Yesterday I met the lady who sold words. She used to stay close to my house but as more and more people came to stay near us, she left the village and went into the woods. She made a cottage for herself and started living there. Yesterday I was feeling quite low and decided to take a long walk in the woods. After the mad rush of the day I was so longing to hear the silence of the woods. It was such a beautiful landscape; slightly uphill a walk and then the plain, part green, part grey and then lots of blue sky. The walk uphill made me somewhat breathless and I sat on the grass. That’s when I saw her. It was almost dusk, she was collecting small sticks to make a fire. I tried helping her with the weeds and pine cones. Summer was almost ending; the evenings were turning a bit chilly. It had not rained for a while and there was a sense of dryness to everything. In minutes the fire started crackling and we both sat by it. She had always been a good friend. Now looking at her in the fading sunlight I noticed she is getting older. But she was beautiful with the sad eyes that seemed completely void of dreams. I knew her quite well and was sad to see her so lonely and lost. She smiled and asked how life has been for me lately. I was anyway tired of my own silly life and did not want to speak one word about myself. Instead I asked her about herself. She smiled again and said - let me tell you a story today.
Back in the days when I was just beginning to realize my gift with words, I had met a little boy. I met him by chance. It was daybreak and like most young girls I was collecting flowers by the village lake. It was one of those days when the clouds hung low, dark and gloomy. I remember it was very windy that morning, cause the first thing he asked me was ‘ where do you think the wind takes you with it? Do you think she is angry?' Then he smiled and started talking. His world was so full of wonders. It had more colors than a rainbow. He would just look at the still lake to imagine what all lies underneath. So vivid, he drew pictures with imagination. God knows where he got all his colors from. He was a very beautiful child - A smile never left his lips, it was an age when everything seems possible – reaching for the stars and flying in the sky are just a child’s play. Everything and everybody was nice and happy. He lived in this big beautiful dream and called it life. As you can imagine we got talking. I had the words, he had the imagination. The pictures we drew were perfect. For once he was getting answers to his otherwise crazy questions and for once I was mesmerized by all that goings on in his little head. Together we built castles in the sand, got lost in the desert, sailed in a mad sea and walked on the moon. Needless to say we lost all sense of time and space and were lost in our own world. When it started raining, we went in to the broken house near the lake. From the window we looked at the raindrops dancing on the lake, numerous small ripples created by numerous small raindrops. He pointed out - the number of ripples must be more then the number of raindrops. When we could not see the raindrops anymore we located a moon on the dark sky. He told me its black because it’s a combination of all the colors. When I asked how did he know that, he said while trying to invent a new color with his paintbrushes he found that out - mixed all available colors and created this special color. He actually thought it’s a new color but his mother told him it is called black and it was already known to the world and he was somewhat disappointed. The moon kept playing with the white and grey clouds. It was wonderful trying to guess the shape of the cloud in the dim moonlight, but we managed to find a bear, a bird, 3 monsters of undefined shape and a fish. The moon kept going up in the sky and we were still together, wherever we were. Then slowly, gradually we could see outlines of trees, the lake. The sky was getting clearer now. Then there was the sunrise. He explained how one can get the color of sunrise, the exact orange pink red. He told me how much of which color will make that color, I forget that now. I was never for colors you see. All I had were words. And now I was running out of them. After a full day of living completely by my senses, I was just spent. We came out of the house, stretched and looked again at each other in the first ray of the sun.
