There will always be something left to discover. So don’t worry. It’s terrible and breathtaking and sometimes it shatters me into pieces, the knowledge that we’ll never know it all. We struggle and ask and build theory after theory, but no ancestry of human lives is enough to learn the secrets of our world.
But then again:
There is always something more.
Because there will always be something left.
“How can I be a real lion without a mane,” the lioness sighed.
“Who needs a mane when you have claws and fangs and a roar,” the jaguar said.
One day, I’ll be able to introduce myself with a simple hello.
When they ask for my name, I’ll be able to say: “You know who I am.”
They’ll frown. They’ll think. Their lips will part. Tiny cogs start turning inside their head.
“So you are,” they will say. “You are – oh.”
I won’t say anything until their eyes go wide. “Oh,” they will repeat.
“Yes,” I’ll say, amused and impatient, already pushing my sleeves up. “Now close your mouth and pull yourself together. We’ve got work to do.”
When she turned sixteen, the princess wished for a needle. “I want to sew a bit,” she wrote on a note and put it into the basket that went down her tower for food and books. “Just so I have something to do.”
When she received it, tucked under berries and cheese, the princess took the needle between two fingers. She went down the tower and to the door where the dragon lay.
“Beast,” the princess said.
The dragon said nothing. The chain around its neck was golden and terrible. Its wings were folded. It lay still and looked at the princess.
She lifted her hand. The needle gleamed silver in the dragon fire under the beast’s belly. “I can unleash you.”
For a while, the dragon only looked. It looked and looked, and then it opened its jaws. “And what do you want in return?”
The princess smiled. She went over to the dragon and pushed the needle into the lock sealing its neck.
“What do you want?” the dragon asked again. But the princess said nothing.
While she worked, the beast slowly shifted to its feet, and the princess did not flinch when hot breath flooded over the scars on her naked shoulder blades. She did not tremble when the dragon nudged her where her wings used to be, neither when it sniffed where horns used to adore her bald head, nor when it nosed at the burns that torches had left on her four arms.
The chain fell. A shudder went through the dragon’s body. It took a deep breath, its throat bulged, and magic erupted from its freed lungs. The door on the bottom of the tower burnt to ashes.
The princess smiled.
“Well,” the dragon said when they stood outside and looked at the sky. “Now you must tell me.”
And still, the princess smiled, a slow and horrifying little smile that stuck to her tiny mouth. The dragon stumbled away from her, terror shooting through his veins. He was up in the sky within seconds, but the princess only looked at him.
When she spoke, it echoed across the clearing deep in the forest, and the dragon in the sky shuddered from her soft voice that sang gently:
“I want to ask them why they did not lock me up a bit better.”
You thought you couldn’t live without them. But the day came, and your heart went into pieces. Maybe in silence, maybe with a whisper or the wail of a storm crushing your ribs and veins. There you were. There you lay.
Hello, how have you been since then?
They sure did leave some wounds in you, didn’t they. Let me see. Oh. Oh? That’s quite different now. Tell me, tell all of us – aren’t you alive?
The scars are still there. Nothing to fear, no shame to be found in them. But look beneath. Watch what you did below.
You filled the emptiness that they left, and what you poured in was yourself. You. Your mind and heart and the ever-growing swell of your soul that you thought wouldn’t ever recover.
You’re surely not smooth. Don’t have a flawless surface or boring, dull evenness characterising your presence.
“So full of themselves, that one over there,” the world says when they look at you. Yes, that you are. Nothing in the universe is better to fill your existence with than yourself.
Our world gets dark sometimes, but light is the fastest thing we know and one of the most incredible mysteries we do not know, so be certain that it will return. And in the meantime, there are adventures to have with your other senses, because there is never nothing left and who knows what waits for us behind the visible?
i can never know everything. there’s always something out of reach, something hidden, something buried, something so breathtaking in uniqueness, and it hurts me. species have passed without an eye to see them, colours and scents and the feeling of extinct air faded away like they meant nothing. it breaks my soul apart. don’t even think about the universe, the curious fingertips of our galaxy feeling into the darkness to search for more of infinity. don’t think about our solar system, the stars’ dying light touching our hair or the millions of years-things-lives before us and away from us. the lost history of earth is enough to slither sorrow into my bones. i bow my head. i weep for what i and you and the future will never know.
i can never know everything. there’s always something out of reach, something hidden, something buried, something so breathtaking in its uniqueness, and it gives me hope. there’s growth. life changes, and the change lives in everything. nothing lasts forever, they say, and look up to the night sky to remember the moon before one day, their children’s children ask about the history of the silver firmament where the mighty ocean obeyed the glint of something further away then the new continents. it breaks my soul apart that we will never run out of secrets and discoveries. i’m not afraid that there will come a time when the shiver of new words and mysteries settling into your mind through the pages of a book or a whispered tale or fingers drawing in the mud is unknown to humanity. history doesn’t run out of ink. it may change the font and go from black to blue or emerald, but the new chapters will always, always come out.
there are locked chests and hidden waterfalls, tree houses and underwater trenches and bird nests and old books. there are first steps and a new touch of fingers against yours and a million ways of getting out of bed so you can stand up to the sunrise and whisper: today, i want to hear a new story.
i lift my head. there is no need to cry.
we can never know everything.
I may have a hard shell, but if you get close to me, reach out to my heart, and dig deep into my soul – then you’ll find something soft.
Lava. There’s lava in my core. You’ve burnt yourself, love.
Nobody knows how he does it. It’s strange, really, how the effects in his movies look so real, almost as if the faeries could reach through the screen to steal your nose, as if the sea serpent could rise from the ocean to tug you gently between its teeth.
When the movie director that creates fantastic world’s wins his tenth award, someone finally asks. “How come,” the journalist shouts over the noise of his colleagues, the static of microphones and laughing celebrities almost blocking his voice, “that your movies seem so real? What’s the technology? Who is your team, would you tell us?”
Because the director always accepts his awards and honours and prizes alone. His team “sadly cannot attend this time” and that means every time. Nobody knows who works for him. The best in the entire the industry deny any cooperation (and oh, some may whisper behind switched off cameras about dubious business, because special effects are brilliant nowadays, but even those can’t pretend the impossible.)
This time, the director halts. He turns around. The journalist holds his breath. Could this be his chance? Would he find an answer to Hollywood’s most scandalously expected question? In all his excitement, none of the reporters pays any attention to the bodyguards flanking the director.
Maybe they would have seen a flock of a forked tongue over thin lips. Maybe their eyes would have stuttered in irritation when they caught on a shimmer of horns in the left one’s dark hair.
But they all watch the director.
The director who just, as he always has, smiles and says:
“You just have to be very good at closing contracts.”
If it has been thought, there’s a multiverse for it. If it hasn’t been thought, there’s one anyways.
Moami 