The Ocean at the End of the Lane

by Neil Gaiman

“I remember my own childhood vividly . . . I knew terrible things. But I knew I mustn’t let adults know I knew. It would scare them.”

I stared at the house, remembering less than I had expected about my teenage years: no good times, no bad times.

Childhood memories are sometimes covered and obscured beneath the things that come later, like childhood toys forgotten at the bottom of a crammed adult closet, but they are never lost for good.

As we age, we become our parents; live long enough and we see faces repeat in time.

Memories were waiting at the edges of things, beckoning to me.

I liked that. Books were safer than other people anyway.

I made friends slowly, when I made them.

I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.

I don’t remember how the dreams started. But that’s the way of dreams, isn’t it?

I did not want it to exist, the bridge between my dream and the waking world.

“That’s the trouble with living things. Don’t last very long. Kittens one day, old cats the next. And then just memories. And the memories fade and blend and smudge together . . .”

Small children believe themselves to be gods, or some of them do, and they can only be satisfied when the rest of the world goes along with their way of seeing things.

I liked myths. They weren’t adult stories and they weren’t children’s stories. They were better than that. They just were.

Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences.

I thought, I’m going to die. And, thinking that, I was determined to live.

I wanted that yesterday back again, and I wanted it so badly.

“Monsters come in all shapes and sizes. Some of them are things people are scared of. Some of them are things that look like things people used to be scared of a long time ago. Sometimes monsters are things people should be scared of, but they aren’t.”

“Oh, monsters are scared,” said Lettie. “That’s why they’re monsters.

“I’m going to tell you something important. Grown-ups don’t look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they’re big and thoughtless and they always know what they’re doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. The truth is, there aren’t any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world.”

Children, as I have said, use back ways and hidden paths, while adults take roads and official paths.

Adults should not weep, I knew. They did not have mothers who would comfort them.

I was a normal child. Which is to say, I was selfish and I was not entirely convinced of the existence of things that were not me, and I was certain, rock-solid unshakably certain, that I was the most important thing in creation. There was nothing that was more important to me than I was.

I stood there for perhaps two heartbeats, and it felt like forever.

“Nothing’s ever the same,” she said. “Be it a second later or a hundred years. It’s always churning and roiling. And people change as much as oceans.”

A story only matters, I suspect, to the extent that the people in the story change.

Death happens to all of us.

“You don’t pass or fail at being a person, dear.”