Dear Reader,
Have you ever stood by the shore and watched the waves crashing down? If you have, you'll notice there's a pattern to them. Some crash hard, and some ripple down, but the all hit then back away to the ocean where they came. This story is like that. Each chapter begins at the start, builds, then crashes on the shore. Some are big, some are small, but all lead us from the start to the conclusion, to "this would have happened anyway."
I began this story at least 3 years ago, perhaps more, right after I finished Caged Bird. The inspiration comes from my life as a kindergarten teacher. Our science curriculum covers the Five Senses. I thought, what if I explored "You love me, real or not real" from that perspective? And so began this journey. Along the way I earned a Masters in Education, watched my children grow up, and little by little, plunked away at this story.
All of this to say, Please enjoy:
KPKPKPKP
HOW DO YOU KNOW?
"How do you know?" you ask him. "How do you know if it's real?" you're lying in bed after a sweet evening of discovering each other.
"You seem so confident. How do you know?"
His mother used to tell him this story, it's one of the happy memories he has of her, he tells you. She wasn't always so pragmatic. "She loved us, in her own way," he remembers. It's just the stress of living under a despot in a district that only knew coal dust was more than she could handle most days.
He tells you the story of a rabbit. A stuffed rabbit that was loved so much, for so long, that eventually he became real. "So that's how you know?" you say sceptically. "Because you're loved? But how do you know it's real?"
"Well," he tells you quietly. "when you want to know if something is real, what do you ask yourself? Can you smell it? Hear it? See it? Taste it? Feel it? If you can, that's how you know it's real."
You think about that for some time.