Pinocchio in Reverse
Do you ever cry when a story is finished? I don’t mean because of a sad ending, a death, or a separation. Do you cry simply because it’s over?
Let me tell you a story.
Once upon a time, long, long ago, in a land far, far away, there was a toymaker who made a wooden puppet as big as a child one day and named him Pinocchio. A doll who wanted to be a real boy.
Once upon a time, in a faraway land, there lived a Girl—a dreamer. A Girl who never liked the Pinocchio story. She didn’t know why exactly, but something in his story always made her unhappy.
She was… different. Before you roll your eyes and dismiss her story, as we usually do when we come across a ‘girl who isn’t like the rest of her peers’, let me tell you this isn’t necessarily a good kind of difference. This isn’t the kind that makes her happy, special, and loved. No. This time, when the girl is different, she’s brought down to her knees by the force and weight of her pain.
When she was younger, while other kids were busy dreaming of becoming a doctor, a lawyer, or a teacher, she used to close her eyes every night, imagining she was a character in a story. One night, she was Bastian Bux, hiding away in an attic room, reading a magical book. Next she was Sherlock Holmes, Harry Potter, the Count of Monte Cristo, or Darren Shan. She got to be so many people and lived so many lives in her dreams. And if she always put herself in the place of the male characters in every story and dream, who could blame her? As a kid, the Girl saw her freedom in being a boy, a man. She thought being a boy would eliminate her differences from others, and make life easier.
All her life, she felt detached from life as it was lived by others. She had an unknown resentment for the To-Do list of life: study, check; go to university, check; find a partner, check… Things she knew she was supposed to want but was nonetheless wary and terrified of. Something was wrong or missing from her life.
But what was it? What was this thing—this unknown and suffocating thing—that made her restless, miserable, and lost? What was it that made her wish she could step out of her body, shed it like an old scratchy skin that didn’t fit—never had—and be free of her burden? What was the burden? She didn’t know, but she was more than eager to find out, to get to know herself, and to heal her aching heart.
Books are perhaps man’s greatest friends (constantly competing with dogs for that title). She turned to them and befriended them. Even though she enjoyed their company, once the story was over, she felt even more unsettled than before. Finishing a book and feeling the fictional walls receding and being replaced by reality broke her heart over and over and over again. More and more each day.
Years followed years, and the Girl grew up, keeping this love-hate relationship with the books at the periphery of her life. As she grew older, she found herself longing for another world. She was an alien among humans. Lost and afraid, feeling completely misplaced in her own life.
Gradually, however, things started to make sense. It was a slow and painful process, seemingly useless at first, but a process nonetheless. Despite the pain, she read more and more stories, found parts of herself in some, and lost parts of her soul within the pages of others. The Girl laughed and cried with those people in the pages, feeling a strong connection and compassion for them. It was a long journey, as all self-discovery journeys are, and it took the Girl a lot of courage and effort to finally admit the truth—her truth.
With trembling hands, a pounding heart, and tearful eyes, she finally admitted to herself that she never wanted to be a real girl. The thing that irritated her, confused her, and disappointed her all this time was her own realness.
Fantastic, right? That’s only logical; isolate the problem and then resolve it. Except it wasn’t a math problem. It wasn’t even logical. No matter how hard she tried, the Girl could not - cannot - un-real herself. It might sound funny. It is probably even ridiculous. But when you feel your heart ache, when you feel anxiety and melancholy invade your lungs and turn a simple thing such as breathing into a chore, you will no longer laugh. The despair alone will make you want to lie down and let the cold, dark tendrils of hopelessness wrap themselves around you like a moonless night embracing the world.
It broke her heart. It couldn’t possibly be true, but everything was starting to make sense. Everything she was supposed to want but never did. Everything she’d always wanted but could never tell anyone because she feared their judgment. It made sense, but it also terrified her. The thing about truth is that when you find it and don’t like it, you try so hard to ignore it. Terrified, she tried to ignore it all.
To protect herself from this pain, the Girl stopped reading for a while. She put on a mask of normalcy and tried so hard to stay away. To be normal. But all masked people get unmasked eventually, and there’s an expiration date on all lies and pretenses.
The joy of throwing herself back into a story was dizzying, but this time around, the pain of endings was overwhelming. Intensified. Like a kid who doesn’t want to go home after a fun day playing outside, screaming, crying, and stomping their feet, she too dreaded finishing a book. The more she read, the more she yearned to stay.
This was when she finally admitted and believed the terrifying truth that she’d already known deep in her heart all this time: that she belonged to stories, to the vast unreality of imagination. She never wanted to leave. Endings filled her with a rushing emptiness that swallowed her up. A jarring time travel back to a lonely land of reality. And every time, after reading the last words of a story that felt like home, incapacitated by the migration from fantastical to real, feeling miserable and abandoned, the Girl wished she weren’t real. She wished she were a character in a story, not weighed down by the expectations of reality.
Closing a book felt like closing the gates to the impossible, where dragons can fly and magic rugs can take you anywhere in the world. It chipped away at her heart a little every time. And it terrified the Girl, still does, to lose all her heart to this loss, this rejection, this brutal reality that she was condemned to a colorless life of realness. It’s the life of an exile: leaving everything you love behind and living in a place that is unstoppably real among people who have no time for stories. People who don’t understand what a burden reality can be.
How she wished she could one day open a book, take off her shoes, and just step into the story and be gone. She wished she were a pirate, sailing the seas, fighting monsters, having adventures, and being free. Oh, the adventures she’d have on that pirate ship! Oh, the wonders she’d see! The Girl wished she were a thief who could climb walls like a spider, jump from building to building like a cat with soundless footsteps like a ghost. Sometimes she wished she were a hobbit living in the Shire, always happy and carefree. Sometimes being Anne and living on Prince Edward's island was the dream that hunted her. While Narnia is a dream come true, she wished she could open any random door to any random world, walk inside, and never look back. True, reading itself is like opening doors to multiple universes, but when you’re done with a book, you have to go back to your original world. That was what hurt the Girl the most. That was the part of the adventure she so desperately wanted to change.
Iceland, Prague, and Berlin are nice places to travel to, but what she really craved was to get on a train in Lud-in-the-Mist and go to Ingray to spend a few days with Calcifer in the moving castle, and then from there take the next train to Neverland.
But alas!
It took the Girl years to come to terms with her reality, a reality full of contempt for realness. But it was freeing to finally say, “I don’t have high expectations. I’m not looking for Prince Charming in the real world. I don’t want fictional characters to be real; I want to be unreal myself. I’m the one who wants to step to the other side. To be part of a never-ending story.”
It’s a sad life—the real life. Draining, even. Filled to the brim with death. Death of hopes and dreams. It’s her cross to bear—her realness, that is—and she’ll carry it with a bleeding heart and a mind that will always wander in stories. Stories that have already been told, those that have yet to be told, and stories that might never be told.
Such is life.
Now you know why Pinocchio’s story always made her sad. Even as a kid, without knowing it herself, she felt sorry for him and for his ending—the plight of being a real boy. In a way, she’s still waiting for a fairy to come to her room one night, as they usually do creeps that they are, and whisper a spell to un-real her. She still wants to be fictional and belong to a fantastical world. She wants to be part of a story.
Once upon a time, there was a girl who didn’t fit in her own skin…
