It’s a story about a girl, and like most stories go, the girl is lost.
She wanders, up cold mountains, into musky caves, and even plunges to the bottomless sea.
But lost she remains.
It’s frustrating because in most ways the path is clear.
The road signs, telling her go right, go left, go up, go down, in 2 km, in 10.
It’s all there.
The wind pushes, and the trees whoosh and point, and the sun whispers promises of an oasis.
She listens and follows, but it’s never where she needs to be.
Sometimes there is a joy in being lost. The simplicity of being a wanderer.
Sometimes she meets the ‘hers, the hims, the theys,’ the promised soulmates, and they walk with her, at first content in the journey, but eventually, they tire.
“How long shall we be lost?” they ask the girl.
She doesn’t have an answer to that, she never knows. She starts mourning their presence then.
Eventually, the thems become faraway specks in her heart, mind and vision.
The special ones become the stories she tells the world around her.
Sometimes she flies.
Far away from the cuts and bends of her path, she can almost see where she needs to go. But she always falls.
Sometimes it’s a relief.
If she wasn’t lost, what would she be?
Curious, creatures watch her, and some even approach her fading Eden.
They communicate amongst themselves, in the languages of the new and the ancient.
They chirp and gibber, and tweet, and growl, and some even pipe, but it’s always the same question.
“How long does she wander?”
They too never get an answer, for the girl, in all her adventures has never been able to grasp the tongue of the forests.
She starts to forget, and forget what she is forgetting. With only an idea that it’s complicated, unfair, sad, but warm.
She forgets.
Sometimes she is as young as a child, and other times she is ancient, a sister to the air that surrounds her.
There are days she cries but in the vast space, her cries get lost in the shower of rain
“What if someone is waiting?” she wonders in the roaring silence.
One day. Because for even lost girls, there is that day,
She decides on a path.
It’s dark. Muddy. Thin. And branches cut her skin. Strange eyes peek through empty dark spaces.
She doesn’t see the light for a long time. She doesn’t turn back.
She misses the trees, the caves, the cretins, and the joys of wandering.
She feels a brush of regret.
Still, her feet push her forward, on into darkness.
When she finally steps out into the light, she trips and falls.
She gazes around her, a little lost.
Then she feels it.
Ah
That’s it.
And she smiles.
She understands.
To all drifters, by choice or by circumstance.
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