When she was a child, she ran around outside as fast she could, arms flailing, legs pumping, until she fell in the grass in a fit of laughter. Her little legs always had cuts and bruises from her adventures climbing trees or trying to skateboard or slipping on rocks in the neighborhood creek.
She cried the day her mom finally bought her a real bra. Something told her, society perhaps, that becoming a woman meant the end of her carefree days playing under the sun.
Then she started to straighten her hair and wear eyeliner and Instagram came out and suddenly she was spending more time taking pictures of herself than climbing trees and splashing in puddles.
She thought her first love was going to last forever. It ended in heartbreak less than a year later.
College proved to be tough not because the work was hard but because it was her first time being alone so far from home, although she wasn’t able to pinpoint that as the reason at the time.
Graduating into the real world was a bit of a slap in the face. Ah the naivety of your early twenties. How could she know how little she knew?
Love came and went. She learned to grow confident in her individualism.
Society (and her biological clock) pulled on her. She started to lose her way, her footing less sure. She was realizing just how little she knew.
She tried and she failed and she got back up and tried again. She did jobs she thought she liked and ended up quitting in a rage. She had a few stints of unemployment. Contemplated switching careers a dozen times. Swore to herself she’d never make the same mistakes. She wanted so badly to live without regrets.
A love came to her unlike any other she had ever known. It flipped her life upside down in the best way.
Love ebbs and flows, and in the moments of its fading she realized she no longer recognized herself. She faced an internal struggle of holding onto herself and making room for her partner. She hadn’t yet learned that the self doesn’t even exist.
When she had a child, the world was very different. She wanted so badly for her daughter to run through fields of grass the way she did, light and free. But there were devices everywhere breathing capitalism down everybody’s throats. Her daughter wanted the newest screens and to keep up with the trends and she was growing up too fast and she was supposed to have cuts and scrapes from trees and rocks not an eating disorder.
Time passed, as it always does, and she and her partner became empty nesters. The love that was once there was getting harder to find and with nobody else in the house but each other it became clear that they would go their separate ways.
Statistically her life was more than halfway over. Maybe three-quarters of the way there. She was back to trying and failing and trying again. Except this time she knew how little she still knew. The failures were no longer painful, they were almost joyous.
She stopped using the world failure. As she got older she merely wanted to try everything she possibly could. She had spent too much time holding herself back with her silly little rules. She used to blame society but it was her that was deciding to listen to them.
She woke up one day and decided to not have any regret. Problem solved.
She didn’t know when it was going to end. Even at the end she still couldn’t have been sure. But just as time always passes and things always change and existence is always impermanent, so was she. And her self dissolved back into the other selves, released from its stint on planet Earth in human form on a linear time scale and the wave that was her returned to the sea.