The Story of the Half Girl

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The Story of the Half Girl

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A long, long time ago, there was a village.

And in the village was a hut,

and, in the hut,

there was a woman,

and she was giving birth to a baby.

Around her were midwives

and everyone a mother needs to push out a child from one world into the next.

And the baby was born, and I'm happy to tell you, it was a little girl.

She was a very sweet little girl.

But if you looked at her, you would have said...

What a beautiful right eye she has.

What a beautiful right ear, right shoulder, hip, right ankle, right foot.

Because the thing was, it seemed,

there was only half of her visible.

The other half, she just couldn't see.

And so, as the little girl grows up,

she looks around the settlement, and she can't help but notice everyone looks pretty complete

She thought to herself...

How is it everyone seems so confident, so full, so arrived when there's only half of me?

As soon as she can learn to talk, she starts to ask these questions.

She never really gets a straight answer.

She always gets a slanted pixie dust kind of answer that just falls through her fingertips.

She's not okay with this.

So by the time she hits that rocky road that separates adolescence from young womanhood,

she's had enough of the village.

She decides to leave.

The day she left the village, she was aware that nobody tried to make her stay.

She was aware no one tried to call her back.

She was aware no one lamented.

She just kind of slipped away, it seemed.

That's how it felt to her.

So she started to walk, and she started to walk, and she started to walk.

Days went by, weeks went by, months.

In a story like this, I can tell you that when a girl walks for days,

Well, in our lifetime, that could be years you're out there.

And when you're a half girl, it's hard to have jobs.

It's hard to have relationships.

It's hard for things to settle, you know, because in some way you're only half arrived yet.

You know, you're not fully arrived.

So it was a kind of restless life.

She was living anxious and shaky

and time went on as time selfishly does.

Even the first slivers of silver entered her hair.

And one day,

on a hot day, unlike today,

it was a hot day,

she heard this sound,

before she even knew what it was,

she turned,

and she saw this mighty river.

Some would call it a sacred river.

And so the half of her hopped over to it to cool down, and she's sitting there taking things in,

When something marvelous happens.

She sees coming down the beach toward her is this other half girl.

And this girl is the half that she is not.

She thinks to herself, you know, maybe if I met this girl when I was five,

it would have been a joyful union.

Maybe even when I was 10.

But I'm so chewed up by the world and all my divine incompleteness.

I don't like much seeing this girl at all.

And how it looked from a distance.

The other girl wasn't pleased to see her either.

So when the two of them met face to face,

it was a good old-fashioned stare down and each spit in each other's mud.

Well, they began... to fight.

And they fought...

And they wrestled.

And they pulled hair and they scratched faces.

Until the momentum of the moment threw them both backwards, falling into the sacred river.

Down they go into the dreaming of the river.

Down they go to the softness of the water.

Down they go being struck by the hardness of its rocks.

Down they go till a half head pops up.

Down they go till a right hand appears

Down they go until a left hand drowns the right hand.

Down they go till two half heads pop up gasping for air.

Until back down they go.

Minutes go by. Hours.

Just when we have given up hope to ever see either of them again.

One. One woman appears.

Crawling out of the sacred river.

Now I'll admit, she looks ragged as a wet dog smells.

She has the Medusa hair.

She’s drip, drip, drip.

But there's one of her. You know.

One eye is going one way and the other eye is going the other way.

But there is one woman.

This new shape has been made under tremendous pressure from the sacred river.

Now, one of the ways you know you've had a wrestle in a sacred river is you don't have any memory of what happened beforehand.

She starts to walk for the first time with two feet

So she puts the right foot in front of her,

left foot,

right foot,

left foot,

right,

left,

right,

left.

She notices, oh, it's much faster walking with two feet.

She starts traveling faster, mystically faster, like time traveling with no technology.

She walks through the forest.

She walks through a desert.

She walks back through towns she used to know.

Until one day, she walks through a village.

At the edge of this village is a very old man and an old woman standing there.

The girl thinks to herself, these people seem somewhat familiar.

She asks them, can you tell me where I am?

And the old woman says to her,

“Dear daughter,

Do you not recognize the village that you left all those years ago?

Do you not recognize our faces?

The faces that wept in silence though you couldn't see us there.

Have you not realized yet that all the girls in the village are half girls in their own heart?

All boys, half boys and theirs.

All of them have to go far out into the world to find

The part of them the village could not give them.”

Now as the couple are saying this, children are starting to come up to the old couple.

They're smiling.

They're giving the girl the welcome that maybe she needed all those years ago.

But you know, had she had it, maybe she would have never left.

Maybe she would have never left.

But they had a big feast.

There was singing.

There was dancing.

They prayed.

There was confessions.

There was stories.

There was repentance.

And they went to bed and they woke up and they did it all again.

Everyone was in love, even the long married.

And from that time forward,

this full woman that had returned,

she became the storyteller of that place,

of that village.

And when all the half girls were really struggling and the half boys

They would sit around her in the hot sun,

and she would shade them with the beauty of her adventures out into the world,

telling her stories.

At the end of her life, where she was buried, grew this great oak tree.

And it's said truly by the storytellers

That to this day you can go to that village and you can shade yourself under that very tree.

And you can hear the story of the half girl be told in either direction the wind blows.

And it's been stored and shared within the jaw of generation to generation to generation.

To now today as I share it with you.

The story of the half girl.