A Quest for Quintessence

“It makes sense, our current condition. Mankind has spent millenia with its eyes wide and warily open, glancing over its shoulder for predators and prey alike. When the world is wild, there is little time for sleep. But slowly, we began to build for ourselves a world significantly less wild than that of our ancestors. We built a world where it was safe to sleep, and we have been sleeping ever since. Unforutnately, the wide, wild world continues to turn while we slumber. It is a beautiful thing, but it is far from benign. There are still fights to be fought, still wonders to be discovered, still room to move forward. The greatest challenge of this generation will be waking the deep-sleeping masses from their dreaming state, so that they can see the world once more with open eyes. It must be so, for it is only in the waking world that their dreams can be realized.”

Once upon a time…there was a girl who was born in a valley. She grew up with her face towards the sun, protected all around by hills and trees and starlight. She played in the fields and the forests and made friends with the streams and stones. The clouds and the dew drops made her gentle, and the thunder and beasts made her wild.

One day, the world outside the valley decided the girl had done enough growing, so they took her away on mechanical grey birds and bulky metal horses to a land where there were no hills or valleys or wild things. In this flat land, they tried their best to turn her into a flat thing. But she was a child of the valley, and she could roll and shine and hide like the valley could, and she would not be changed. They dressed her in their flat clothes and taught her to say flat things, but they could not flatten her out. She stayed among the flat people for a time, but one sunny day when no one was looking, she snuck away to where the trees began and has never been seen since.

Once upon a time…there was a girl who knew a boy who asked her if she would rather be a firework or a light bulb. Fireworks, he explained, were beautiful and intense, but lasted mere seconds before disappearing with a bang into the dark. Light bulbs, on the other hand, are constant and commonplace, hardly inspiring but certainly useful. “Which is it better to be?” he asked her. The girl thought for a moment, then locked her bright eyes with his and said, “Considering the time of day, I think it would be best to be eating lunch.” And with that, she walked off in the direction of the closest refrigerator. It’s a silly question anyway. People wouldn’t make good light bulbs or fireworks.

Once upon a time…there was a girl who fell asleep on a breezy night in May and dreamed herself back into her old schoolyard. While meandering among the monkey bars and warm asphalt of long ago, she spotted her younger self playing on a quiet swing set. Of course, all good children know never to approach other versions of themselves in time out of time, but the girl rarely paid attention to what good children know, and wandered over to talk to the girl she used to be. They sat on the grass for a while and spoke of the things that only they could know, and the girl told her younger self of the person she would one day be. She recounted her adventures, her triumphs, and her failures with few embellishments and even fewer omissions, feeling all the while like some bizarre combination of a prophet and a pilgrim in a strange but familiar land. 

When she finished, the younger girl told the older girl she was proud that they were one and the same. They both smiled, and in that instant the girl awoke from her dream with the ghost of a tear on her cheek. She smiled a real smile and, with the approval of who she used to be, went off into the world to see who she would become.