Kissing the Stars

I'm sure that everyone reading this was once a little kid. One who would go outside during the late hours, lay back, and look at the stars overhead. Maybe trying to count all of them until they reached 15 and just gave up. But no matter how we looked at life and our surroundings, we always tried turning them into something magical.

For example: I was a very imaginative little kid as I was growing up. My friends and I would get together with some stuffed animals and create a new story every time we got together. Sometimes it would involve being spies, sometimes being in a normal family (like playing house), or even stories of a dystopian society where only a few characters were brave enough to stand up against the tyranny of the evil ruler. Granted, we had no idea what the words "dystopian" or "tyranny" meant back then, yet we still knew about them. And that's the point I'm trying to get at with this blog. No matter what way you slice it, without the darkness or the evil, there's not much of a point to telling a fairytale.

I mean, think about it! How do you think "Jack and the Beanstalk" would have been if Jack had just gone up the vine, found the magical harp, and climbed back down without any conflict whatsoever? Uh... hoorah? Good for Jack? Or what about if Cinderella went with her loving stepmother and stepsisters to the ball, met the prince, got married, and everything was la-dee-da lovely after that? I don't know about you, but I'd be snoring.

And without this evil and this darkness in the story, would we really care about what happens to our characters? In "Titanic", Rose loses Jack after he freezes to death in the icy water. Now that part really hit me and made me feel terrible. That darkness grabbed everyone in the audience as if they had just lost one of their loved ones. But when she is reunited with him in the afterlife, it made the audience cry again! Not out of sadness or despair, but out of joy. "...the world where this Joy happens is as full of darkness as our own world, and that is why when it happens it is as poignant as grief and can bring tears to our eyes."