A tear in the fabric of Real

For Maria Consuelo Michelle,

Let this piece begin from its title. “A tear in the fabric of Real”. Real is capitalized because it is a name for a place we wrongly believe is everywhere but is in fact only a place inside our minds. It is a little place trapped between a past remembered and an expectation of things that are still to come.

The place is elastic. It can be stretched this way and that like fabric. But it bothers  us to think so. We would rather have its weaving fixed. We would rather have it conform to what is real as if real was universal, immutable or absolutely the same for all. This premise reassures us. We tell ourselves, this is the only way to function. Any other premise would drive us mad.

And we might be right. But perhaps only half so. And we might as well excuse ourselves for thinking this way if thinking any other way will only drive us half-mad.

Half-mad is a state we should reserve only for short moments in time; otherwise, it might prove inconvenient or become permanent. And we must not disturb an already too disturbed world. Rather, we should speak this way only sparingly to keep from being misunderstood or understood so completely we end up disproving entirely our first premise.

Which is that Real is only a fabric or a place inside us. And we can if we choose put a sharp fingernail at its surface and with it incise a small tear if only to see what happens next after that.

A tear in the fabric of Real lets in the unexpected and the unpredictable. It opens for us a small passage into the Real so unbelievable it might as well be fiction or fantasy. And that too is not such a bad place. If only because it is not caught in fixed time such as we we are trapped in, mostly.

And so we are transported. A young man in love with a pretty woman, half Caucasian, half proper, half intending to lead a most proper life. In its course to fall in love with a proper person, and thenceforth to be married, to raise a proper family, to live happily ever after.

The woman thinks she knows this man. They are going out to see a movie this very afternoon or so she thought until the young man arrives tugging behind him a wisp of a little child with the finest hair and the blackest round Chinese eyes.

“Who is this child?”

“Yours?”

“Yes.” He lies. But only so as not to offend the child, whom he feels he would have been honored to have fathered if only it were so. Though it was not. That much was real. That would be the last time they would meet inside the Real of the woman’s expectations. The movie never came to be seen. Not at least by all three of them.

On the way from her doorway, which was as far as he got with her, the young man wondered what he felt? Was he sad? Disappointed? He could not tell. But he has the little girl’s hand in his.

Outside the gate is a sidewalk. An open ditch runs between this sidewalk and the fence around the woman’s house. It is overgrown with bushes and miscellaneous plant life.  The young girl points the man to a nest of birds inside the undergrowth. It takes a while for the man to see what the little girl  is seeing.

It is a magical little vision, perhaps a universe invisible unless she took him by the hand to bring him here. In the undergrowth there were tiny little birds cavorting around their nest, their wings reflecting the colors all about them, colors he thought he had not ever seen and may never see again, unless.

Unless the little girl takes once again her little finger and with its sharp little fingernail incise a tiny tear on the fabric of Real. And if she brings him here again, still he would enter.