According to her parents, from the moment she took her first steps, she was always racing off. Those short, st…
According to her parents, from the moment she took her first steps, she was always racing off.
Those short, sturdy legs were not yet steady. She'd stumble, bump, and tumble, but she'd always scramble up, brush off her seat, and start running again.
Or perhaps it wasn't running at all, but chasing?
She always seemed to have something to pursue. Butterflies, wind-borne catkins, drifting petals, fireflies... She loved to chase, to behold all these vibrant, novel wonders she had never known.
Yet this constant tumbling, while ignored by the child, bruised her parents' very hearts. So her craftsman father fashioned a tiny rod, baiting it with a shard of translucent glazed crystal, not to catch fish, but to tether his own little wanderer.
Beneath the sun, that shimmering crystal hung high, and she chased its light for a long, long time. Until dusk fell, and the radiance of the crystal dimmed. But this time, she did not lower her head to seek a new prize. She remained gazing upward. This time, reflected in her eyes was a sea of stars that had remained unchanged since ancient times.
Has this starry sea truly never changed? No. These stars are alive.
This complex celestial chart, the intersecting stellar orbits; star after star that defied prediction, wandering according to its own whim; this firmament that one might never fully fathom in a hundred lifetimes.
So the heavens hid a vibrant new world, brimming with infinite mysteries that a single lifetime could never exhaust...
Everyone grows up. And in growing, we learn too much, until the extraordinary becomes mundane.
There are butterflies, catkins, petals, and fireflies, and then, there are the stars.
Grown now, and knowing the sting of a fall, one loses the heart to chase.
But she was already enchanted, submerged within this sea of stars.
Stumbling, bumping, falling, and chasing, she remains exactly as she was as a child.