She sat down a few rows ahead of me. Though I had seen her before, I had never really paid much attention till today.

She was barely 15. Clumsy. If I didn’t like her and if I were a rude critic, I could say she looked like a mule. But she’s a good Christian girl and so am I so I decided she just looked lost. Lost somewhere in the various commandments perhaps. Or lost between the instruction manuals of “to be or not to be”. Or lost between who she was and who she should not become. Lost definitely.

Her face twitched in between and I surmised she must be rebelling in her mind against herself or her mother or her father or against whoever. Then there was the brief shuffling of her feet, impatient with some other.

The reading of the psalm was done and a song was next.

She slumped and started singing with the others.

If I had the powers to place her in a crystal ball and see the roads and the crossroads and the many cul-de-sac she may tread in her days to come, and if I had the power to set her on the best and easiest path, I’d just do it. For the fun of seeing her happy. For the fun of seeing her platypus lips, painted and happy and widen with a real smile. For the fun of seeing her blossom into the flower she must become, without the funny hedges built around her. For the fun of freedom and life and all things real.

The sermon was over. It was raining heavily outside. The gravel on the ground was fresh and kept the wet red mud from playing mucky. She walked past me as I walked to my car. Lost eyes, lips that were about to say something to someone she was searching out. Platypus lips. Mule. Cute.

It rained harder. Large droplets shutting out the cacophony of meaningless niceties. Larger droplets becoming crystal balls. And I saw me at 15 through large droplets. Mule. Cute. Lost.

Across the big river, as usual, women were washing the day’s laundry. A thin boat carried a few people from the other bank to ours. There was a tiny crowd at the junction waiting for the local bus. The road was lined on both sides with sugarcane plantations, leaves taller than men, sharper than men, cut by men, burnt by men once the sweet sugar was taken.

Everything was beautiful and ugly and cruel and fair and at war and at peace. Everything was forgiven and cursed and remembered and forgotten and allowed and banned. Convictions and conveniences and the condemned. Baptised and chastised. Organised chaos and the disoriented order.

Did the platypus girl get confused too? For her sake, I prayed she does not see fractals and the star showers and the games of the moon and the plays of the waves. For her sake, I wish her idiocy.

And there was the evening and the morning – the nth day.