And If It's Cold Will You Stay Warm? You Drift Too Far Will You Swim Towards The Shore? And If You Fell In Love Will You Hold Onto It?

--"If You Fall", Azure Ray

There was an episode of The Gummi Bears where they brought to life a princess from one of the storybooks. I can't for the life of me recall if it was one of Zummi's spells gone wrong or if it was one of Cubbi's and Sunni's adventures gone wrong. I remember the princess looked a lot like me (as much as a cartoon representation can resemble a real person) and I remember that she sounded eerily like my voice sounded at the time. Now, I'm not one to believe in messages very often, but I do believe that there are some lessons the Lord likes us to learn taught in some very funny means. The episode dealt with the fact that this princess--let's call her Breasanne--wanted to remain free to roam and not be bound within the story that had been her only existence. She thought that now that she was out and about, kicking up life quicker than a hoedown, that she shouldn't be forced to return to the life that had been written out for her.

Hell's bells, that's a topic I can relate to. I used to feel like my life was scripted out before I was even born. I used to feel like a character in someone else's story, and a minor character at that.

That episode got me to thinking. What happens to the characters we write and create when we're creating art? What becomes of their life once we've tapped the brief piece of their lives that interest us? Do they go on living or does their "life" end the moment we no longer have use for them? In the case of Breasanne, the had to eventually put her back in the book due to some cosmic malady that her absence wrought. She didn't want to go, but she had to in order to save her new Gummi friends. Her sacrifice was what the episode was about, that possibly sacrifice of one's life is the ultimate way to prove that you are alive. You can't give someone a gift you never possessed in the first place, you know?

But what I wanted to know was always if it was cold in her storybook life. I wanted to know if the story was written for her to fall down the stairs, did she know her fate and try to avoid tripping too badly? I wanted to know if she had ideas about where her life was headed or if she was like us and had no clue whether she was headed for her dreams or destruction. I wanted to know if she got scared if the author never wrote "Breasanne was scared." I wanted to know if she had ugly days, depressed days, funny days, if her creator never had the forethought to include these details in her biography. I wanted to know if her life extended beyond what we could read about her.

I sometimes fret about the ins and outs of existence. We're like God's characters in a sense. We have a destiny we don't know about. We go through life the way He intended us to go through it. We make choices, seemingly of our own free will, but He's already known what we were going to choose eons ago. We're very much trapped in the life that has already been inked for us. The difference is I do get cold. The difference is I have fallen down stairs and gotten boo-boos. The difference is I had some say in where I was headed. The difference was nobody had to tell me I was scared some days. I knew that instinctually. I've had ugly days. I've had depressed days. I've had lots of funny days. And I'd like to think that my life is far more than what one person can read about here or any other place. I am not the sum of my stories or thoughts or deeds.

I'd like to think there's a whole side to life that makes me richer and more fulfilled than a character in God's story of me. He might be my creator, but I breathe on my own, please, thank you. Yes, it may feel like I'm the cat fated to chase after that rascally mouse because that's what I'm supposed to do, but there's a life beyond these pages of musings that I write. There's a whole world of adventure and excitement that I never manage to bother to share with anyone here. Some people are lucky enough to hear the complete truth, some people are only lucky enough to hear parts of it. But whatever anyone else hears, only I know me. I'm the only one who knows the complete story.

No matter how many stories I relay here, there'll never be one that will completely sum me up. I could go and write for a thousand years and never find the one incident that'll tell it like it is. Like my daddy says, "you can only ever see one side of the moon at a time." That's me, there's a part hidden away because I hide it away. I'm like my own author, telling you what you need to know, and keeping what you don't locked away inside my soul. Just because I don't say I had oatmeal this morning, doesn't mean it didn't happen. And just because I don't say I worried about my nail chipping, doesn't mean I didn't. I pick and choose my story everyday. I'm never someone else's sidekick in their story.

Never.

I live therefore I write, not I write therefore I live.

Breanne