story of a girl

Originally written 6/7/2015; updated 4/25/2024

There is a story about a girl.

Who loved to sit in her room or at the library or a park all day and read books.

The books were about anything. Space, murder, loss.

She wanted these books take her out herself; she desired to become something else as she was reading.

And she did. She became something beautiful, even though she never realized it.

Here are a few more things the girl loves, things that make her who she is.

Her favorite color is olive, and she wears it constantly. A long time ago, when she was little, she said that she didn’t have a favorite color. But that changed when she saw the color yellow. It reminds her of the woods, and the leaves on some of the trees.

Yellow reminds her of Autumn. The clear, cold air. The crunch of the underbrush and dead grass on the ground everywhere she stepped. Autumn is her favorite season. (Even though she was born in Spring.)

When she was 9 years old, she had a friend that would take her to the woods every weekend. And they would map out their course on a small scrap of paper and they would name the landmarks that reminded them of where they were. One rock was Counter Pointe Way, because it resembled the face of a clock and they wanted to used Counter-Clockwise Way, but her friend was only a few years older than her and neither of them knew which way counter-clockwise was.

That’s when she began to love the woods. She loved the trees, each and every one. She loved the sound of animals roaming the ground she stepped on and the birds in the sky she loved it all. She still does.

Sometimes, when she isn’t busy and she doesn’t feel like being around other people, she’ll go to the park near her house and go off the path. She’ll pretend she’s in the woods and try to get lost like she used to. It’s different now because she has to go back to doing things she doesn’t want to do, and life just isn’t as fun or exciting than the woods are.

She also loves the ocean. Her dad grew up around the Gulf, and she has been going to the beach with sand and Seagulls and salt water since before she could speak.

Before she knew that the air was always windy and sand never truly goes away, even after she left the shore. But she loved it.

The feeling of sand between her toes and salty taste in her mouth from the water. It reminds her of freedom.

But that freedom feeling changed, slowly and surely, as she realized that the pretty girls in their pretty swim suits look more like models and princess while she does not. She was not tiny, and not fit or swimsuit-ready. She did not look like the pretty girls.

This changed her.

Made her weaker, more fragile. She began to become pieces of glass that were molded together without the slightest care of finesse. Sheer was thrown together in bits and she was fractured. Her pieces stopped fitting together like they were supposed to.

How do you explain the missing fragments of a young girl? She was no longer whole when she thought about herself, she couldn’t look in a mirror for a long time. Afraid of what she saw. Or didn’t see. She stopped liking the color olive, stopped going into the woods. No one thing could bring her joy anymore.

She hated Autumn and started loving Winter because in the coldness of the season women do not wear pretty swimsuits and she does not have to hate herself more. You must understand that she did not intend for this to happen.

This is not something anyone intends to happen. She did not wish this self-loathing or the sadness. She begs every day for it to go away.

And it did. Sometimes. At random moments, she would smile in a mirror and be happy with herself. But, unfortunately, this did not happen as often as she’d like.

As time went on, it got worse, and the cracks began to worsen and she began to fall apart. Yellow was a disgusting color and the smell of pine in the woods sickened her and she cried before she stepped a foot onto sandy shores.

She was no longer herself. She would not have known who she was in the mirror, if she ever looked in one. The girl was not only lost, she was gone completely.

But time has passed and she changed. She became someone else. Someone that was not the little girl she was, and not the fragile glass that could not look in mirrors. She became a mix of the two.

She started liking museums as opposed to the beach, because in museums only the painting and sculptures do not have their clothes on. And some paintings and sculptures show flaws in the human body and have cracks from wear and age.

And that is considered art.

Her favorite color is now olive because olive is warm and not bright and loud like yellow. Yellow yells while love whispers and she likes that, because now she whispers, too. But Winter is still her favorite season. The colors in Autumn are too much like yellow and the crisp air of Winter calms her now. She no longer thinks of the crunch of leaves as a significant event, it’s just the next step before soft snow and clean air. She can’t seem to breathe during Summer anymore. She feels suffocated.

This was the story of a girl. There is no happy ending. Not yet. And she might not get the chance. But, this is a story about you and me and everyone else that lives and breathes because this girl is all of us.

We have all had something change us. Something to make us who we are today, whether it be a good thing or a bad thing.

Regardless, it helped us. We are maturing, growing stronger. We can accomplish what we need to accomplish because we have the will to do it. And that is the happily ever after we all search for. That is what she deserves, what we all deserve.