A stairway leads to the room above, a room with a leaky ceiling that leaks in a continuous rate, a rate that if paid attention to would drive the most sane of men mad. As a collective, the people of the village know not to enter the room, they fear the leak that once heard, is all you can hear. It takes over your senses like a fiery romance takes over your heart. One second you are living your life, which means simply doing what one does, breathing, hearing, observing but never being truly present; then, you’re stuck listening to the drop as it drops…drops…drops…
One Autumn afternoon, after the annual fair that leaves all boys and girls with a sense of magic that only bright lights under dark skies can cause, a gang of boys and one girl decided to climb up the stairway that leads to the leaky room above. Once at the stairway, most fled, but the girl and one boy stayed. The girl because she had a curiosity that fear couldn’t repel, and the boy because he had a crush that made him dumber than a rock.
Let’s go, she said, as she reached out her hand.
The boy took a few moments to muster the courage that wasn’t his own, and then took her hand and went up the stairway that led to the room above: the one with the leaky ceiling that leaks at a constant, drowning rate.
Step by step the boards of the stairway creaked in a song that only old wood could produce. Old wood that hadn’t been walked over, cared for, or thought of for that matter, in years. After minutes of delicate, tremulous steps, the girl and the boy in tow, made their way to the top and into the room with the leaky ceiling.
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The first thing they noticed was not a leak but an array of books piled in towers across and on the shelves of the room. Dust covered, cobweb ridden books that were abandoned and forgotten. Tales and histories lost, forever in limbo as long as the fear of the leaky ceiling remained.
The boy and the girl spent hours looking through books of histories that they had only ever heard one side of. In exhalation, they would turn to each other and share a line that added ten new perspectives to the one-dimensional histories and stories that they had been taught as children.
This went on for hours and hours, they’re stomachs grew hungry but their hunger for the truth won over. They continued to pull at strings that would unravel thoughts and ideas that made up the very principle mechanics of this world. The world, the universe, the very concepts that rule their reality was penetrating into their minds like a light piercing through the clouds. With each turn of the page they understood more and more and more.
It also instilled something else within them..
They had to keep turning the page. With each book read, it made the next book that much more tantalizing. There are never enough answers. One will always lead to another.
And so they continued their journey until their bodies gave out and they could no longer turn the page. The boy was the first to go off into the next world, a world that he now, thanks to the forgotten books, knew something about.
Just one more drop the girl said as she forced her eyelids to stay open.
Just one more page…
Just one more page would put everything together, she mumbled to herself as she too gave in to the eternal slumber and transitioned into the next world.
And she was right.
Just one more page would have been enough.
It’s a shame that we only ever get enough and not a drop more.