Missing
The girl had been missing a long time. She had often contemplated what it would be like to be missing. To be missed. Yet she never really believed in the sentiment. As she never really believed she had belonged anywhere to be missing from. Little pieces of her scattered across the world. She had summoned them now. She had taken them all back. So that she could work out which of those pieces belonged to her afterall. And which were merely the illusions of a mind so forlorn with life it wove dark magic to create an existence.
Shattered reflections. Edges smoothed to perfection. Oh when the pieces of her vanished how those shiny little gems were missed! For those who felt the loss, it was as if a part of themselves had been stolen.
So as she sat in a forest far from here or now or there or anywhere and scrutinised what she had recovered of herself. Foreign faces flickered like visions in the jewels. Her pieces. Her puzzle. They did not piece together no matter how hard she tried. She began to realise that what she had managed to recover of herself could not be pushed back into her soul. Imaginings. Fleeting hallucinations. Co-creations. Becomings.
What did these pieces represent?
If they had fallen from her soul but were out of place there?
She gathered them up again, the dark ones, the pearly ones, the red ones and the emerald. She set off following the river she had placed for herself through the forest. As though her mind would eventually lead her where she needed to be. The place where she would no longer be missing?
The river meandered endlessly. She was tempted to rest. To drink. Perhaps even to sit by its side and make daisy chains. But where had that got her all of these years? Nowhere? With nothing to show for it but a bag full of stolen jewels she believed had fallen from her soul.
It could have been years that she followed that river in circles. It was her destiny she believed. To keep following the tracks her imagination laid out for her. Following a river seemed easy. It seemed obvious. It seemed like the thing she must do. It was a beautiful river afterall. There was a time when she would have bathed in that river and believed it was the source of renaissance for her mal-nourished soul. Not anymore.
Now she was only meant to follow. Follow. Believe.
She was lost.
She was missing.
But she was not missed.
The bag of stolen jewels she had been carrying felt lighter. She looked inside and found a hole. The jewels had gone. There did not appear to be a hole from which they had fallen. Nor could she beieve that anyone else existed within her imagination who could have taken them from the bag.
The river burbled gently, whispering a secret. She felt compelled to listen. But instead of hearing everything became vision. There in the river she saw the jewels flowing endlessly like chasms of light casting a rainbow through the waters.
Those collected shards of herself. Missing. Given away. Taken back. Now set free. Only now could she see how beautiful and necessary they had been. Only now coud she feel lighter as she set them free,
Her mind or maybe her soul had created each of the pieces at a moment in time. Reflections of her world, her people, necessary to exist. To keep on. Not a symbol of her being. Not even of her becoming. They were never meant to be collected up and pieced back together like the solving of an unfathomable puzzle. They were there only to ensure that she could keep moving.
Did she miss them now that they were gone?
Was she missed?
She could not be.
But her pieces were.
Unburdened from all of her pieces. She was suddenly lighter than the air which had stopped her from floating away all of these years.
Floating.
She was free.
She was not missing.
Because she had never been found.
But her pieces were missed.
Yet perhaps there were a few who could close their eyes and see her river and the part of the rainbow that belonged to them forever and would never be undone.