The Girl and the Notebook
Sometimes a little change of direction helps- so I wrote a fairytale.
A little girl with mouse brown hair and a voice like sandpaper was wandering through the woods. She carried her notebook and pencil because she liked to write about what she saw.
She had been given a map to find her way through the woods, but the person who had made the map had no sense of direction, so the little girl got lost. It got darker and darker out, and she was so scared. Since she had no one to comfort her, just her notebook, she decided to write about how scared she was. She wrote about how the night was so black she thought it would swallow her up, and how the shrieks of the woodland creatures haunted her little bones. She she wrote until she fell asleep, and when she woke up she went back to trying to find her way out.
And she would write down what paths lead to nowhere and what trees gave good shade from the sun, and which part of the night was the coldest.
She did this over and over for so long she didn’t remember how much time had even passed. Finally, one day she came upon a slithering snake. He told her slyly that if she wanted to stop being lost all she had to do was follow him.
And she was so very tired of being lost so she didn’t care that he was a slithering snake and she gladly trotted behind him. A few yards into it, the ground disappeared and she dropped into a deep hole that had been hidden by leaves.
The snake sneered down into the hole and said, “see?! Now you’re not lost anymore- you’re trapped!”
And the little girl began to cry because she knew she would never get out of the hole. And she was angry at the snake and angry at the mapmaker for getting her into this, but mostly she was just mad at herself for believing them. More than that though, she was hopeless and scared.
So she laid in the hole and she gave up even writing in her notebook because every day felt the same.
One day when she was laying there in her puddle of tears, she heard a voice that said, “you! Why are you so sad down there?”
And the girl said, “because it’s dark and I have no way out!
Who are you?!”
The girl kept peering up and and she saw the silhouette of someone with the sun shining behind them. The girl squinted her eyes and spoke again.
“Who are you?!”
The figure moved to the other side of the hole and then the girl could see.
It was a woman with wild gray hair that fell to her waist, and it had leaves and twigs stuck fast in it. Her eyes danced with amusement and when she squatted down to the rim of the hole and steadied herself with her hands, the girl could see her gnarled fingers were covered in dirt. The woman laughed.
The little girl was upset that she was laughing.
“Why are you laughing?!” She blurted out angrily.
The silver haired crone cocked her head to the side and looked even more amused.
“Well isn’t it obvious?” She said. Her voice had a bit of a sneer in it but her eyes were kind.
“No!” The girl was growing more upset and confused.
“You’re angry at the mapmaker and the snake because they got you in here. But they’re long gone. You’re angry at yourself because you believed them. But that’s not getting you out either.”
The little girl blinked back tears and pleaded with her eyes.
The woman spoke again, this time more gently.
“Do you know why you’re really in this hole?”
The girl looked down. Fat teardrops rolled down her dirty cheeks and left clean lines. Her chin quivered. Her voice was barely a whisper.
“Because I’m stupid?”
The old hag softened more.
She quickly gathered herself and strengthened her voice.
“Girl! Pick your eyes up and look at mine!”
The girl looked up slowly. The old woman’s eyes gleamed with determination. The girl felt her fear melt away when she saw it.
“You’re in that hole because you are supposed to be- you have a job!”
“A…a job?!” The girl stammered.
“Where is your notebook?”
“It’s here.” The girl patted her pocket of her dress.
“Why aren’t you writing in it? You stopped!”
“Because nothing I say matters. I’m in a hole.” The girls chin began to tremble again.
“Yes. You are. And there are two things you need to do and you can get out.”
The girls eyes snapped back up. “Oh please- please tell me!”
The woman with the wild gray hair stared at her with that determination again. “First,” she said, “you have to believe that you can get out. You haven’t done that, have you?”
The girl shook her head.
“Right. You have to do that. And you can’t just pretend. You only need to believe a little- but you have to.”
The girl nodded in agreement.
“Before you start you believe your way out, you need to take out your notebook. Write about the hole. Write all of it. Write about mapmakers who don’t know direction and about slithering lying snakes. Write about the hole. Write about how scary and sad it was to be in there.
And then- write about how you got out.”
So the girl took her notebook out and sat on the floor of the hole and wrote furiously. She wrote it all. She wrote and wrote and she got to the part about how she believed she could get out, and she looked up and saw something in the dirt on the wall that she hadn’t seen. She stood up and went to it and brushed the dirt away. It was the rung of a ladder.
She put her notebook in her pocket and climbed up the rungs one by one.
She looked for the old Woman but she was nowhere to be found.
As she stepped away from the hole, she saw a map. A REAL map, one she knew right away by the dirty fingerprints that it had been drawn by the old Woman. And scrawled on the back of it said
“Give what you wrote to anyone who needs it- that’s how you stay out of the hole.”