Chapter 8: A Birthday Story

There wasn't anything particularly interesting about it. It didn't have any special features, nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing about it screamed "Hey, look at me!" or anything. There wasn't a ring of emeralds around it, it wasn't studded with faceted jewels, glinting in the hot afternoon sun. There were no flashing spotlights, no pyramids, no red carpets. It didn't even have a specifically negative magnetism to it- no mar that would have set it apart from others like it. No weird old haunted house popped out of it, there were no creaky floorboards, no spiderwebs that got into your face and made you scream the crap out of yourself. No, no, and no. If someone were to whip out a checklist it'd run something like this. Colourful stage lights? No. Vegas-style music? No. Rolling clouds of white mist? No. Death-defying stuntmen cartwheeling in the air on bikes with flames coming out of the exhaust? No.

No, there wasn't anything really special about it. Not at all.

So what so special about this? You ask, bewildered. Why would anyone want to write about nothing? Why would anyone want to read about nothing? Why would anyone even think that anyone would want to read something that is really made out of nothing?

Must've lost you there.

Here's why. Because in this gaping, rectangular nothing, something and everything is being closed and opened. It's dead, but it's coming right back to life. Snap, just like that.

* * *

Picture this if you will.

Spring. A crowd of young people. There's a couple of old folks hanging around here and there. Not senile-old; middle-aged old. Though there might've been an odd senile-old individual somewhere. A leathery, wrinkled face in the crowd. Senile-old people are quite hard to spot sometimes. People tend to forget about them. It's as if they'd spent too much time here, so that they fade into the background and become part of the tree or the sidewalk or the shop window. Sometimes even time forgets them, and then all they do is sit and watch the world go by eventhough they can't even remember the names of the people around them; maybe even their own names at some point.

Anyway, the crowd on that spring afternoon was mostly made up of young people. And you must not forget that.

It was incredibly hot. The sun was absolutely merciless; t was literally yelling "Lighten up, folks! It's sunny here!". Those who had had some experience in this field brought umbrellas. When popped open, everyone else huddled underneath, the sun beating down upon their sweaty backs the way a native African in a stupor would beat his goat-skin drum during a native African dance ceremony. It was a ceremony that spring afternoon, all right. But there was no drum-beating and dancing involved.

There was a tractor somewhere. Probably in the background, having a pleasant chat with the senile-old individual also at the back. The guy manning it looked bored. In the intense heat and silence, it'd be no surprise if he was discovered sleeping with his eyes opened. Or maybe his eyes were half-closed. Half-opened? Half-closed? No matter. The state of the tractor guy's drooping eyelids is of no importance. He comes in much later, when most of the young-people crowd parted. They're doing pretty much what crowds normally do right about now. Crowding over something.

Perhaps you should go over and take a look yourself.

* * *

Ah, here you go. Flowers. Lots of them. Do you know their names? Bright orange gerberas, white roses, little purple violets. Pretty, don't you think? Wait, there's more. Go on, look closer. Can you see them? Know what they are? Bits of paper? You reply, confused. The crowd's throwing handfuls of them. Not just any bits of paper. Nope, they're wonderfully creased and folded with razor-sharp precision papers. Pretty papers, too, if you'd like to know. Violet, tangerine, yellow, navy- there's even some patterned with adorable kitty cats. And all of these fiddly bits of paper are folded; folded in the popular Japanese art-style of folding paper into decorative shapes. What's that word again? Oh, yes. Origami. Yes, these handfuls of coloured paper the crowd's throwing into the rectangular nothing were folded Origami-style. Folded to take the form of some sort of decorative shape, so that it looks less like a piece of coloured paper and more like something else.

That something else, in this case, is a crane.

Here's the saying. Or belief. If you folded a thousand (or was it more?) of these cranes, whatever you wish for will come true. If you wished to be famous, to win the lottery and become insanely rich, or if you just wanted a loved one to recover from a mysterious illness that not even the doctors can name, you fold a thousand pieces of paper into a thousand paper cranes, and poof. Abracadabra, wish granted.

If only life was that easy.

What else do you see, nestled among the flowers and origami? See the bright green streaks? Yeap, there they are. They look a bit like scrawls, don't you think? They come in two different shades of green: dark green and light green. Nothing simpler than that. Do they remind you of something? Here's the hint: remember all those movies on t.v where the cute guy breaks his leg playing football and has to have a cast? Then his friends come around to see him in the hospital, chat up the trainee nurses and sign their names and write crazy stuff on the cast. Then when cute guy heals he'll probably frame up the cast to remember all the fun times he'd shared with his friends.
Yeah, something like that.
Lots of green markered writing. All over the place. Up, down, left, right. It looks so pretty against the stained wood. Almost as if it were glowing.

Yes, things are looking pret-ty normal. Though underneath its pret-ty normal facade, something was bursting from within. Going down, down, down. Decomposition, decay. Then it was going up, up, up. Shoots springing from the freshness of it all. Of course, that would take quite a long while later. It was still quite new. A bit like a new journal, probably given by a kind aunt on your birthday or Christmas. There're plenty of creamy, empty pages, the smell of newness of the leaves. As the years go by it'll be filled with a story. A bittersweet story of a life well lived, a life filled with fun and laughter and youth, albeit it's rather short, abrupt full-stop. But it did not simply end then even so. It continued on even after, moving on to the epilogue of sadness. There were tears, and with the tears laughter, with the laughter the strengthening of loose bonds and the rebuilding of ones once broken. No matter how wonderful the story, you'll have to come to its final chapter, it's last full-stop eventually.

This story just happens to be about a short story. A little novella, one no-one expected to end so quickly with such an unexpected ending. But then that's life.

Oh, look! What's this? Green rain? No, it's ribbon. Lots of them. Little green snippets being untied and let go to fall into the rectangular nothing, to take their place amongst the blooms and paper and marker-messages. Kinda like confetti, albeit a bit longer and more silky to the touch. Earlier in the day the young-people crowd were in a bit of a frenzy cutting the ribbons from big reels to tie in their hair. Then they realized that there were just a bit too many young people and too little ribbon on the reels, so they had to make do with tying slivers of green on their watch-bands. The earlier birds who got first pick had to cut theirs up into three pieces to distribute to the other young-people. Oh well, sharing is caring right? And no better time to share than a time where everyone needs everyone else to hold and cry on the most.

After a while the crowd of young people moved away, and as promised, the tractor guy comes to take centre stage. Shovelling the soil into the nothing, filling it all up with something. A while longer, and then it's pretty much over. Book closed, end of story. The end.

There's a paper crane poking out of the soil.

What on earth? You think. Yeah, that's the shocked look expected to be on your face. This is crazy! How can anyone talk about such things so carelessly? And sure, flowers are fine, cranes okay too, but markers? What the hell happened to respect? Blasphemy! Blasphemy! Blasphemy!!!

Here you must calm down. Take a couple of deep breaths; that always helps. Then you have to hold yourself in check and recall something that was mentioned earlier. Do remember, the crowd is mostly made up of young people. And rest assured, the old ones, middle-aged old or senile-old don't actually mind all that's been done. They see it as a genuine token of friendship, the last stroke of young artistry, the last happy shout of freedom of creativity and ingenuity.

The last way of saying goodbye.





* * *


Happy Birthday.