Fragmented Fairytales

Once upon a time, there was a girl of merely eighteen, who lived in a great world of abundance. She spent her days spilling her dreams into a leather-bound journal and her nights contently living inside her head. She looked outside her window every morning at the endless rows of wheat, sipping her coffee, wondering silently to herself where those fields ended and where life began.

She left on a Friday, her journal still in hand, her dreams still in head, temporarily trading her world of abundance for a few feet of suitcase and a couple of strange beds. She took a few planes, rising above the veins of her town, watching them mingle and intertwine. The fields of wheat became rows of humbling skyscrapers. The flat, mundane land turned lush and green right before her eyes. On the final plane toward her dream world, she watched the sunrise against the Atlantic ocean while traveling 25,000 feet above it. She wasn’t just in the veins of a city anymore, she was in the heart of the world. She suddenly realized, this is where life began.

For the next month, she simply wandered.

Every morning she woke up as if it was for the first time. She looked outside her window at the nearly extraterrestrial world the lay before her, sipping her coffee, wondering silently to herself why she ever counted life in years rather than miles. For the first time, she felt understood. Her lightness was appreciated and her darkness embraced by cities who always left her with more questions than answers. 

Surrounded by languages she knew she would never be able to imitate, she met other travelers in English pubs, all of them intriguing, all of them gone before she had the chance to say goodbye.

Still clutching her train ticket ever-so-nostalgically, she journaled in the famous coffee shops of Amsterdam, watching smoke delicately dance all around, tugging at strangers’ lips then disappearing into nothingness, as elusive and unpredictable as her own heart. She tried to tread quietly, knowing this world would soon forget her, but even so, her laughter still mixed with friendly giants and naked bikers in magical parks. Red lights still bounced off her own eyes and reflected into another, eerily familiar set. She soon realized that she didn’t know how to feel about leaving the city that had effortlessly and unexpectedly captured her heart, so she simply felt- her salty tears catching on the slight curve of her smile before dropping, permanently etched into the water that absentmindedly flows through the Dutch canals.

In Paris, she observed the city shrinking right along with her ego as a lift casually scaled her up to the top of the Eiffel. Distanced from both earth and reality, her red dress was utterly consumed by the glittering tower. She watched her journey come to an end in The City of Lights, concluding it all with one final act of permanence.

She hoarded memories, selfishly keeping them all for herself, safe in her mind, sharing them only with those present and of course her nearly full journal, knowing the world she was now flying back to would never fully understand or even truly care.

But she cared. And that was enough.

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