Everything Ends, New Life Has Begun

Everything Ends, New Life Has Begun

By Ava Linney

Everything ends, new life has begun. Winter turns to spring, caterpillars into butterflies. A young girl tries strawberries for the first time, the juice dripping from her chin as her mother cuts them from the vine. They are soft and red, and she smiles a toothless grin as the seeds cling to her gums, as if they wish to hang on the essence of her youth. As the young girl grows, the garden gets smaller. The attention once paid by doting little girls is replaced by the bitter joys of teenhood.  

The young girl now paces in the yard, waiting for something she cannot place. She feels the grass between her bright pink toes and ignores the overgrown weeds in the garden. She doesn’t see how the vines are being choked, how they wither and yearn to expand.  All she feels is this crawling of her skin, the longing to break free of something she does not despise. She clings to a childhood now over, to her mother's tan skin under the sky of ten years old. She learns and breathes in painful spurts. 

How can I bring it back? How can I bring it back? She pleads. The vines do not answer. The wind does not sing. How do we return something that has not been lost, only outgrown? A girl cannot stop herself from evolving. She must fight, a brutal and bloody battle for her beauty. She must suffer for the grace that is to come. She longs for the little girl, for the stickiness on her chin and her mother's smile. 

One day as a woman sits on her balcony, the symphony of her city is the theme of her nostalgia. She does not cling to a life once loved, to a girl once happy. She is grown, and her beauty is her knowledge, strength, and suffering. She has won the battle. She continues to yearn. Of course, she yearns. What is a life of substance if the person cannot look back and hope that what has come to pass returns brighter? So as the woman sits and lives, she is what the vines whispered into the spring. When she returns home, they rejoice at what she has become, that the pain has passed. Everything ends, new life has begun.