they were leading.

I disappeared alone in the woods, alone in my gardens. I listened to the natural world around me and soon forgot the metal jungles below. I didn’t need words the same way; I danced in the wind to talk to the trees. I cried in the river to commune with the water. This seemed more fitting for me. More real than anything I had found, communicating with ‘my own kind’.

I carried on for decades - centuries, living in peace and becoming one with all around me. The idea of being one of them slipped my mind. The memory that I used to belong to something different escaped me. I still had a voice, but I could no longer use it to form words the same way. I could no longer speak the language I was born into. All that I might have known in the past had long since died away. Nothing remained but my ties to the trees, my whisperings with the foxes and wild rabbits.

Until the child came. Wistful and hopeful. She climbed the high mountains and through the trees to find me. She had discovered the secret of me. She came pouring into my life like a fine wine, offering lower inhibitions and pure delight. How did she find me? I never came to know. How did she know she was one like me? She never said. But she told me tales of the world below and how things had come to be. Things were shifting and changing. The sparkle in her eyes and the excitement of her connections awoke something in me. A longing I thought was never much alive to begin with.

I let her take me back down the mountain. I let her guide me back to the world I used to know. She helped me learn to speak again, to connect and understand the metal jungle I had left in my past. The duality of who I was started to become clear, but with my child, I could forge the connection and live with it all.