a girl.

The girl had not looked for attention. She hadn’t looked for pity or sorrowful glances. Most of all, she’d never really wished for things to be different.

Every day she got up before the sun. She skipped along the concrete sidewalk as the day’s first beams of light appeared behind the treetops. She often went barefoot. She liked the feeling of pebbles against her toes. She would make herself oatmeal and tea, with just a bit of honey. She’d never grown out of it since she was a child and her mother made her sweet, hot drinks when she caught a cold.

She would scrub the dishes and wash the clothes and hang them out to dry. Feed the cat, water the plants, make her bed. And when it was all done she would take out a plaster tray of watercolors. She tiptoed up to the big closet, the one she could sleep in, if she really wanted, because there was so much room. She would pull out a six foot tall roll of canvas. She would throw it across the living room floor until it hit the wall on the other side. And then she would paint. Lines, streaks, splatters. All different colors of all different textures. Faces, words, ideas, anything and everything she could possibly think of.

And she thought of many things.

Her ideas reached the ceiling and even when that was a boundary, she could still close her eyes and imagine them going out into space. The galaxy, she knew, was an enormous thing. It was filled with ideas, and concepts, and lightness and darkness. It was filled with many things she did not yet know about.

But that did not bother her. She had things to do, and things to think about, and with six feet of canvas and a little house on a hill and paints and pens, her world was complete. Her own galaxy was right there at her fingertips.

She did not speak much to others, or make friends. She lived alone and so people thought perhaps she was lonely. But their understanding was not close to what she felt inside. She was not unhappy, or ungrateful. Being optimistic came naturally and there was no need to be hopeful.

She stood back and looked over what she created. She picked up her cat, gently so as not to frighten it. She held its paws with her hand and looked out over her very own living room.

“It’s a mess,” she giggled. And with that she smiled. “Perfect.”

Because she had the one magnificent thing that so many other people had lost:

She had herself.