“We are trying to communicate that which lies in our deepest heart, which has no words, which can only be hinted at through the means of a story.”

“It is a small world. You do not have to live in it particularly long to learn that for yourself. There is a theory that, in the whole world, there are only five hundred real people (the cast, as it were; all the rest of the people in the world, the theory suggests, are extras) and what is more, they all know each other. And it’s true, or true as far as it goes. In reality the world is made of thousands upon thousands of groups of about five hundred people, all of whom will spend their lives bumping into each other, trying to avoid each other, and discovering each other in the same unlikely teashop in Vancouver. There is an unavoidability to this process. It’s not even coincidence. It’s just the way the world works.” –Neil Gaiman

Growing up I dreamt of visiting every single city in every country on every continent of the world. I wanted to meet everyone and know them intimately. I imagined the seven billion birthday cards I’d send to the far corners of the earth; a million secrets and inside jokes and memories; walking into a mall and knowing each passerby by name. Neil Gaiman’s assumption that I’d only ever know five hundred of these souls shocked me– the thought that I would spend a good part of my life trying to avoid some of them nearly broke my heart.

But “it’s just the way the world works.”

I’m not fond of that statement–though it is the way literature works. You have a select cast of characters who are “important,” a chosen few whose lives make the story possible accompanied by a menagerie of meaningless faces that blend into the background. I wonder sometimes in the stories of my friends lives how often I’m forgotten. Am I at least a single chapter or is my influence rendered through a mere sentence? Will the readers have any memory of my presence by the end?

x Johannah E.

C: ffffound, Neil Gaiman

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