Prologue
If it never crossed your mind that your past might just be nothing more than a story that someone, somewhere, once whispered gently in your ear in a haze of a dream, then you are one of the truly and handsomely lucky ones. Ignorance truly is bliss because what you don’t know couldn’t possibly hurt you, certainly not as much as knowing your parents didn’t truly love you and not because of something you did or how you are, but because someone decided they didn’t love you and then whispered the same thing in your parents’ ears. What if your past was just a story someone whispered to you and it became the echo that carried you through the rest of your life, bending everything around you accordingly and shaping the way you carried the world?
How appealing would it be if certain hurt and pain and mild and not so mild discomfort you felt because of something you did in your past was just a story someone told you about you?
After all, people don’t remember most of their lives until someone reminds them. You don’t, for example, remember the warm feelings and the well of love you once felt seeing a certain someone coming towards you, until Jason from school bumps into you in the market and reminds you in a humorous way of that certain someone you loved when you were seventeen. You don’t feel the warm amorous sensation as you once felt it, but only vaguely remember that you felt warmth, a certain amount of kindling around your heart and at the pit of your stomach, regardless that now that well of love has dried up and no water was left but only small skeletons of albino crabs at the bottom.
But you accept what Jason told you, as if reminding you, and do not question whether Jason has mistaken the story for a dream he had or for something he had experienced when he was seventeen, or even whether all of that was just an old woman’s imagination whispering into your ear a story that she made up because she had a certain secret design in mind and needed to get you at a certain point in time to a certain place to meet a certain woman and rescue her from a certain damsel-in-distressque situation.
If it never crossed your mind that your past was just a story someone whispered in your ear and the remains of the story echoed through the world around you, then you are luckier than Finn.
This is how I met Finn.
