The Unknown Force

A lone girl stands in the midst of an empty forest - a forest so empty and devoid, miles and miles of nothingness can be seen from the widely spaced trees. White engulfs everything like an envelope, unwritten paper pasted on the trees and slick white paint sticking to the sparce leaves. It is not winter, nor summer, nor any season - it is all plastic and rubber, without softness or texture anywhere. The ground is a pure white, powder-colored dirt that doesn't cake to anything and refuses to mold. Alone she is, with nothing but herself, and she looks down and sees that she herself is too dressed in a small, flowy white dress. Even her skin and hair is a pale white, and she yearns to find something of color.

Her heart is aching, a dull bitter roar that refuses to cease and causes her disorientation and fear. She wants someone to find her, she wants a connection. A hero. She wants to rip her heart out and throw it on the ground, and see the beautiful blood smear with the whiteness of the forest, to see the last beating of her emotions and become white and simple like the things around her. She wants to be empty like the forest, she wants her emotions to no longer cloud her thoughts. She wants so sacrifice her being in order to not deal, in order to become blank and blissfull. The girl wants to not ache and cry and leave her baby-mind behind.

But she's panicking. She feels so warm in comparison to her surroundings, so vulnerable, so attractive. She feels like she is prey to something, though that something is elusive and unnamed and invisible. Nowhere to run or hide or seek shelter in. She sees her reflection in her mind, imagines what she looks like now - a little girl lost, clueless and awkward and trying to disguise herself but failing miserably.

She looks to the sky - the blue sky! It is a baby blue, hardly blue at all, but it is something to cling to - anything, at this point. It is color amongst whiteness, and if she squints hard enough she can convince her mind that it is brighter than it is. Suddenly, she doesn't feel so alone anymore - in fact, she feels an odd presence, like something is coming to her rescue. She feels the tension of something beginning to happen, something that is gathering energy to be done.

Up at the sky, she gazes. Hoping a ray of light will come down, that God will tell her she is good and pure and though that seems like a disadvantage it really does make her a beautiful person. She thinks of the books she has read, and the passages in the bible, in which clouds have parted and beams of yellow sun have travelled to the earth to send a profound message of comfort, a signal that all is not hopeless, a sign that everything is worth something, the delicate equation of life.

But it doesn't come. And in her distraction, she doesn't notice that she is becoming beautifully hard like a diamond, solidly real and tangible. She doesn't see that her white hair is becoming golden, that her skin is obtaining a certain bronze gleam, that her lips are smeared with dark red and her eyes are making the sky ashamed with their blue color. How can she? She has no mirror, no reflection.

And then she does become aware of the change within her, notices that the heat of her tears and the strength of her sobbing is causing her cheeks to become rosy and the taste in her tongue salty. She's ashamed of these tears, so she chokes on them, tries to push them back. She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath, slowly raising her left hand as if reaching for something.

And she turns and starts walking, something unseen guiding her and bringing her to the path. She doesn't know what it was that helped her, what sublime advice that was suddenly injected in her heart. She doesn't know what brought the color back slowly, or what took the heartache away.

Who saved her?