Prologue
As a child, we are all known to be naïve, adventurous and impressionable. Our softened hearts are new to the world and we have a curiosity nothing can satisfy for years.
As we grow older, that curiosity dies down. Our imaginations grow weak.
However, the beauty that we once have appreciated has never left our lives; we have just become blind, deaf, or perhaps even mute to it. We cannot speak to those "things" anymore, or listen to them respond back to us. We cannot gaze at their beauty and appreciate their majesty. We have been shut off to a different world of flashing man-made lights and toxic substances -- cheap imitations of what we once had. We long to return to that lovely state; the broad expanse of our past lives that we have thrown away permanently for suits, briefcases and books.
The only way back to that magical world is now art.
We use words, strokes, and sounds to recreate that euphoric world. We make a rickety bridge that is worn down with each re-reading of text, each repeating of a song, each reviewing of a painting. Perhaps that is why we have a natural need to constantly create – the past bridges have been used so many times they can no longer hold us as we try to cross over them again.
The human body is constantly deteriorating. Each time we attempt to recall a memory, we recreate it from scratch and the re-conception is further from the actual truth each time we delve back into it. Life's wonderful irony makes it so that the memories we have forgotten about are the ones that are preserved so well. Our minds are not garbage bins, but a massive storehouse that is simply a blueprint of each memory we have ever had. We reconstruct them every time and fail because we are flawed as beings.
We have a hunger to remember, to appreciate, to cross over to that miraculous world of infant-like feelings and to love life again as we have before.
I believe that, as children, we were able to see things that we no longer can.
Some of us can sense things, or sometimes those things will come to us in our sleep as we dream and speak to us then. We have given these things names.
Demons. Angels. Spirits.
These things are the invisible wonders that we once had the privilege of "playing" with as children. We could see them. They could touch us. Naturally, a demon could care less about a simple human child – feeding on more matured beings are much more satisfying [more blood and flesh] as well as easier to possess, for most can no longer see them.
And I can assure you one thing: nothing is more beautiful than these ethereal creatures.
The stories of fairies or trolls or elves are not so far from the truth – those are all beings that have taken a different form. A hiding spirit or an angel undercover. Perhaps a demon with a mask, as the Japanese folk have described their spirits at times. But these creatures... these things are what we humans have been chasing for so long. The weeping of an angel. The rhapsody of a devil. The song of a spirit. We have sought after their wonderful noises, their beauty on paper, their lyrics in words. We have only come so far.
I have stopped striving to recreate their sounds, but to make my own sound now. I am creating an index, an account, a dictionary... a book.
The Book of Creatures.
This is merely the beginning. I will recreate my past journals during my boyhood and adulthood into electronic text so their stories – the demons', angels', and spirits', not mine – can be enjoyed as simple "tales," for there is a grain of truth in every lie.
That has not changed, after all.
I do not know how long I have left on this world; I have been told by many a creature that human lives are brief, and it is not until now that I have fully accepted that fact. But, my life has been that of a happy and sad one. I have dear friends and a being whom I love and adore. I do not want to think of when I will disappear, but… in due time, it will happen.
This is the account of Aiden Wright, a man with child's eyes.
**Ironically, upon writing this, I have also happened across Natsume's Book of Friends which is uncannily similar. Bluh.