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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