The Forgotten Quest

Once upon a time, there was a a little girl who was cursed when she was very young by an evil witch. On the 10th birthday party of the little girl, the evil witch had visited and put a spell on her: she would live a life running away from everything that is truly important to her. The little girl did not fully understand what the witch had said or what it meant, and so she soon forgot about the spell and grew up joyfully and full of potential.

She was an amazing singer and she was asked to sing at a wedding and loved the attention and praise she received, but never did it again because it made her too nervous. She only ever sang to herself, or when it didn’t really matter.
She was also an amazing painter and had the wildest imagination, but she considered these things not important in life, so she never felt proud of these talents and never fully developed them.

Growing up, she had many friends and was very popular, but every few years, she would find other friends and start the same cycle over and over again, always with new people.
She also fell in love many times, usually with princes who were unavailable, but when her love was reciprocated, she ran away, sometimes literally.

“What is wrong with me?”, she asked herself one day. Suddenly she thought of the witch and she remembered the spell.
“That is it, of course! I am cursed!”, she said, “I will find that evil witch and make her reverse the spell!”.

The little girl started traveling with great difficulty, because this quest was so important to her that she kept forgetting about it altogether, because of the spell she was under. For many years she got lost in a forest, unable to remember who or what she was looking for, until one day she met an old man.
The girl liked him immediately because he could tell the most beautiful stories, so she decided to stay with him for a while. He told the girl everything about his life, how he used to work in the greatest theater of the Kingdom, creating magical scenery for world-famous plays, how he traveled the world and married an exotic princess and how grateful he was for the 10 years they had lived together.
‘So she died?…’ The girl asked, immediately feeling ashamed of herself for asking the question… what if it hurts him to talk about it?
And indeed, the old man started crying. Tears were running down his cheeks as he said:
‘She was the best thing that ever happened to me. I loved her and still love her so much, and I am so grateful for every moment we spent together. If I die today I will die a happy man, because I lived such a full life, three lives worth, with adventures and failures and losses and pain, so amazingly beautiful…’
To her own surprise, the little girl was suddenly overcome with jealousy. She had never loved someone so much or done anything so amazing and she could feel that she never would, if she would continue to walk the path she was on.
“I need to go now,” she said to the old man, “There is something or someone I need to find, I just don’t know what it is. Thank you for sharing this with me, I feel like I am not ready yet to fully understand it, but I know you just gave me one of the most important gifts of my life.”

The next day the girl left the old man and she wandered the forest once more, until she found a tower. She decided to climb it, and in the top room she met a beautiful woman.
Suddenly she recognized her: “You are the evil witch who put a spell on me so I would run away from everything that is important to me! How could you do that to me? I have been searching and feeling lost for most of my life, I cannot take this anymore, you need to undo the spell, right now!”
The woman smiled at her and said softly:
“Ok, love, but I believe you remember wrongly. I came to your tenth birthday party because you wanted me to. You were hurt and you commanded me to keep you from that happening ever again, by never allowing anything or anyone into you heart again. And so I made your wish come true and closed your heart forever.”
The little girl started crying and said:
“I take it back, please undo that spell, I want to love things and people, I want things to matter, I want to get hurt!”
The woman frowned and asked:
“Are you sure? That would cause you pain, and you made it very clear to me in the past that that is not what you want!”
“YES I AM SURE!!!”, the little girl cried out, “I realize now that all that the spell has done for me, is that I have nothing precious in my life, and I want to have precious things in my life, life is meaningless without, empty, just like my heart… Please undo the spell now.”
The beautiful woman looked at the little girl and she saw the words were true. She blew what felt like a thousand little arrows towards the little girl’s heart, piercing her, one after the other, the missed opportunities and the hurt she had caused to herself and to the people around her. With every arrow that hit her, she felt as if a piece of the armor that was holding her captive, fell off.
“Never again,”, said the little girl, crying but smiling and breathing deeply, “Never again do I want to close my heart, I want it to be open, so open, that it can contain the whole world inside it.”
And she lived, open-hearted and happily ever after.

The end.