20 • LEGACY
BY MADISON WILCOX
W
hen I was twelve years old I asked my grandpa: “How did you get to where you are now?” I asked him because he was beautiful. Not just his face, but him, his heart. I figured he must have traveled long and hard through life to get here, wherever here was. So I got the courage to ask him one day, as we took a walk around a lake in the city park, “How did you get so beautiful?” He smiled. Then he told me a story. “While I was young I walked through the future for a long time, looking for something to make me beautiful,” he said. “But I couldn’t find anything in the future. Then, years
later, I walked through the past for a long time, too. Both journeys took most my life. But in both places, whenever I looked inside my heart it was still ugly. Nothing I found could make me beautiful, at least not beautiful inside. But now I am here.” “Where’s here?” I asked. “Here is wherever I am,” he said. “But what about the future? Tell me more about what it was like in the future,” I said. “Wasn’t much there,” he said. “I was there, but no one else was. In the future all you can talk to is yourself; all you hear are your hopes and fears clambering for attention. It’s a lonely place, the future, when the rest of the world hasn’t caught up
