A Circle

There was once a girl with endless eyes and golden hair, and she was always hungry for more. She lived in a small town by the coast that was woken up by the calls of seagulls and lulled to sleep by waves crashing against the rocky shoreline. Her house stood perched on an overlook from which she could watch the sea to the East and the city to the West. She thought it a very lucky place to be, perfectly balanced.

She was a big believer in balance, this girl, as well as a believer in magic. She kept her bookshelves full of obscure and cultish texts, which she had been collecting since she was a little girl. The city folks didn’t think much of her. She would go down to pick up gas, food, and books. Sometimes she would visit the antique shop or gardening center to buy new flowerpots. Her trips seemed to be driven by necessity rather than a desire for connection, and the people recognized that and respectfully moved out of her way on the days she visited.

One such day came when the autumnal winds were picking up in strength. The girl decided to go downtown to pick out something warm for the blustery nights. She stopped by the antique shop on her way back. The clerk smiled at her over his black-rimmed glasses. She was an odd bird, and he had grown to enjoy her sporadic visits. The girl drifted through the aisles, focusing on nothing in particular, waiting for something of beauty to catch her eye.

And perhaps because of her open indifference, something did in fact stand out. The girl’s gaze landed on a little black book, a seemingly ordinary thing. Nothing but a few aged pages bound in dyed leather. Yet it spoke to her, and the girl opened it to discover the words: Every truth in me is already written. Something stirred in her as she read them. They were meant for her, she knew. She was destined to find this book. She bought it together with a silver brooch of her choosing.

The girl walked home with a spring in her step, watching as good omens unfolded on her path. She spotted a four-leaf clover in the flower bed. A white rabbit crossed her path. Getting the book was a good thing, they said, and it would fill her life with much good fortune.

At home she sat down in front of wide-opened windows and took out her favorite pen. She opened the notebook and starting jotting down thoughts – little things on her mind, details about the day that others might have missed. She wrote about the clovers and the rabbit and the broach, the kind spectacled man and the salty air that swept over the sandy beach, the seagulls on her windowsills, her house on the hill. She wrote faster and faster, the strokes of her pen carving themselves deep into the paper. She wrote about her first day in town, about those that have helped her, those that have harmed her, the storms she had faced, her puppy loves and schoolyard memories. At some point, a powerful invisible force took over her hand, and the words unfolded on the page as if by their own desire to come to be.

She wrote now not just of herself, but of the city, of nature, of the rhythms of the seasons, of the world around her. As she wrote, curious things started happening. Glimmers of wisdom appeared between the lines, and they looked so beautiful she could have wept, the way a miner could weep when he finally finds a nugget of gold after digging for weeks through rocks and dirt. The girl admired the truth her hand had created, then lifted it up from the page and held it to her breast. Without knowing, from here on out, the girl carried this truth with her wherever she went.

On her next outing, the townspeople noticed that there was something different about the withdrawn cliff dweller. She glistened and shone under the morning sun, and the local gossips caught wind of it and let their whispers of magic run through the veins of the city. The rumors drew people into the streets, and they all came and clustered around the girl. Men grew enticed by her. Women asked her for her secrets. Children embraced her ran around her with laughter. They knew she had something they wished to possess and brought out their weapons to get some of it for themselves.

Most offered their riches. She accepted their coins with a smile and a word of wisdom, then gave them to a needy stranger around the corner. Money meant nothing to her. Only she knew that what she had could not be bought. It could not be possessed, only seen and admired, like the wind, the moon, and the stars.

The secret the girl carried was that she had found much more than a single nugget of truth. She had struck a golden ore. She was in the heart of the goldmine, and the further she dug, the more wealth she found. She ignored the shine of the coins for the shine of the words that leapt forth from under her pen. The words seemed to set the pages themselves on fire with their glow. And all that glow, without the girl knowing, clung to her chest and eyes and heart, to by gazed upon with both horror and awe by hungry strangers of the city.

More and more they asked her to share her words of wisdom. They invited her to other cities. Then big metropoles. She took buses and trains and stayed overnight in resorts. She carried few belongings with her on her travels, however, she always remembered to bring the notebook, her most prized possession. She declined invitations for drinks and dances so that she could write. New lands opened at her feet – she flew on planes, spoke to great leaders, saw many wonders of the world. Everywhere she looked, there was light, beauty, and abundance.

