Once upon a time a girl with a very average name was born into a not-as-average life. She had outrageously bird’s nest-like red hair and lived in the country with her ever-in-love parents and seven younger siblings. Those ever-in-love parents decided very early on that their children were to be homeschooled, and so the girl learned nearly everything she knew sitting among trees rather than inside of walls, under beams of sunlight instead of under the gaze of critical eyes. At times she sought out her father and asked him about what he was learning, and he told her of history and physics and engineering. While listening to her father explain the law of relativity and talk about how every person we see negatively is really a mirror of ourselves, she found out that she loved ideas. For a decade her mother became mildly obsessed with collecting books, and the girl found out that she loved words. The girl grew. By the time she was thirteen, she had cut off most of her own hair, and when she was fourteen, she, along with her parents and those of her siblings who were old enough to realize, experienced a shift in paradigm. The world as she knew it fell away, replaced by understanding, and she soon stopped being afraid. She went to school in the town she had lived in for nine years, and learned of the existence of a life that had been just outside her fences. She found out that not everyone understood Shakespeare, and that if her clothes didn’t look new, they might wonder. The girl decided not to care. She hooked pens over the holes in her jeans and wore pencils in her hair. She wore a different necklace every day, and filmed her classmates at the lunch table. Her teachers were impressed by her and many of them talked to her as a friend. She spent a lot of time smiling. But some days, she wept. After the first quarter of Junior year, she realized that she was spending eight hours each day to learn not very much at all, and chose to drop all but two of her classes. The next year, she watched from the sidelines as most of her friends marched in their caps and gowns to retrieve a piece of paper that they had spent thirteen years earning. At about that time she became confused. Her mother wanted her to leave the crowded house and pursue a life for herself, but the girl didn’t know what that life was supposed to be. She wanted to get some kind of footing before she jumped off of that cliff. When she caught pneumonia in the middle of the summer, the girl promised to leave. She promised her mother and she promised her boyfriend, and she looked for somewhere to go. She found someone else who wanted to leave, a woman who had adopted three little girls and continuously convinced herself that waiting should not be an option. The woman wanted to take her daughters across the country, wanted to show them the things she hadn’t herself seen. And so they met with the girl and they each knew they could care for one another and they went. They drove from Idaho to Maine, through deserts and mountains and forests, from elevation to elevation. The girl saw things that she had never thought of, and thought of things she had never seen. She had a lot of time to herself. She went for walks and watched as the trees there turned into every color but blue. She waded through canals that formed in the old streets, and dressed as a house for Halloween. She spent an hour standing on a bridge, trying to memorize the paths of leaves flowing through a river. She noticed that all the while, flowers were blooming. She saw the Atlantic and kissed the pages of books a hundred years old. She ran through stone castles and dined inside of a museum. She turned nineteen. She snuck out in the middle of the night to lie on the road’s yellow line and made eye contact with Cassiopeia. They left on Thanksgiving, and spent that evening in a small city in the state of New York, eating steak instead of turkey at Denny’s, and sharing the holiday with members of a much larger family. A couple days later they were caught in a snow storm, and as the girl waited for food that was to be retrieved through the two feet of white, she called a man she knew and told him that she wanted to send balloons down a waterfall. She was home for Christmas, and for New Years, and she finally began to see. She realized that she wasn’t in love, and that she was in love. This realization ignited a spark that lit up the quiet places in her spirit, and she became aware of who she was and who she wanted to become. She left for San Diego to meet back with the woman and her daughters, and has spent three months there gradually constructing the idea that her future will be comprised of. Each day she grows more and more aware of herself, and she’s become almost entirely comfortable with the whole of the universe around her. Starting from the center point behind her eyes, moving outwards, through her veins, past her skin, into this room, encompassing the city and the ocean and the continent and the planet, pausing at each human being who is significant in her life, distilling joy and meaning throughout everything.
The girl isn’t sure of many things. But there are a lot of things that she is sure of, and she knows that it’s those things that matter. She will share those things with as many people as will look. And she will never relent.
(Source: squeakwhimsical)
