When I was little, like really little, I used to write a story about a girl around fifteen or sixteen who is very poor. I think I may have come up with the idea from a dream I had, which I can't remember anymore. No! I just remembered – it sprang from a book I read when I was around that age. I don't remember what it was called, but it was about a young girl living in Egypt, who was very poor but who had Sight. A sight that transcended the physical world. But she scared everyone with her dreams and prophesies, and her family blamed her for tragedies that she foretold.
She was embroiled in a scandal wherein a foreman was treating his workers poorly, but tried to pass it off on one of his employees. The town believed him and shame would have come on a good man – one of the only good men who had ever treated her with respect even though she was a young girl – and so she used her abilities to navigate the world and help him prove his foreman wrong.
From this dream came a story for me – an abstraction of the story I think, or at least pieces of the story that made sense to me. She was a young girl, and she was influenced by the kindness of an older man.
Of course at my age this is what my mind heard.
So I wrote a story about this other girl, who lived in the desert a long time ago, in a poor area. She didn't have a home, and didn't have a family or anywhere to go. A teacher had come to stay in her town and open a school there – just a school of himself. He was also poor but had a way of earning money. She would often sit outside in the school yard and listen to the lessons she heard, but she couldn't understand most of what he said. She would sometimes find pieces of parchment and try to envision the things he said and give herself aids, or draw in the dirt. The teacher noticed the strange markings that happened behind his building, but he didn't find other traces of the secret student. She was small and fast. She didn't want to be noticed, but she did. She just wasn't brave. On a day that was too hot she accidentally fell asleep in the shade of his building. When he came to check if there were more markings, he found her. He was astounded at first that his secret student was a girl, but then he was laughing. He left a notebook there for her.
She was starving. I was writing about a little girl who was famished – she needed sustenance of the mental kind. She needed connection and leadership. She expressed this by finding the nearest well of knowledge and desperately leaning in to drink, but so barely able to, she can only dip her fingers in and get a couple drops into her mouth at a time. But still doing everything she can to nurse herself back to health. She would go hungry sometimes if it meant listening to him speak. She would humiliate herself, dirty her hands and her dignity to try her best to capture his words in her thoughts. She starts to find things there where she slept, and she started sleeping there. She starting finding papers that had a drawing of a thing, and then a symbol to represent it. She started to connect the dots, she started to understand the lesson that he was trying to teach her. He sent her a page of drawings. She left the matching symbols for him to see in the mornings. She got all of them right. She studied diligently.
Side note. The word diligent means a lot more than I used to think it meant. I used to think it just meant focused. It actually means focused in the context of devotion and fidelity. It means devoted almost intimately.
One day he came outside and spoke with her. He was very tall, and intimidating, but there were smile lines about his eyes, and she liked them. She was caught between a child and – the next thing (when you're a child, you think you know what the next thing is, but you definitely don't).
I think my young mind was looking for guidance. I think I was writing about my future, or my hoped future, a time when someone would find me and show me things I couldn't comprehend yet.
I never finished the story because it has no plot. It wasn't a story at all, really. It was a manifestation of my soul and what it wanted.
ORPHAN OF THE SUN
I remembered :)