Speaker's Corner

Things always seem bigger when you’re a kid, they say. And I agree; with one exception - always the exception - of outer space. When I was young, I used to think those stars were painted on a canvas, that hung behind our own sky, stretched on enormous splints and wrapping itself around our entire world. Splatters of purple and orange, random littering of white specks and a Pollockian way with some reds and yellows whenever a meteor shower would pass. Like a three year old finger-painting. And every night I thought little men and women would tug the curtain behind our stage a little further on, so the spectators might know we had arrived at a different scene, another day. It was a most wonderful feeling: as if with each night, all the lines from the previous script were erased and I could write a new one in my dreams overnight. I felt free as my characters stepped up on the stage, barefoot onto the bendy and young wooden planks, still at liberty to improvise in between the dialogues. They danced and laughed like there was no audience, which is exactly why it was entertaining. And every day I buzzed with what my night had dreamt up for the day to come, anxious to see it played out. I was unaware of the absence of my mother’s love, for in my younger days, under the painted starry sky that inched further on down, I had Ursa major as a mother. And I could wallow in her soft tan fur that caught the starlight. I was a child of nebulas and constellations and I could giggle and laugh and I could roll around and wrap myself in the black warmth of the Universe that seemed sticky beyond belief. I loved those days when I felt it close in all over me, when I was small enough for it to coat me just up to my fingertips. I felt the big bear’s claws around me, as I just - just - fit into the crevice of her chest. And then I grew up.  And I learned and I opened my eyes to the galaxies behind the galaxies and the words behind the words and the stars behind the eyes. And I got a script, and a strict director called Adulthood, which I despised the minute he walked in. And suddenly, I noticed the floorboards creak, and I noticed the stains and the hollowed out areas in the wood where I used to stand. Just like that, I felt like I was acting. Acting another part than my own. And it felt awful, because mother bear’s protective claws couldn’t reach around me anymore, for she had become the smallest thing in the sky right then. I rebelled in the darkness of the wings, whispering in the ears of my costars to start a revolution. In my case, the riot consisted of bringing on another player, from another company, and sneaking him into the coulisses, trying to get him on stage. It was you that took the challenge on, that dragged out a soapbox that made awful scratching noises on the flawed wooden floor. While looking Adulthood right in the eye, you put it in the middle of the stage. Your feet stepping on made an echoing sound that resonated in my bones. The breath you drew seemed eons long. The speech that followed, loud voice and rhetorics that would put Demosthenes to shame, was nothing less than a revolutionary call to arms.