“In the Time Before Time…”

I try and remember Before, the best that I can. Before work. Before taxes. Before hours on the phone with insurance-agents or accountants or doctors putting together treatment plans for grandma. Time was different, Before. There was more of it. There’s less and less time in the day, now– there are more and more things that need doing. Forms to fill out, emails to send. Open houses to attend. Dishes and laundry to do. Drafts to write and rewrite and scrap and start over and then rewrite again before giving up. I don’t really have time to be doing anything, anymore. 

I can’t afford to go and see my older daughter in the school’s winter musical tonight. It really will be enough if it’s just my partner who goes. But I clear my schedule as much as I can. I work in bed and I work over breakfast and lunch. I will be there. We will be there. Together; Unity. 

I don’t really have time to be doing this, even, these old axles and ball-joints and elegantly curving Masks. But I don’t feel entirely able to stop myself. 

I see simple shapes as I work– smooth, round stones and jagged black outlines in a sand pit, shifting and dancing and playing out their drama. I see a shadow casting itself upwards. I see the world itself toppling over backwards into helpless slumber– and I don’t even realize yet that it’s the world itself that’s fallen, here. I won’t realize it for another ten years. And when I do realize it, it is equal parts shock and relaxation, the muscles of the neck and wrists gently loosening, the natural shape of the story settling into itself, as it was always going to. Circular clarity. 

A legend is a story you tell someone to show them how the world is and how they ought to live in it. Doesn’t matter if it has any facts to it or not because it’s true. It’s true without facts because it tells you how the world is and how you ought to live in it, and it’s right, because it’s a legend, and it’s shaped your head and your heart to see the rightness of it. It doesn’t have to have been passed down over hundreds of generations, thousands of years. It doesn’t need temples. It needs a child sitting and listening by the fireside, or laying in bed, or watching from the couch, or dipping their fingers into the rippling pool of energized protodermis and finding themselves transformed. A legend lives in your head and in everything you do without you even realizing that you’re remembering it. Sometimes it does come to you, in little words, and you don’t even notice until you’ve already said them.

Both my daughters are fast asleep now in the backseat on the way home from the show. My older daughter is still in her costume. We’ll probably wind up putting her to bed in it. My partner is drifting off in the passenger-seat next to me– her eyes keep wilting shut, and then popping open again. She asks me if I need her to take over– she can take over if I need her to. I tell her it’s alright. We’re almost home. I’m exhausted, but I can keep going. I keep going, because I can; Duty. “That’s what a Toa would do.”

“…a what?”– her eyes pop open again. 

“Nothing, love. Just rest. I’ll wake you when we get there.”

A story written for little plastic building-toys is still a story. A legend with colorful heroes of fire and ice and air, masks of power, ever-rising darkness, enemies upon enemies upon enemies, each sold separately is still a legend. It cares about right and wrong. 

It’s been twenty-two years now since the beginning of Bionicle– the vast majority of my life. It’s been nearly a decade since the end, or what we are calling “the end”. But how long has it been since “the end” of Hercules? Bionicle is a legend; there is no end to it, and there are no words anywhere on paper or pixels that can truly declare one. Bionicle is a cultural practice; to sit and assemble Tahu from the parts in the bin for the three-hundredth time is to build Tahu anew, as truly as the very first. Tahu always spills from his canister onto the sands of Ta-Wahi, and through the motions of my fingers, he always pieces himself together. And then, when the time comes, he is always pieced apart again, and rebuilt into something new, something unprescribed; a new prayer? A new parable? A Toa with three arms, or all the other Toas’ weapons combined into one. A Rahi with masks for feet and a Bohrok head. What I imagined the Makuta to look like before I saw him– and I’ve never really seen him, no, these are all just shapes put together to vainly try and help me understand. To open The Coming of the Toa and find, like every other time, that it isn’t just nostalgia; it really holds up. No matter how old I get. A team of people in cubicles didn’t all sit down and write a book for kids, make toys and games and comics and movies for kids. Someone took books and toys and games and comics and movies, and they shaped with them a legend that kids could understand, and there’s a difference, that’s the difference. Somebody shaped a legend, and there is no one person or kind of person whom legends are for; legends are for people. Legends live past people, there is no stopped heartbeat that can kill them. Legends only die when people decide that they aren’t legends anymore– and even then, they only stay dead until someone else changes their mind again later. All it ever takes is the decision. Culture is what you decide it is– what matters is what you decide matters, that decision is everything. 

I do it this first new time by myself, on the living-room carpet. Revival. I sit down and give them shape; Tahu, Gali, Kopaka, Lewa, Onua, Pohatu. The start of it all. Effortless, instinctive, despite the leftover heaviness in my eyelids. And then… Nui-Jaga. Nui-Rama. Tarakava. Muaka and Kane-Ra. The Manas. It’s all so much easier now than it used to be. My fingers are larger, stronger, surer. The instructions I manage to find online are clearer to me– I can understand more than just one step at a time after squinting, I can see the intentions now. The plan of it. I work through the afternoon while my younger daughter takes her nap and my partner takes the older one to the cast party for yesterday’s show at Applebees.

I build them, and I bring them, and then, before bed, instead of sitting in the rocking-chair with the same old fairy-tales or old Greek myths in my hands, I call my children down onto the floor with me, and explain that we’re going to do something different tonight. I don’t need the books to read them, the comics or movies to show them, not yet. I can begin just like this, just with these. I can try to tell the story myself; that’s what makes it a legend.

“In the Time Before Time… the Great Spirit descended from the heavens carrying we, the Matoran, to this paradise. We were separate and without purpose. So the Great Spirit illuminated us with the three virtues: Unity, Duty, and–”

I have to stop for a few moments to keep my younger daughter from swallowing the mask she’s bitten off of Gali’s face because “this one is pretty”, and by the time I’m done with that, my older one has taken off one of Pohatu’s legs and swapped it with Lewa’s. Within five minutes, they’ve found the remote-controls for the Manas, and I’m calling into the hallway for my partner to come help me with this, they’re starting to get a little too riled up and I’m worried they won’t sleep enough for school tomorrow. 

I’ll try again in a few years. I know we’ll get there; that’s Destiny.