The Child and the Old Woman, Part II

…She raised a guilty pair of eyes to him and whispered:
“I have something very important to tell you.”
The child shuddered at these words. The old woman was like a stuffed animal to him, a dried up old squirrel caught in a picturesque position on a dead waxed log. Stuffed animal do not try to reveal secrets nor instruct you. She rubbed her hand with obvious anxiety, and her fingers were so gnarled that he thought they would entangle.
“We are the same, you know, you and I.”
She grinned and bowed her head a little. He thought he would run away. She was sweet, almost tender, and the smell of hospital that usually surrounded her seemed to give way to whiffs of soap and fresh apple pie. A stranger, more than ever. But her eyes were suddenly moist with fear, and words fumbled out of her decaying mouth, ominous words breaking out from dark, long locked up rooms riddled with ancient keys to even darker secrets:
“People are dangerous, my child.”
Her trembling tone paralyzed him, as the world got darker around them. The flashy orange embers from the hearth were now floating in space, grower bigger, threatening. The world was nothing but orange ambers. And her voice alone gave rhythm to his fragile but irrefutable existence.
“You will know love, my boy. And friendship as well. You will trust and glorify your precious ones, invest time and energy in your dedication to them, hoping for them to do the same in return, and still, forgiving them when they don’t, accepting their scarcely demonstrated gratitude as a more than sufficient reward. In your heart, you will praise their loyalty and faithfulness. But they will go. Soon or later. They will. And you will be alone, with a void in your heart, for all the love you’ll have spread like a cobweb, like tentacles, will then be hanging limp and purposeless before your indifferent eyes.”
She paused for a second, gripping hard on the armrests as if she would throw herself against he floor. Her voice sounded calmer as she resumed. An older, resigned narrator.
“You can think that you share something with them, a link, a bound, unbreakable. But we are rocks in a riverbed, swept by the streams, thrown against each other one day, torn away the next. We roll on each other but never embrace. You know that. You cannot give them all your love. You will scare them, stifle them. And they will go. But you and I, we are the same. We keep trying, naively, desperately, to see through their eyes, and make them see through ours. It will never be. You are alone. People are dangerous. They are unsure of their needs, afraid to satisfy it, inconstant in their affections. You must be careful, my boy. More careful than I have been.”
A tear ran down her uneven cheek while she looked at him with immense eyes. Sad, understanding, immense eyes. And then she turned to the earth again, to the fire giving its last carbonic breath, and kept silent.
The child wanted to catch her attention again. But he did not know what to call her, and could not find anything relevant to her point. Restrained arguments echoed from the dining room, soon followed by lame uneasy jokes that tried and failed to ease the situation. Pathetic pretence that hatred and bilious grudge are no serious matter. He knew she would not turn to him again.
He stood up and went to his room. But sleep was long to come, and the darkness filled with nauseous screams soaring from his guests ridden parents’ bedroom, and his own inability to believe the old woman had indeed lost half her mind, for her words had started to settle in his brain, and slowly unfurled their cold semantic network with a lethal, yet perfect method.

Soundtrack: “Secret Girl”, Sonic Youth