The Girl Who Wrote Her Future in Chalk

The Girl Who Wrote Her Future in Chalk

by[Javid khan]

She was small when she first discovered the sidewalk was a canvas.

Not just a place to walk, but a place to dream.

She found the box of pastel chalks in a forgotten drawer—peach, pale blue, lemon yellow, violet like the twilight that dipped behind her street. No one told her she couldn’t, so she took them outside, crouched on the concrete, and began to write.

Her letters were crooked, her drawings shaky, but the meaning was clear.

“Astronaut.”

She scribbled it in blue next to a stick figure in a fishbowl helmet, floating between stars.

“Singer.”

She drew a microphone, complete with musical notes dancing from its end like butterflies.

“Happy.”

The “p”s looked like flowers. The “a” resembled a sun.

Each word, each picture, left a piece of her on the pavement. It didn’t matter that cars rolled by or that neighbors smiled politely, thinking it was only child’s play. She was writing her future. In her own hand. In chalk.

But then the rain came.

It wasn’t a storm, just a soft summer drizzle—more blessing than warning. But when she raced outside the next morning, the sidewalk was clean.

Scrubbed. Erased.

Her dreams were gone.

She looked down at the blank gray slab where yesterday’s colors had danced. Her hand opened. A piece of chalk still rested there, now softened by her tight grip.

She sat. She looked. She thought.

And then she wrote again.

This time she wrote “Doctor” in steady pink, underlined it with purpose. Then, beside it, a large heart with blue veins running through it, and a face wearing a stethoscope.

Later came “Explorer,” where she drew a ship with white sails crossing a purple ocean. She etched small Xs on imaginary islands and named them after her mother, her cat, the stars.

Rain came again the next week. A sudden storm.

She watched it from the window. It made her chest ache—like watching a friend slowly walk away without waving goodbye.

But the moment the skies cleared, she was out the door. Her knees stained with wet chalk dust, her fingers raw from writing.

Each new word was like a spell she cast. A small rebellion against vanishing things. An insistence that dreams were still worth chasing, even if they disappeared for a while.

The neighbors began to notice. Some stopped to watch her. Others walked carefully around her chalked-up futures. Some even smiled, sadly, as if they knew how fragile dreams could be.

Still, she wrote.

“Poet.”

“Inventor.”

“Witch.”

She wrote stories with chalk that snaked along the entire sidewalk: girls who turned trees into homes, cities that floated, animals that spoke in rhymes.

It wasn’t just fantasy. It was possibility.

She didn’t mind the rain as much anymore. Not because it hurt less, but because she knew what to do when it passed.

She wrote again.

One day, a woman stopped beside her.

“You know the rain will just wash it away,” she said gently, like someone offering a warning, or maybe a kindness.

The girl looked up, eyes steady, then returned to her work.

“I know,” she said.

“But that’s not the point.”

She smiled, and drew a pair of wings next to the word “Free.”

Years passed, as they do. The chalk ran out and was replaced with pens, then keyboards. The sidewalks were traded for notebooks, then stages, then spaces where dreams weren’t just imagined—but built.

But still, some mornings, she’d wake early. Walk barefoot outside with a new box of chalk. Sit where the concrete still remembered her.

And she’d write:

“Still dreaming.”

“Still here.”

“Still writing.”

The chalk never lasted, but the act always did.

She had learned, long ago, the rain would always come.

But so would she.