The+Girl

The world is a strange place. It is big and it is small. It is full of contradictions. A person can at one time be surrounded and yet feel isolated. And for one young girl contradiction is all there is. She grew up privileged but right now, she has absolutely nothing. She has no skills to aid her, no dreams to guide her, no family to support her, no friends to accompany her. In an apartment building with hundreds and hundreds of people, surrounded by countless buildings each with hundreds more people, the girl feels desperately alone. So she grabs a cell phone, some clothes, a stack of letters, one picture of a boy with beautiful eyes, whom she has never met, and she empties her sizable bank account. A few unremarkable hours later she is on a plane to Chicago. She is trading one huge city where no one cares for another huge city where no one cares. As she sits behind the wheel of her rented car where countless other forgotten souls have sat she considers just driving away. Not stopping until she has reached a town where there are more crops than people. Where high school sweethearts still marry, stores are closed on Sundays, and there is no such thing as a traffic light. But something draws her into the city. She is sick of cities and private school uniforms, rich girls with nothing better to do than stab you in the back, parents who travel so often that its almost not surprising when their plane just never comes back because it was supposedly lost over the Indian ocean when she was fifteen, and a half-sister who doesn’t even care. Still she finds herself checking into a hotel with crystal chandeliers, marble floors, and a bellboy that seems oddly familiar. She walks past the bar, ignoring the glances, and takes the opulent elevator to her gorgeous room and stares out the window, wondering what she sees. She had forgotten about the boy. Not completely of course, he had been there in the back of her mind, remaining just below the surface of her memory. She had forgotten what he had meant to her, what he had represented, who he had made her become. Then she found the box. It wasn’t much. A picture, a phone number that no longer worked, (she had tried it) and the letters. Black ink on white paper, the same handwriting, even though it had become stronger and more defined, as things are apt to do over a period of time in which one grows. And both of them grew, from the age of twelve to the year they turned sixteen, they both changed quite a bit. Partially because those are crucial growing years in a life, but also because of each other and what life threw at them. He had lost his brother a year before she lost her parents. Both events catapulted them into growing up a little faster than they had planned. He made her realize that life was a wide spectrum of opportunity and at the same time she taught him the beauty of dreaming. Yet somehow she had shoved him away because she didn’t like who she had been before and no one accepted who she was after him. She created a new person and pretended it was how she had always been. She was on the brink of breaking into so many pieces that she would never recover, when she found his letters. Once again her lost friend’s words wrapped around her and taught her that there was something more important to be found in the world. But here she was, doing absolutely nothing, in an unfamiliar city The girl took the stairs down to the lobby and the friendly and still familiar bellboy called her a cab. “Just visiting the city ma’am?” She answered, tapping her foot impatiently against the floor, trying to place his face. Before her cab came she found out that he it was his last day on the job, he had come to the city to live his dreams and he finally started this Monday at eight a.m., a popular publishing company downtown had finally hired him. She wished him well as she slid into her cab and he smiled and said goodbye. He was one of the friendliest people the girl had met. The world is full of contradictions yes, but it is also full of surprises. Little things sneak up on you sometimes, when you are the least expecting. One young girl, lying alone in a strange hotel bedroom in the dark, picturing the face of a childhood dream, suddenly recognizes a stranger’s beautiful eyes.