Lion’s Honey
Lion’s Honey
The Story of the Half Girl
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The Story of the Half Girl

So a long long time ago there was village!

And in the village was a hut

And in the hut there was a woman giving birth to a baby

Around her were midwives

And everyone a mother needs to push her child from one world into the next.

The baby was born

and I’m happy to tell you it was a little girl!

She was very sweet little girl

But if you looked at her

You may have said

What a beautiful right eye she has

What a beautiful right ear, right shoulder, hip, ankle, foot.

Because the thing was, it seemed,

There was only half of her visible

The other half

She just couldn’t see

And so as the little girl grows

She looks around the settlement

And she can’t help but notice

Everyone else looks pretty complete.

She thought to herself, how is it everyone else seems so confident, so full and so arrived when there is only half of me?

As soon as she can learn to talk she starts to ask these questions

And she never really gets a straight answer

She always gets a slanted, pixie dust kind of answer that slips through her fingers

She’s not okay with this

And so, by the time she hits the rocky road that separates adolescence from young womanhood, she’s had enough of the village

And decides to leave!

The day she left the village

She was aware that nobody tried to make her stay

She was aware that no one tried to call her back

She was aware no one lamented

She just kind of slipped away it seemed

That’s how it felt to her

so she started to walk

She walked and she walked

Days went by

Weeks went by

Months

In a story like this is

when they say that a girl walked for a few days,

In our life time, that could be years that you’re out there

And when you’re a half girl it’s hard to have jobs

It’s hard to have relationships

It’s hard for things to settle

Because in some way

You’re not fully arrived yet

So it was a kind of restless life she lived

Anxious and shaky

Time went on, as time selfishly does

The first slivers of silver entered her hair

One day, it was a hot day, unlike today. It was a hot day and she heard a sound before she saw what it was. She turned to see a mighty river, some would call it a sacred river.

So the half of her hopped over to it

To cool her down. So she’s sitting there, taking things in

When this extraordinary thing happens

She sees coming down the beach toward her is this other half girl

And this girl has the half that she doesn’t

She thinks to herself, “hmmm, maybe if I met this girl when I was 5, it would’ve been a joyful union. Maybe when I ten even.

But I am so chewed by the world now

In all my divine incompleteness

I don’t feel good about seeing this girl at all

And how it looked from a distance,

The other girl wasn’t pleased to see her either

So the two of them have an old fashion stare down like fighters after the weigh-in,

Well as any girl in here knows, what happens next is any form of spitting in the others mud! And they wrestle with either

Grabbing hair

Clawing faces

Dropping f-bombs, the whole kitchen sink

The momentum of the moment pushes them both into that big sacred river!

Down they go into the dreaming of the river

Down they go into the softness of water

Down they go being struck by hardness of its rocks

Down they go, a half head pops up

Down they go, a right hand appears

Down they go, a left hand drowns the right hand

Down they go, two half heads gasping for air

Minutes go by, hours too

Finally, just as we have given up hope of ever seeing them again

…. One …. One! woman appears!

Crawling out the river

Now she looks ragged as wet dog smells, I’ll admit

She has the Medusa hair

Drip drip drip

But there is one of her

One is going one way

The other going another but it’s a new shape!

I new shape that has been made under tremendous pressure

Now one of the ways you know you’ve had a wrestle in a sacred river

Is you don’t have any memory of what happened beforehand

She starts to get used to walking with two legs

She notices walking in this new shape, is much faster, mystically faster, like time traveling with no technology needed

She walks through the Forrest, walks through the desert, walks back through the towns she used to know

Until one day, she walks through a village

At the edge of the village is a very old man and woman standing there,

The girl notices that these people seem somewhat familiar, and she asks them, can you tell me where I am?

The old woman says to her…

“Dear daughter, do you not recognize the village that you left, all those years ago?

Do you not recognize our faces, the faces that wept in silence though you could not see us there?

Have you not realized yet that ALL girl in the village is a half girl in her own heart

ALL boy was a half boy in his own heart?

All of them have to go far out into the world to find the part of them the village could not give them.

Now as the couple are saying this, children are starting to come up to the old couple smiling.

Giving the girl the welcome that maybe she needed all those years ago.

But you know… head she had that, maybe she never would’ve left

They had a big feast,

There was singing

There was dancing

There was praying

There was confession and repentance

They went to sleep and they woke up and did it all again.

Everyone was in love. Even the long married

And from that time forward, the full woman that returned became the storyteller of that place,

And when the half girls and half boys were really struggling,

They would sit around her in the hot sun

And she would shade them with the beauty of her adventures out in the world with her stories.

And at the end of her life, where she was buried grew a great Oak tree.

And it is said and said truly by storytellers that to this day, you can go to the village, and shade yourself under that very tree and you can hear the story of the half girl be told in either direction the wind blows

As it’s been stored and shared within the jaw of generation, to generation to generation to generation

And now to you, the Story of the Half Girl


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