The girl who vanished: A fairy tale

Once upon a time there was a little girl who lived alone with her distant parents in a house in a forest.  One day she realized she was bored and wanted to go out, meet people, and have experiences.  When she went out, she found that the boredom to which she was so accustomed was replaced by an excited enjoyment of every situation and encounter.  She did not judge the different people and other creatures she met by wondering about their motives.  For she would talk with every kind of animal and sometimes even with plants, and it seemed to her at least that she understood, indeed always, their language, what they seemed to be saying to her, and out of the desire they seemed to have to speak to her and her in particular, as if some, indeed maybe all, of them, had something to say to her that she wanted, needed, and also loved to hear.  

They all said, and were interested in, different things, but to her it was all more or less the same because she wanted to be engaged with people in the pleasurable experience of interacting with them, which she would do by talking and sharing whatever ideas or impressions came to mind.  When anything was presented to her perceptually, she would find it fascinating and to each different and new thing she would give first a word and then a set of verbal expressions that did not so much refer to or say anything about anything as they expressed her excitement.  Always she would meet people, and they would seem to like her, and she them, since they would interact face to face and either give her words to repeat and develop into phrases of connected words, always complex and rather confusing for anyone to listen to if they were trying to understand it.  But she was not trying to understand what the people she kept on meeting were like or were doing, nor to guess what if anything they might have wanted that was not presented in what they were saying, nor was she curious to understand what she herself was saying.  And in a calmer moment, back home in the house, she might wonder and then realize that she did not understand her own expressions, but did not mind that either, for her purpose was to be in the world where things were happening with real people, not just the imagined friends back home that she might occasionally come upon and that her younger sister was always playing with, not desiring as she did to go out and have experiences with anything outside the closed world of the house where she resided in outward quiet and inward entertainment and occasionally turmoil, though one that troubled her not or at least not enough to bother about. 

After her first encounter, she realized soon after moving on that she had lost something.  At first not sure what, it turned out to be one of her little toes.  And with each new encounter another part of her would be lost.  Also, in each case she would wonder what it was that had really been said.  She wanted to know what this message was, a message surely meant for her and her alone, the truth perhaps of who she was and what she was doing.  Yet she never lingered long about this, and always went on, each time losing some bit of herself, not knowing how, but only that, upon moving on after leaving the brief but so pleasurable encounter, something was lost, and some part of her was now missing.  And so it went on, and bit by bit she lost toes, fingers, bits of hair, patches of skin or flesh, a knee, a leg, an arm, some hair, her nose, an eye, an ear, a mouth….

And finally she noticed that she had lost all of herself.  And so she was no longer there.  She was no longer there where she was.  She wanted to see herself and would look, but could not see anything when she did.  She still could see, somehow, unaccountably, and hear, and understand.  Her voice was still there and speaking words.  It was like a machine that produced words as it went on, and with each new encounter with a person, animal, plant, tree, rock, or other thing that she seemed to come upon, it was as if she would ask its name, and then repeat it in a string of names linked to others in a discourse that did not say anything specific but that did connect the names and so in a way the experiences and the things.  She in this wove a fabric of discourse.  

She came to a point of stopping when the forest opened onto a meadow which seemed to extend to the horizon with no clear ending point.  There she stopped and sat down on the wet grass on the ground though to be sure she sat there, knowing that she did, not feeling the ground or grass or its wetness, not sensing anything any more and not encountering any new persons or things whose voices - and everything had its voice and spoke to her, so that she seemed to speak the language of things, their secret language, that only they and some god might understand, a knowledge occulted to persons desiring to know including herself.  But what it would mean to understand what she saw and especially heard and repeated she had no idea.  She liked, however, the feeling.  

Her voice had an echo that continued for many years after her disappearance.  It is not known if she still heard it or saw what was around her, since the voice emanating from the place where she had been emanated like the light from a long dead star that continued to shine over a great distance and for a long time.  Friends she had known and admirers she had not known would come for years to the spot where it was learned or believed that she had finally vanished.  Her lost parts were never found.  Sometimes people would respond to the voice, but they did not hear in response anything new.   

Learning of this, her sister was very sad and said, I will not seek experiences, I will live with what I imagine.  But I will know that it is imaginary, and in this way I hope to not lose myself.  Eventually, her sister married a very nice man who was considered a suitable partner and lived happily ever after in a life about which there is nothing at all really to be said.  She knew that and didn’t mind.  Unlike her adventurous sister, who would have found that intolerable.  

A monument was erected in the meadow on the edge of the forest, and it said, ‘To the girl who wanted to experience everything, who could speak to the soul of every being, and who with each encounter would lose a part of herself until she vanished’.   And below that was added: ‘What we still do not know is what it was she wanted.  It is said that the person who learns this will have found a great truth.’