The Ocean at the End of the Lane

by Neil Gaiman

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.

Sometimes when I look in the mirror I see my father’s face, not my own, and I remember the way he would smile at himself, in mirrors, before he went out. “Looking good,” he’d say to his reflection, approvingly. “Looking good.”

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

I lay on the bed and lost myself in the stories. I liked that. Books were safer than other people anyway.

“He’s called Monster,” he said. It felt like a bad joke.

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

I wondered what would happen if Ursula Monkton pulled off her face, what would be underneath that?

She was the storm, she was the lightning, she was the adult world with all its power and all its secrets and all its foolish casual cruelty. She winked at me.

Monkton was an adult. It did not matter, at that moment, that she was every monster, every witch, every nightmare made flesh. She was also an adult, and when adults fight children, adults always win.

“Everything here is so weak, little girl. Everything breaks so easily. They want such simple things.

It was as if the essence of grandmotherliness had been condensed into that one place, that one time. I was not at all afraid of Ursula Monkton, whatever she was, not then. Not there.

Peas baffled me. I could not understand why grown-ups would take things that tasted so good when they were freshly-picked and raw, and put them in tin cans, and make them revolting.

I stared at him. Adults only ever said that when it, whatever it happened to be, was going to hurt so much.

“Can’t you just snip it out? The thing in my heart, that they want? Maybe you could snip

I understood it then, at the last, and felt foolish for not understanding it sooner. The girl beside me, on her mother’s lap, at her mother’s breast, had given her life for mine.

It’s hard enough being alive, trying to survive in the world and find your place in it, to do the things you need to do to get by, without wondering if the thing you just did, whatever it was, was worth someone having . . . if not died, then having given up her life.

His face and arms were tan, not the cherry-red of monoxide poisoning,

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

She had such unusual eyes. They made me think of the seaside, and so I called her Ocean, and could not have told you why.

“Is it true?” and felt foolish. Of all the questions I could have asked, I had asked that.

And then I said, “Which never happened. You know what I mean.”

“I don’t remember.” She pushed the hair from her eyes. “It’s easier that way.”

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

“Same thing as happens every other time you’ve come here,” said the old woman. “You go home.” “I don’t know where that is, anymore,” I told them. “You always say that,” said Ginnie.

I wondered where the illusion of the second moon had come from, but I only wondered for a moment, and then I dismissed it from my thoughts. Perhaps it was an afterimage, I decided, or a ghost: something that had stirred in my mind, for a moment, so powerfully that I believed it to be real, but now was gone, and faded into the past like a memory forgotten, or a shadow into the dusk.

This book is the book you have just read. It’s done. Now we’re in the acknowledgments. This is not really part of the book. You do not have to read it. It’s mostly just names.

In Sarasota, Florida, Stephen King reminded me of the joy of just writing every day. Words save our lives, sometimes.