Annie Gardner - 4/24/09
This is an abstract story I wrote just this fall (2008), two years after my course in the summer of 2006. It is not all true, some parts exadgerated, and some I imagined. It is very abstract, but it is based on my experience and i believe that it captures the essence of what my Outward Bound Experience ment to me.
Once upon a time the world was black and white.
There were twelve girls on a rainy day that were each given the same empty string. They boarded the same thirty foot boat, and though, scientifically speaking, the world is round, they extended the heavy charcoal oars and managed to get themselves over the edge of the earth.
The water seeped into all their senses until there was no dry place to retreat to. It was the damp in the touch of their clothes against their skin, the smell, the sight, and the rhythmic lapping of the salty waves beneath them; the taste of the penetrating rain on their parched lips.
In that first black night, while their bodies slept, a girl fell into rhythm with the moon, and when the girls woke up there was red and they put a red bead on their strings.
The world was black and white and red.
They had no roof to protect them from the relentless rain. Instead, they had orange-cocoon suits that smelled of unwashed bodies and mildew, and they put an orange bead on their strings. They got a yellow bead the third night because two girls sat on anchor watch in the freezing rain of inhuman hours and the stars sang, and the girls sang with them, finding unique untapped strength in their voices.
The world was black and white and red and orange and yellow.
When the three girls who believed there was no beauty other than black and white saw the other colors, green seeped from their souls because their bodies again found nourishment.
And the world was black and white and red and orange and yellow and green.
On one day, the sun came out, and the water reflected twelve girls who saw more beauty in their unwashed reflections then they had ever seen before. They found the beautiful blue beads in the water as their distorted vision became clear.
The world was black and white and red and orange and yellow and green and blue.
They threaded the last bead onto their strings when the timid girl covered in scars and angry welts found the strength to realize she was royalty; the color purple radiated from her newly found courage.
And the world was black and white and red and orange and yellow and green and blue and purple.
And again the rain came. The girls tied their strings around their necks, took up the oars, and rowed from the rainbow place they had discovered to the black and white earth that they had come from only to find that the world was no longer black and white.
The End
