Work Text:
Growing up sideways
(...it's better this way)
She is no longer the frightened child who clings to her mother’s arm.
The world, in all its wonder and strangeness doesn’t intimidate her. New places, new people are now seen as adventures and ways to make new friends – but she always makes sure to stay polite and to learn the rules.
Rules were important, after all. They could save you or condemn you.
(Don’t take what isn’t yours to take. Don’t invite greed in. Be persistent and don’t falter. Don’t let them turn you away.)
She loved rivers. She could spend hours watching the flow of the water. It baffles her father and frightens her mother because even if she was too young to really remember it, she had almost drowned one day (and lost her shoe).
In those few days she had learned to stand taller. She had grown up – but not to an adult, not really, because she couldn’t see the world in the same way her parents and teachers did: in ways of money, and ambition and complications.
Instead, she still believed in friendship, in forgiveness, in gods and magic and everything is possible.
She had grown up in a different direction. She had grown into herself, and she was more herself than she'd ever been.
Moving, saying goodbye – these things were less sad to her now. Because she had found that ‘goodbye’ sometimes meant ‘hello again’ and regaining something she had not really forgotten, just not-remembered.
So she went wherever life would take her – freely and fearlessly, wondering what she would find after every new bend in the road (and in every river she crossed).
She moved on and lived and learned and gained friends and said goodbye, never really stopping to look back when there was so much to look forward to.
But she never forgot, and a part of her heart was always and forever reserved. And she didn’t cry or brood or try to find her way back.
Because he had promised her that someday they would see each other again.
He had promised.
And she was not really a grown up, so she still believed in promises.
The world was a magical place, even if the wonder of it was not always as apparent as it had been there. But Chihiro had become very good at seeing the wonder where others could not and finding the beauty in all of those supposedly childish, un-complicated things.
So she explored her world and lived her life.
And waited for the time they could explore it together.