nothing else but my heart's desire [COLLECTION] | FINISHED

A fragment of a woman's mind - ORIGINAL PROSE

I never asked to fit into either box, never wanted to be anything but myself. I don't want to be a work of art, put on display to be dissected and analysed. I simply want to exist as I am now, as I was then, how I will be in the future and how I've always been, from this day until my last: me, living, breathing, sad, angry, happy, bored, aware and not aware, a mess of contradictions and happily so. The girl I was lies beneath the ground, the woman I am stands before me, she's crying but feels more stable somehow, as though she can finally stand on her two feet without faltering. She feels sure of herself, though still looks around her to be sure of what she sees and feels, not faltering but needing to be pushed forward, as the ghost of doubt lingers in her mind, somewhere in the gloom. She looks like me, my mother is nowhere to be seen, my father now remains a distant memory. She's older, but I still see how she walks and I am taken back to a time long forgotten, as my child self walks in a similar fashion. Our old selves never leave us, but we can leave them. To be women in our own right, to breathe without tears, we must. Flowers will bloom where she lays, and she'll walk forward still, knowledge the weapon worth its weight in gold.