Hiatus, Return

Long ago, so long ago, there used to live a girl who often sat in the dark and wrote. She would compose endlessly, the words flowing through her and onto the page, out into the world where the wind would snatch them away and take them to the the furthest corners of existence. One day there came a storm; it whipped the pages from her hands, it stole all her words, and flung them far far away.

The lonely girl stood, and watched as the wind scattered all the friends she had ever known and resolved that she would trek until she gathered them all together again. For a long time she travelled, for a long time she wandered, for a long time, she was not sure what would become of herself. And in that time the urge to write would overwhelm her, and she would fling herself onto the ground and weep, for she had nothing with which to record her thoughts. And very soon, the words began to leave her, seeing that there was no escape through that girl.

Slowly, so very slowly, she collected all those far flung sheets of paper, she dusted them off, and she bound them into a book. Often she would flip through that book, and be astounded with what she found there - words that she did not remember having written, words that were beautiful and haunting, which danced and wept and sang and grieved. She could not believe that such things could have come from her mind, could have been formed by her hand across the pages. But it was true; all those pages were memories and feelings, scrawled or carefully traced, and all that was written had meaning.

Always did she keep that book with her. Sometimes she would read it, but more often than not, she would merely thumb through the pages, glimpsing snatches of things that were. She was glad for having found all that she feared she had lost, for those words bound her to a time when she was a different person. Thus she dubbed the volume The Book of a Girl Who Was.

Then one day, absentmindedly stroking the cover of that book, she came to the realisation that the words she thought had fled, had slowly begun to return; they whispered in her mind, the background noise to her thoughts, which would sometimes be heard clearly, other times, be a mere presence, shadowy and insubstantial, but ever there. She let them come. She took her pen, found a fresh sheet of paper, and began to inscribe the phrases which turned in her mind. By the end of the first session, she had looked down upon her work and found that it was different from what she had written before, and yet, all the same, it was strikingly familiar. With a smile she put aside that paper and began another, and another after that, filling sheet after sheet. Then she stood back and laughed, a melodious sound that uplifted her heart. For it was that she had placed aside The Book of a Girl Who Was, and began composing another volume. This new book, she could see was an amalgamation of several books, all intertwining and growing as one: the books of The Girl Who Was, The Girl Who Is, and The Girl Who May Come To Be.