Its a typical weekday during school holidays. My mother is
at work, my brother is out somewhere…I never knew where he went. We didn’t have
electricity. That meant no TV, no internet, and a bunch of other things. To my
brother, that was a fate worse than death. Anywhere was better than being at
home. But I was a homebody, the captain that never abandons ship. I found company
in the characters I read about in books. My mind deployed creative ways to deal
with time. Funny right, that I talk of time this way. I seemed to have endless
amounts of it. What does a kid do to use up time that he has in spades? I had
no gadgets to play around with nor toys to fiddle around with, plus I wasn’t of
that young age anymore anyways. So my mind became my best friend. I spent hours
poring over the pages of books. I remember one time, a man that was building
part of our house asked me if I was not hurting my eyes. What could I tell the
man? This is my life. I live and work in this thing that is between my ears. When
you finish reading a really good book and you close that last page, your mind
cant stop thinking about what happens after that last page. Just because you
have reached the end of the book doesn’t mean that world of characters is all
of a sudden non-existent, right? Some characters that came to me were not
fictional, but real people. I had some kids, usually a little younger than me,
come spend some time at my place. Our house had been years under construction
so the unroofed spaces of the front part of the house offered a great space to
chill with friends. I could tell they thought me eccentric, and they liked that
eccentricity about me. When I spoke, I spoke the language I read about in books.
I shared ideas I read about in books. They say that books carry the spirits of
people that wrote them. This couldn’t have been truer to me than at that time. Books
where life rafts, a way to be part of the world without having to leave my
house. But as it turns out, non-fictional characters are as important as the fictional ones, if not more actually. I would miss these non-fictional characters, I would miss my friends. I
would hold the burglar bars by the front door with my hands and stick my head through it, and
look past our incomplete living room to the dusty road ahead, wishing, that
someone would come and play…like that old Sesame Street song.
