TILL IT MADE SENSE

ANUVA ANANNYA
Viqarunnesa Noon School
Class: 9

It amazed people when her long auburn hair fell down her back, snaking down to her knees. Her hair smelled of a concoction of strawberries and roses and was always disheveled in an attractive sort of way. She had eyes that were a vibrant sapphire blue that always remained lost in her own fantasy world. Her smell was like a hallucinogen. It was the feature that best described her unearthliness. It was not of a human being, it could not be. It was a real smell of a real flower. That's what people thought. Nobody ever really heard her voice except when she sang. She sang invisibly and invincibly. Her voice made the birds stop chirping. It was magical.

The people around her noticed everything about her, except her loneliness. Her angelic beauty was seen by them all, but she was not. They never gave her what she truly longed for.
So, one autumn night, she left her place and ran toward the horizon, in search of real love. She crunched through the patchy bushes and she waded through the canals.

She spent dreadful nights in the woods, alone and in the dark. But she didn't let fear clutch her fragile heart. She waited for the mornings. And as soon as the sun rose, she set off for her perpetual journey again.
She ran a lot. And she kept running. It didn't seem tiring.
The journey was rather beautiful.

Because passing through the streets, the fields, the shores and the hills like a phantom made her notice love. She noticed it in the fields of rye, in the infinite blue of the sky. She heard it in the whispers of the birds that flew around her. She felt it in the baffling waves of seawater that touched her anklet-adorned feet. She saw it in the stark silhouette of hills against the spreading light of the dusk and the dawn. She found it in the stars that peeped through the display of nothingness and she smiled her beautiful smile. She suddenly knew how beautiful love was.
She was triumphant.
What she didn't know was, she was being followed. That she had a companion in her perpetual journey. She hadn't found the ultimate love she had been searching for, yet. There was someone who loved her for who she was, and he did so with all his heart.
And he was a boy in ragged clothes. He wore a beautiful smile too, and everything about him was as disheveled as her hair, except his face that spoke of love.

She discovered him sitting beside her one morning, in an open and seemingly infinite field. Her freezing gaze fell upon him and she was at first startled at what appeared before her. She smiled her knowing beautiful smile again.
And the boy saw love in it.
So he tentatively came forward and held her hands. They kept holding hands until everything made sense again.