The Story of a Girl whose Soul was Red

 

 

 

Imagine a girl whose soul was red, for that is the girl in this story.

 

This girl thought she understood the world but she could not; try as she might, find a place for herself.  She could not find her home or her people.

 

When she was little, those around her could not see her soul was red.  They measured her value against their own and found her to be lacking.  Disappointed, they tried to love her anyway but she was wrong and they could not help but show her that, every day in every way.  Cross with herself, she blamed her red soul for all the things that made her wrong and she banished it away from her and forgot about its existence.

 

The girl was sad but without her red soul she could not work out why.

 

She resolved to try harder so she went out into the world and made a life for herself.  She filled it with parties and fun and boys, anything that would make her right, anything that would fill her up.  She told herself that this was the life that was meant for her, but it did not always feel like that. 

 

She achieved and achieved and achieved, everything she put her mind too turned to red.  But she did not know the person looking back in the mirror. 

She had made herself forget she was red and yet she longed to remember. 

 

One day a man came along.

He told her his secrets and asked for hers in return. 

Over time, she gave them all to him.

All except the red soul, she had forgotten about that.

 

When the secrets were shared, she gave her last to him…

‘Don’t leave me’ she whispered.  A nasty remnant from a childhood fear. 

‘I’ll never leave you’ he promised.

The girl would not hear anything else for she liked his words and wanted to be complete.

 

But then something happened that would rip it all apart.

The man she had made her heart, left her and did not look back.

 

The pain broke her. 

No amounts of tears were ever enough.

She was torn and the bleeding would not stop.

The pain came with hurt, with shame and with longing. 

It all came out in the blood, spilling out everywhere and tainting everything.

Life stopped there, in the pain and the girl wondered if she could bear it.

 

However, this was not the end of her tale.

 

Wrapped in all the pain spilling out of her, came her red soul.

Scratched, ripped, bruised and battered – but red nonetheless.

The girl did not recognise what it was at first and would not touch it.

 

Instead she wandered everywhere to find something, anything to make the bleeding stop. 

She ran through the dark thinking that light would be just around the corner. 

But, it never was.

The blood continued to spill and the tears continued to come. 

She walked through the life she had built and tore it down. 

She wanted no part of it.   

 

She could not see it, but her red soul was free and circling around her as she began to build new things for herself. It whispered into her ear and told her that she was love and that she was everything she never knew she needed.  The girl often shied away, she did not dare to believe such a thing.  But eventually she would come back and hear the message again.  One day she hoped she would learn to believe it. 

 

Along her way, people recognised her red soul and whispered their tales to her.  She listened and she felt every one of them.

 

She did not know it until much later, but the girl was collecting stories.  Stories that would heal her, stories that would guide her and stories that she would later tell to others.

 

It was never the big stories that taught her. 

She knew, as she had always known, she was red. 

Her red soul was her heart and her strength.  Her essence and her whole.

 

It was the little stories she valued the most, the small glimpses of moments that marked the journey.  She collected them all until one day it came to her, her very own story.

 

Red was remembered and a storyteller was born.

 

She learned that her home was never going to be outside, she would need to build it herself and so she began, with a red diamond sky where she was always welcome and always free.

 

She learnt that it would never matter what tore you and made you bleed, the only thing that was ever important was the stories you could tell. 

 

Eventually, she made a home for all of her little stories and sent them out into the world so that other people had a place to share theirs.  There it sat, until today when you came along to share yours.

 

Find your red. Share your stories.