The Girl

This is a story about my Girl as I have experienced her in my dreams over the last four years. It was written as part of an dreamwork writer's group that I belong to.

The Girl

The world was a dark place and the girl was silent. There was really no fear because the darkness was so familiar. Anger was familiar too. It was a writhing deep anger that filled the girl and filled the darkness too. In fact it seethed with a opaque rage that spoke of injustices unfathomable. Truths that couldn't, shouldn't be spoken.

Every now and then a brief flash of light. Hope, but so dazzling the girl was befuddled, confused. It seemed  that there was heat in that light, possibility. In those moments the fear became visceral and rose in a bloom of passion and desire and terror. But there was fire and the girl feared the fired. Somehow the fire of her passion would become the oven of death or perhaps a funeral pyre in which memory and knowing burned blisteringly bright with pain and then subsided back to a stillness, a pulsating in the dark.

One day the girl awoke to a place of waiting. She knew the waiting as a place outside of the anger. Something was happening, there was a stirring. Her whispered prayers finding their way up through cracks in the stone. Someone knew she was here! Not just someone, but The One.

The one who she remembered. And in the remembering, the door opened. Light burned down on her shell-shocked face and she skittered out of the corner and took the light full on. Hands lifted her and carried her up.

There was magic in the forest and wild beasts clamored for her attention.  And then she found herself on a flag-stoned plaza. It was night, yet day. She looked with wonder up at the sky and saw three red planets stacked up in space. The stars were brilliant and there was the sun emerging in furls and explosions of fire from behind the darkened silent moon.


The girl coughed and four marbles fell to the ground. She stared in wonder at these marbles, colorful glass, spinning worlds on stone slabs. Suddenly a man was by her side and breathed in her ear a name. And she knew herself again. Together they saw that the marbles had multiplied, each its own story, perhaps something that once was. And they had fallen out of her.

Suddenly the world tilted and the marbles rolled away. The girl felt the sudden shift as a moment of fear and then the sure knowing that this man who had named her, who had seen her, was here to catch her as she fell. Warmth flowed into her limbs and shivered through her body in waves that lifted them together.

When she opened her eyes again she was on a small raft on an vast cerulean sea. A large creature floated on the waves with her. A briny being who offered Herself to the girl and the girl took her offering on the tip of her knife and ate the salty flesh that tasted of wind and sea, tears and blood. She felt her strength returning on the nourishment of this fleshy offering. She rolled into the ocean and the aquamarine water engulfed her. She dropped beneath the waves and into the alchemy of the sea sinking like a pebble. There she rested for a long time.

An angel lifted her, touching her. The angel asked her if she could feel her desire. In the angel's touch, she suddenly realized that she could! It flowed into her, the most incredible feeling in her body. She was alive! And she could speak!

“Yes”, she said. “I can feel myself as desire when before I only knew myself as anger.” The angel instructed her in a new dance and the girl felt her body move into the shape of a flower. She manifest outside of time and slowly she spun in the stillness that lived in the turning of her new world. The flower waited, its petals quivering in anticipation, knowing only the desire to open, to blossom. This was her destiny.

As the sun emerged from behind the dark moon, she burst forth in dew and blood red radiance. Music swelled and still she turned, only now the Man, a potter whose hands were slickened red with clay, held her against his chest and turned with her. She remembered him and melted into him so that when the turning stopped and he took a step, her leg moved with his leg, her foot felt the sole of his and together they could walk.

He invited her into His garden. She lay across his back and whispered, “I have always loved you, since I first knew you”. He took her by the arms and swung her around and around, turning in a swirl of pure of joy, His smile acknowledging her words.

And she learned that she could turn too beneath the stars and the darkness of the moon. Her flower would not wilt and the Sun would always return.

Copyright © 2014 Laura Smith