cliodhna’s wave

There was once a boy who liked playing with his friends and having fun and being happy and he had lots of friends who loved him and wanted to play with him and so they would pass their days making up games and wandering the countryside discovering lost treasures and making up stories as they went.
He had lots of coats he loved wearing. Some were bright yellow and some were dark blue with stars and some were silver and shimmered in the sunlight and sparkled in the moon light. He had long coats and short coats, some with beads and bells on them and others of the finest silk that slid noiselessly through the air.
He would choose carefully every morning which one he felt like wearing. What colour, what style and at the end of the day he put it carefully back in the coat rack for the next day he wanted to wear it. He took good care of his coats.
One day though, something happened, someone was mean to him, or hit him or threatened him and when the evening came he did not take off the coat. He didn’t want to, he wanted to keep it on as protection or as comfort and he went to bed and slept in it. The next morning he put another coat on, on top of the first one and he went out to play.
From then on he changed. He didn’t take the coats off as he had done before. He kept them on and he began to wear bigger ones and heavier ones to protect himself from the world. He moved slower and didn’t laugh as much as before and his friends gave up trying to cheer him up and eventually left him to his plodding walk and silence. People made fun of him then. Slowcoach, they called him and pitied him and stayed away from him and his gloom. Eventually he stopped going out of the house and stayed there and no-body called to the door.
This went on for a while, until one day, he felt a stirring in his heart. The sun was shining outside after a rainstorm and everything was wet and shone and sparkled like jewels. It reminded him of one of his favorite coats and he looked down at what he was wearing. For the first time in ages he wanted to wear a special coat and he felt dirty and itchy and smelly inside this big coat he was wearing. He took it off and the one underneath and then the next one. How many coats am I wearing he thought to himself?
He continued taking them off, getting lighter as they went down, thinner and as he took each one off he remembered what had happened that made him keep it on in the first place. A heavy black one was the day the bigger boy had punched him in the nose and the teacher had thought he started it and punished him instead. The grey one was the day he stole something and then blamed someone else. The next one down was when he had a fight with his best friend and never said sorry. He also began to remember the good times with his friends in each coat. The green one, now faded with its silver buttons gone, was a day of summer adventure in the mountains when they had found the sheep skull and made a fort. The silver shining one was a moonlight search for fairies and goblins in the forest. He smiled when he remembered how scared and how excited they had been.
He kept peeling them off until at last, none remained and he stared down at his naked body all dirty and grubby. He ran a bath and sat in it until all the soap-bubbles had been burst and he was clean and water soaked and his fingers had water ridges in them. He stood up feeling lighter and happier than he had ever in his life.
I will never let myself wear all those coats again, he thought
He ran out the door naked with nothing on and danced down the street. The children in school saw him and laughed and told their teacher but she didn’t believe them and told them to stop staring out the window. He danced past a house where children were playing in the yard. They ran in and asked their mother could they go with him but she shook her said, ‘You must have imagined it? She said ‘No-one goes out and dances in the street naked’. He danced past a café where people sat drinking coffee but they didn’t see him, they were too busy… reading papers, talking.
Coat boy danced into the hills and the mountains and far away close. He is still dancing to this day and if you are very lucky he will dance past you some day. Don’t blink… you might miss him!