By
Madeleine Kando
There once was a boy who was very young and very sad. He always dreamt of beautiful things but every time he was with other people, he was sad and quiet. He was beautiful and he was sad and lived in a world of thoughts and fantasy.
It went on like this for a long time. He got bigger and once in a while, he peeked around the corner of the real world, because he felt lonely in this beautiful world where he was all by himself. Every time he peeked into the real world, he was so frightened by all that strange real stuff, that he quickly closed the door and built new beautiful fantasies.
He grew into a young man when something terrible happened. His world was being attacked! He wasn't prepared at all and he felt an enormous carnage-taking place. It was awful. Everything that he so meticulously had built got destroyed. The awful reality knew no mercy. He suddenly found himself in a strange hostile world of reality and didn't know how to cope. He never learned anything about that reality and it was a terrible struggle. He knew one thing: nobody should ever find out that he did not belong here, that he came from somewhere else, because then his chances of survival were nil.
So, he got up and started walking and did everything that reality expected of him, except that he wasn't real. But only he knew that. And soon he got used to the situation, he lived as others did and soon thought that that was the normal way.
But knowing that he belonged somewhere else didn't leave his mind. He knew that he was playing a role, and knew that it wasn't real and he kept feeling sad, closed off, and turned inward. He could not trust others because they were different, they were really from this real world, not his.
Once, there was a woman who came and tried to help him. She reached out and tried to pull him closer, because she knew that he was sad and closed off and she loved him, even though she knew he wasn't real. But the boy got frightened and made up a ruse to hide. He couldn't trust the woman, he wasn't from his world and she was a strange real woman.
All sorts of hide-and-seek games prevented the boy from disaster, but he is still sad and closed off, and although he unconsciously still wishes he could finally step into the real world, the only thing that he can do is to live in two worlds. He plays his role with more and more conviction and soon he will not know that it is a role. Reality will twist him, like a chameleon. He will change color. Maybe that's what most people do. They change color and don't think about what their original color was.
Who knows, when they are really old and have nothing more to lose or to expect, they will say: 'I am not really red, I am yellow, and I knew this all along, but now it's too late to change who I really am.'
