Time Is My Only Friend

Shall I tell you a secret? My real name is Jester. It’s a secret I keep close to my heart dear reader. A secret few know. Only my beloved, both of them, know this secret. Not even Alice knows.

Well how do I begin this tale? Once you have spent so long knowing Time, you begin to learn that beginnings are not in fact real. There is no start and there is no end. That is the one thing about Time. It is constant. It always is. She is always there. He is always with us. I know, for I have been places where Time has changed. I have been places where Time has stopped. I have known Time, loved Time, betrayed Time, and lived with and without Time and even lost Time. But even in the realms where I have tried to keep Time away, there is still a constant movement. A patient seeping as Time intrudes one’s life. Time knows it cannot die. Time knows it cannot end. So Time has learned to be patient, for even if it doesn’t want to, it always wins.

There is always Time for tea

Ha, I’m getting distracted already. I guess it is difficult for me to write a story, for my innate madness wants me to scribble all over the page, while another part of me wants to write riddles and confuse people. To write a linear story, in a way understood by many is a skill not natural to me. But I have lived a long life, so I shall try.

Can it be called a life? Who knows? Is it many lives? Well, I've had many names such as Mad Hatter, The Dark Times and even Hook. Even then, what I tell you is only a short segment of all that I have lived. And hardly like the real thing since words can only ever mirror reality. It will never be the real thing.

So I guess I should start where most would understand, which is when I was known as the Mad Hatter, but to do so, I must break some truths to you. Before I was known as the Mad Hatter, I was simply a jester, drawn upon a book. I had no thoughts or life as you would know it. More I existed as single unthinking ink lifeform, swallowed up by other entities like me. One girl changed that though. Dear Alice. Who would’ve thought that the single sight of my drawing inspired the entity that came to exist in her dreams? That’s how Wonderland started you see. Like many worlds you know, they often started as dreams. Something that existed within the mind of another, to be visited over and over again, only to be forgotten by daylight. But Alice entered it through a rabbit hole didn’t she? Or was that a part of the dream as well?

To be honest I could not truly tell you. No one really knows how dream world comes to exist half-independently. The truth is very few people cross the barrier from “reality” into these strange fantasies that seem to exist without a solid explanation. Even rarer do people learn about them. The only reason I did was because of my friend Time. That si the nature of art and literature. In honesty, no one thinks these worlds really exist apart from those who live in them. And none but me have ever crossed from one “realm” as I shall call them to another.

Time.

I should probably explain how I and he became friends. Time that is. Well I am not sure myself. Time told me that we met, because Alice had dreamt so in one of her dreams, before the foundations of Wonderland where set in stone. I do not know. And while Time may be a good friend, she can lie. All I know is for as long as I can remember being the Mad Hatter, and ‘living’ in the sense you would know it, I have known Time. It was like we went together, me and Time. My oldest friend. Perhaps it was my friendship with Time, understood by no other, which led to my reputation as Mad. Then again it could have been many other things. I could simply be Mad.

Anyway with this setup and us all on the same page. (Well most likely not since everyone has a different interpretation of words). I shall now begin this tale...