There came a point where the girl had been on the road for weeks, even months. She wasn’t sure herself. One particularly rainy evening as she sat hunched over her notebook in a hotel room, it occurred to her suddenly that her flowers must have dried because she wasn’t watering them anymore. She was forgetting what flowers she even grew in her flowerpots, and what they smelled like. She could only vaguely remember how soft her bed was, and what the waves sounded like when they crashed against the shore. She thought about her books, the rows of ancient and beautiful texts she used to spend hours pouring over as a young girl. She was not a young girl anymore.

With a sudden pang in her heart, the girl shut her notebook and ran out into the street. Rain seeped through her sweater and neon street signs blinded her eyes. She did not know this city. She walked faster, looking for some semblance of familiarity. There was a bookstore on the street corner. Relieved, she pushed against its heavy brass door. The book laden shelves greeted her with a sigh. Yet before she could collapse into their arms, she noticed a display. Right in front of the checkout counter, with a bright red sign announcing a reduction in price, stood a row of black, leather-bound notebooks, each identical to the one the girl left in the hotel room. The girl opened one. Her hand felt heavy, as if made of stone. On the front page she saw the words: Every truth in me is already written. The girl let the book fall onto the ground and grabbed another, same words, another, again. She had attributed such grand significance to a thing so mundane, a thing that no one really wanted, an item put on sale to make room for newer, shinier things in its place.

It’s difficult to describe what exactly took over the girl after that moment. Those who saw her say she simply placed the notebooks back on the self, smiled at the store clerk, and walked back outside, back into the rain, the lights, her room in the hotel. Mechanically, she packed up her suitcase and booked a flight her the next morning, back to her coastal town. Seemingly perfectly composed, she slowly unraveled in a way invisible to the eye. She cursed herself, her tragic indifference, all the places she visited but had never really seen, all the money she earned and then foolishly spent. She slipped the check for twenty thousand dollars, the commission that she received for a speech she gave at the leadership assembly, deep into her pocket. She told herself that she was going to save it, invest it, keep it for a rainy day. She saw now that rainy days would come.

She arrived back home just as the blustery winds of autumn were picking up again. In her scattered state, the power of these winds had slipped her mind. She forgot every summer she had spent preparing for them, how she had to fasten all the shudders on the windows and how she could not sleep for the howling of the chimney. Momentarily oblivious, she didn’t close her pocket, and when the wind came, it took the check with it.

The girl finally broke. She began to cry, piercing wails rocking her chest for this terrible loss she didn’t think she deserved. A storm rose as she walked home to her cottage. She didn’t have money for a cab. A black cat crossed her path. A crow cawed at her from a juniper tree. Bad omens everywhere. The girl barely made it to the door. She swept aside a cobweb as she opened it and collapsed on the floor.

She thought then of her notebook. A wretched thing. She tore it out of her bag and wrote the words that had been echoing in her mind, the only ones her numb fingers were capable of writing: every empire must crumble.

Something miraculous happened then. The words shimmered with the light of truth, which she had long grown used to seeing, but this time, the shimmer did not go away. Instead, it grew in intensity, until the whole page was golden with light, then other pages, then the whole book. It shone so brightly the girl had to shut her eyes, and when she opened them again, she saw that the words had disappeared. She flipped through the pages in utter shock. Every single page was blank. Only the first remained: Every truth in me is already written.

The girl would have wept again if there were any tears left in her. The last thing she had cared about in this world was gone. Instead of feeling the weight of loss, she felt nothing at all. An empty well, she closed the book, stood up, and began sweeping away the layers of dust on her honey wood floor.

In time, the girl put everything back into place. She repaired her shutters, pulled out the weeds from her garden and polished her broach. She made tea for supper and bread for breakfast, and when there were any crumbs left over, she threw them to the seagulls. In time, she returned into town. She greeted people by name, and they greeted her back. She often stopped by the antique shop, and called the shopkeeper Mr. Shephard, and he called her Jenny. She returned to him something that she had borrowed long ago – a black, leatherbound notebook. Blank. Well, almost blank. There were words written on the first page, and a new note inscribed in the margin. It was a short note, easily overlooked, and then easily forgotten again.

There was once a girl with endless eyes and golden hair. She did not ask for more.