ONCE UPON A TIME......

So many different stories, each with it's own meaning. Some are little snapshots, describing a specific moment or event and the sensations associated with them. Some are more abstract; moments remembered and interpreted through the filters of time or experience. Are they all individual little tales, disconnected from one another? Or are they all different chapters of the same story?

In some cases the stories are pretty straight-forward, with a beginning, middle, and end, and the events described have a certain continuity and order to them.

But some have a more mysterious, unreal quality that defy any logical explanation, and which make no sense in and of themselves. Do they have a larger meaning; a context that will never be defined by a logical explanation? Maybe each story occurs on some unworldly plane, and some strange ether connects all of them in a way that defies time or reason.

That is the beauty of stories: they conjure up a specific time and place, but the most enigmatic ones defy any kind of acceptable, normal reality, and their true meanings are probably best left unexplained. Maybe that is why the best stories are fairy tales, occurring in strange lands and times, where magic and mystery shade everything that occurs, and sometimes there is no logical explanation.

And each and every one of these begin the same way.

ONCE UPON A TIME.......

....A SMALL CHILD, little more than an infant really, sits on the living room floor of a small 2 bedroom apartment. His younger sister lies in a crib up against the wall. A small twin bed is up against the other wall. On this bed rests a relative, not his mother or father. She hardly ever moves, and the rasping and wheezing that emanate from this form keep the occupants of the apartment up every night. She has to be bathed, fed, and medicated on a daily basis, and the entire apartment seems to exist for the sole purpose of housing this ghostly apparition. The entire apartment has a smell that the child will always identify with sickness and decay, and the memory of this wretched shell of a person will terrify the child for years to come. One day the bed is suddenly empty and the child, without knowing why, feels an enormous sense of relief.

.....A YOUNG BOY receives a book for his birthday. He is still quite young, 8 or 9 maybe, but he has been able to read for several years, sometimes not understanding everything, but always yearning to disappear into a world where there are no arguing parents, no drunken arguments, no beatings for no apparent reason. This particular book instantly becomes his favorite. It is a combination of fairy tales as well as more contemporary tales for young readers. The book is illustrated with the most intricate and detailed of paintings, usually 3-4 per story. One particular story the boy returns to again and again, not so much for the story itself, but for one of the drawings accompanying the story. The story has something to do with an Indian warrior who has been forced to leave his tribe and wanders into a forest where some mysterious witch/ghost lives and tries to trick the warrior into spending eternity there in the forest with her. The boy doesn't understand why the warrior would resist this. There is a particular drawing that the boy spends hours looking at. A woman with long, raven black hair stands surrounded by the foliage of the forest, her face and features obscured by shadows and branches, with just a hint of what her true features might be. She seems to blend/meld with the woods around her. The boy constructs elaborate child-fantasies around this mysterious character, and returns to the picture time and again to escape the hard reality of his everyday life. Later in life the boy will remember this drawing at the oddest of times, and struggle to recall why the dream-life it inspired had such a hold on him.

......A BOY, ALMOST A TEEN has been sent to a summer camp. One day the boy wanders off into the woods, chasing whatever imaginary creatures that had captured his fancy at the time, and becomes hopelessly lost. At first the boy is terrified, yelling out for help at the top of his lungs, and randomly heading off into different directions without any rhyme or reason. After a while though, the boy calms down and sits down on a bed of pine needles and just starts to absorb what is happening around him. He is convinced that he hears a woman's voice on the wind rustling through the pines saying his name, and also is certain that he sees a shadowed figure with long, raven black hair in the shadows; never in his direct eye line, but always on the periphery of his vision. When the camp folks find the boy he is soundly sleeping on the bed of pine needles, completely calm and unafraid.

.....A TEEN BOY, after being berated by his father for some forgotten slight, finally becomes fed up and says something back that he knows will trigger an explosion. The father hits the boy, for the last time. The boy, with a cold calculating precision, proceeds to beat his father to a bloody pulp, without making a sound or uttering a word. The punishment is complete and without any sense of mercy, and when the boy is finished he goes to his room and opens up a book he hasn't looked at in years and stares at a picture that still manages to transport him to a different world.

......IN A SLEAZY BAR in Georgia, a guy is hitting on a woman way out of his league. The woman seems amused and maternal. Finally she gets up to leave and says the strangest thing. Later in life he won't remember the exact wording, but she says something along the lines of : " You are the sweetest thing, and someday you will find the right person, but it won't be tonight and it may not be for a while, but it will happen". For some odd reason this struck the guy for a moment, and registered as a moment that he would not forget. Then he continued trying to get laid.

