No.11 Make (Yourself) Believe,

The little girl believed she felt the energy of the past. It seemed to her that the people of the past had just been there a moment before her. So much had not changed and there was so much evidence of their existence. Their feet had worn down the stone front step of her house, the repeated touch of their hands had smoothed the wooden hand rail on the stairs and polished the brass door handle of her bedroom. How could she not feel close to them? It was as if they were just round the corner, in the next room, just out in the garden. And then of course the little girl would hear the echos of the past too.

Some might say it was her imagination or make believe. But isn’t that what make believe means? The little girl took it as an instruction…..Make yourself believe! In all the best stories you have to make yourself believe, really believe, for magic to work and for dreams to come true. So the little girl did make herself believe. She believed in the energy that she felt, and the echos that she heard, from the past.

In the evenings, when the house was quiet and the little girl was in bed, she would hear them. I’d like to tell you how many times the little girl heard someone from the past but the truth is it happened so often she didn’t bother to kept count. It wasn’t every night, because sometimes the little girl went straight to sleep, but it wasn’t just once or twice either. It was frequent and often over the years the little girl lived there.

What the little girl would hear was another little child, an even smaller child than herself. The little girl would hear the child run along the corridor downstairs and out into the garden, presumably to play. The little girl thought the running child must be younger and smaller than her because the sound of the running and skipping footsteps were lighter on their toes than she would be. The running child seemed to be happy judging by the skipping. The most puzzling thing about it was the fact that they were up so late when she had to be in bed! The little girl would want to get up and go out to play in the garden too but she was tired and in her nightclothes and anyway there’d be another time, another evening to meet up and play together….she just needed to make herself believe that.