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The years went by just a little too fast. Before they knew it they were older, and wiser. They were sitting on trains traveling in endless loops to day jobs. They were at home fixing bottles of milk for their own children that cried and defecated incessantly. They were worrying about money and they were spending their evenings watching old re-runs on television.
The children were brothers and sisters and cousins, and before they knew it the years had passed them by in what seemed like an instant. They didn’t talk about it anymore, though they all wanted to. Each of them now was in their thirties, caught in the headlights of bills and taxes and mortgages. But they all remembered, and they all regretted.
They had discovered Cecilia, the youngest, standing in the basement. Only five years old, she had snuck away from the party, which was all glasses of wine and ‘haven’t you grown!’ and utterly boring. The rest of them, the brothers and sisters and cousins, had been sent to find her, and the basement was one of the first places they went, thrilled at having permission, sort of, to finally go down there. They descended the steep stone steps carefully into the black musk of the basement.
Cecilia was talking to the darkness.
“I don’t know,” she had said. And the others were completely unsurprised to hear no reply from the darkness.
“Cecilia, what are you doing?”
Cecilia turned around and smiled at them.
“Everyone is looking for you.”
Cecilia suddenly turned back around, excited, and said “Can they join in?”
Everyone peered a little closer into the darkness, trying to discern what she was talking to, but the light from above was being devoured and barely made a dent in the thick dark.
“Join in with what?” One of them said, audibly spooked. The others felt the same, a little afraid.
Cecilia suddenly giggled and turned back around. “You can join in,” she said, “I have a wish. But I don’t know what to wish for.”
Each of them, the brothers and sisters and cousins relaxed, realising that it was a game, a five year old and an imagination and a dark, empty basement.
“Money,” came one particularly frugal reply.
“Love,” came another, slightly more mature, slightly more wistful.
Cecilia just tilted her head. “I was thinking of staying up past my bed time,” she said.
The eldest of them laughed, “I know how you can get all that at once,” he said. “Money and love and staying up past your bedtime, what you want to is to be a grown up.”
Cecilia gasped and clapped her little hands together. Each of them took a moment to daydream of being grown ups. They imagined wealth and love, some of them, freshly teenaged also imagined sated lusts. They imagined staying up past their bed times.
“Yes, I wish we were all grown ups.” Cecilia said.
In the moments that had followed, not very much happened. Then memories began to appear in their minds. Vague memories of things they had not done. They recalled first kisses, graduation, heartache and pain and joy and excitement. Suddenly the memories began to pour into their minds, job interviews and walks in the park and then they remembered funerals, crying for departed parents. They remembered weddings, each others and their own. Birthday after birthday popped into their minds, anniversaries, births, christenings. Both successes and failures, they found their young minds growing jaded and weary.
And then the flood of memories slowed down, ground to a halt. They looked at their hands, and at each others faces, now twenty-five years older than they were. But there was no shock as they could recall every moment from then to now. They were all aware of their lives; they had homes, and partners, children and responsibilities. The memories though were intangible things, it was like trying to imagine seeing something that you have only seen in photographs. They could remember colour and shape, but the experience was not there.
Quietly, sadly, they climbed the steps out of the basement, into the abandoned, dusty house and went their separate ways back to the lives that they had not lived.
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