......IN A SOUTH CAROLINA COURTHOUSE, a civil ceremony is performed uniting a man and woman in marriage. There is no particular passion or fire in their relationship, but each has been damaged in one way or another, and each take solace in the fact that each trust the other not to hurt them in any obvious way, and that perhaps over time something more satisfying could develop. The man believes that just having someone who will accept his idiosyncratic behavior is enough, but inside there is still an emptiness that eats at him.

.....IN THE MOUNTAINS OF BOLIVIA, a man sits on the porch of his "hotel". The owners daughter brings him his food and beer. She has golden brown skin and jet black hair and large dark brown eyes. The man has no sexual feelings for her, but something about her causes a sense of melancholy. She speaks to him in a language he doesn't understand, and her smile gives him the heaviest of feelings. He has no idea what she is saying, and only knows her for a little over a month, but he feels as close to her as he has to anyone, which for some reason fills him with an incredible sadness. When the man finishes his job he keeps enough money to get him back to La Paz and gives the girl over $3000 in an envelope. The curious, confused look on her face when she looks in the envelope only makes the man sadder, and at that moment he has never felt more alone.

....OUTSIDE A MOSCOW FUNERAL HOME, in the middle of winter, a man attends a funeral. As it is winter and the ground is frozen, the people attending the funeral wait outside the funeral home beside a hole in a wall that disgorges caskets one after the other. It is an assembly line type of service where an open casket comes sliding out of the hole in the wall, is placed on a gurney, and then the mourners get to spend 5 minutes around the casket of the deceased before the casket is wheeled up to another hole in the wall and returned to the funeral home, to be buried once the ground is soft enough to be dug up. The dead man was named Vadim, and he had been beaten and then crawled off into an alley and froze to death. No one at the funeral knows or speaks to the American. As the American leaves the funeral an unknown woman with black hair, bronze skin, and large liquid eyes comes up to him and says something in Russian that the man only partially understands. Her tone is kind and gentle, and when she is done speaking she turns and leaves, speaking to no one else.

.....IN A RAIN FOREST IN TAKORADI, GHANA, a man has spent close to a week with a fever and delirium that brings him close to death. After the fever breaks and reason returns the man insists that he was being cared for by a woman with jet black hair and large eyes who held him and bathed him and applied wet towels to his body and spoke to him in an odd language. He asks to see her and thank her, but is told that no such woman cared for him (it was actually a combination of a fat German woman doctor and local male "nurses")

...... IN A SMALL CONFERENCE ROOM, a man struggles with himself. He has information that may be of importance to a woman he doesn't know at all. The smart thing to do would be to keep this information to himself and just mind his own business. The woman has jet black, raven hair, and she moves with a grace and elegance the man has never seen before. Her eyes are impossibly large and seem to be gateways to an unknown universe. The man realizes that he has actually fallen into something like love with this woman, even though she has never shown the slightest interest in him at all. He decides that he doesn't really care whether the woman has any feelings for him or not, he is going to share what he knows and let her do with it as she will.

.....IN A DARKENED HOTEL ROOM, a woman is atop a man, naked and making love. Her hair surrounds her face and she is back-lit by the light behind her, so her face is partially obscured. She tells the man that she loves him, and at that exact moment her features become crystal clear. The mans heart actually seems to stop, and a monumental sadness seems to be lifted. The man wants to cry, and doesn't even understand why, but does realize that nothing from this moment on will be the same.

....IN THE DREAMWORLD OF SLEEP, over the course of years, a boy/man has a recurring dream. In the dream a woman waits in the shadows, speaking soft and low, offering the promise of love and hope and redemption. The man is a bit of a cynic, and realizes that dreams and reality do not overlap, and could never imagine that anyone could ignite the love and passion he would die to share, much less show any interest in him. This only happens in fairy tales. But what if he is wrong. What if there is some strange alchemy at work that brought him to a specific time and place, creating the circumstance that would allow such a thing to happen, and what if the signs were there all along.

Who knows where chance and fate collide. Maybe everything is completely random. Maybe everything is just spinning out of control, and everything that happens is just a complete toss of the dice. Or maybe, just maybe, there is some odd timeless connection between everything, something that defies explanation, something that is there waiting to be discovered if we only have the will and ability to look for it, if not fully understand it. Maybe all of those moments are there just waiting to be discovered, even if it is only once, upon a time.