On a perfectly ordinary summer day, where the sun shily reveals only half of its rays due to being wrapped in the gentle paddings of the cumulus clouds that adorn themselves with a backdrop of that same old blue, the very crown of every ordinary day - this day where crickets commence their orchestra of unseen lust in grassy green jungle brotheled highways and where the occasional sweat pearl is caressed away in an instant with a swift lick of windy tales... On this very day that so meticulously weaved its string of normalcy into my life, a pair of gilded scissors cut this very fabric in two, in a mere moment so delicate, it contained but a mere snip, a glint of golden hues. Except there were no scissors, no snip , no glint of golden hues... A child stood infront of me, tugging on my sleeve, perhaps in this moment synonymous with my consciousness, each tug pulling me further and further away and out of my day dreamy haze back onto the bench I was seated on. When she noticed that she had my attention, a barely audible giggle served as her own starting signal. And like every bell in the world rang at once in fervor, she bolted along the white garden wall that stretches ad infinitum into every cardinal direction, prompting me to do the same. For as it is with children, their mere presence casts a spell that pulls you into their frolic and delight, resistance dispelled and futile. We ran and ran, ran so far that distance as a concept for the first time bloomed into existence from its bud and soon after withered away again... Fast, so fast that all that was peripheral world melted into a unified mass of blurred colors. Time too, ran in inexplicable passing, us eventually coming to a stop, panting in a frenzied overclock of bodily functions, all the while keeping a faint smile on our face. When the world around me started to spring into form again, I first looked at the wall that we have been running along all this time, where I noticed, for the first time, an imperfection in its otherwise overwhelming white. There appeared to be a crack in the wall, large enough for a child to slip through with ease, tiny enough that I didn't trust my judgment in whether or not I, let alone any normal-sized adult, could manage to squeeze through this abnormality. As I was thinking about this possibility, the girl was already on the other side, stretching her pale arm through the crack, signaling me to follow. I set my doubts aside for a moment, and if this was the key to enter in the first place, I slipped through the wall with the same ease I imagined a child would. Beyond the wall there was the garden, a rich green meadow stretching into the horizon. In this large open space, I felt like a narcotized frog in a boiling pot, for large open spaces always seem to have this effect on me. Hopping, twirling, dancing...the girl was moving infront of me, inviting me to follow into the great beyond, and as we started our wanderings, something sprang into view: an apple tree, its fruits a crimsoned red - I imagined Eve allured. Its trunk and twigs seemed a little weak, drained of essence, like the tree nourished the fruits with all of its life force, soon to perish in its endeavor. The girl made no halt infront of our first discovery. Just as if one would pass an apple tree on a roadside, she plucked the juiciest and roundest-looking apple from the tree and took a bite, her faint grin exploding into a crescent, bursting into a sprint, which made me keep pace, but not without looking back at the tree, which had now withered towards the ground in a deep bowed statue, emitting a quality of mourning. Our further wanderings were accompanied by a rare utterance of words: "I learned how to tie a butterfly ribbon just the other day" the girl said in a beam of a smile, which I reciprocated in silence. Soon after we encountered what I would describe as a graveyard without rest. There were all kinds of animals lying around in between a valley of stones: Cats curled up with their spines bent backwards, dogs panting under the heat without a tongue and doves with clipped wings, some dead, some barely clinging onto life in faint motions of breath and wavering twinkle in marbled eyes. As we slowly trudged through this interstice of life and death, the girl occasionally stopped to tie ribbons around some of the animals that were still undecided in their fate. "And for you too, a sun to read the dark..." she muttered. Every ribbon tied; a deathblow of hell roaded euthanasia - the final pull to complete the knot - the eternal silencer of every breath, every twinkle now a faint shimmer. The girl knows nothing of it, and I have not the heart to utter syllables of sound. Thus we march on, my steps weighted, a heart like lead. We decided to take a break, all this walking took a real toll on me. I wanted to lie down in the grass for a while, close my eyes and feel the sun bathe me in its glory. The girl, meanwhile, was doing cartwheels around me when all of a sudden we heard a rhythmic noise that seemed to draw closer towards us. After staring into the horizon for a while, the source of the noise made itself visible: A giant, made entirely out of what appeared to be glass, walking towards us. His body was entirely see-through, and with each step he took, there appeared another crack somewhere on his body. Despite this, the giant didn't make halt and we had to move out of the way eventually, since we had the feeling that he would squish us otherwise. By the time he reached us, it looked like you could tear his arm off by shaking his hand, his body now a walking mosaic. The girl spoke to the giant: "Mr. Giant, where are you going?" ... But the giant kept on walking, not paying any attention to the girl, who now shouted once more "MR GIANT,PLEASE TELL ME WHERE YOU ARE GOING!!" ...After the giant ignored her a second time, she became infuriated. The girl started to run after the giant, substituting her words with a touch on his large heel and in a flash, the giant glass mosaic sprang into a million pieces, weaving into the air a rainbowed spectacle of colors... "So Pretty..." The girl said in sweeping awe "So this is where Mr. Giant was heading...". Sometimes, the girl sees things that I don't. Sometimes, the girl hears things that I don't. On a particularly long stretch of nothing but the green meadow that encases us, she suddenly stopped to give me a deeply sullen look, pointing towards what appeared to me as a random spot in the sky, saying, "Unfortunately, the clock is ticking". No matter how hard I tried to listen, there was nothing but all-encompassing silence around the center of my being, no tick and no tock to speak of. And no matter how hard I squinted my eyes, there was no clock hand performing its rhythmic dance either. It is here where I wondered... was I once able to see these things? Have I simply lost an inborn sense under the wheels of time? If yes, why? Would this girl's perception also slowly but surely erode without her noticing anything? There are truths in this world, truths one should not speak of... and this might just be one of them, I thought. We hurried in our step and before we knew it, we reached our final destination. Dozens of small white building blocks were strewn about the grass. Like magnets, they propelled the girl towards them and without hesitation, she started building various different things: Towers, houses, animals, a tree, a human and so on... Notably, she always destroyed the thing she built before starting to build something new. Building and destroying, building and destroying. Innocence is the child, I thought. They go where they please, they do what they please, innocently but ruinously, their forgetfulness a new beginning. It was then that the girl built her final creation: a plain white wall, like the one that encased this garden. I looked into her eyes for the first time, a crystalline lake of blue, which pulled me in deeper and deeper until, with a flick of her finger, she destroyed the very wall that she just built a moment before, summoning a sound larger than life. When I looked behind me, the endlessly long garden wall sprang into millions, billions of building block pieces, burrowing the skies blue, the clouds, the sun and eventually, myself under its colorless weight.