I met a girl

I met a girl today, young, beautiful, with the world in front of her. She is just 21, about to graduate from college. Already, she has seen too much of the world; while others her age were opening kegs or glossy magazines, debating which shoes or bag to buy, or yet others, competing furiously for lucrative internships or well-connected jobs on the Hill, she decided to take a year off college, when she couldn't afford to pay for it, and went to a country that shall continue to be unnamed (not Lanka) and worked with refugees for over a year, setting and running a nonprofit that dealt with resettlement, psychosocial trauma, and gender based violence. She survived frequent sexual harassment, and intense loneliness, away from everyone she knew, and very far away from a world that made sense. If the phone rang, it would always be an emergency. After a year, she was back in the United States, watching events unfold in the country that she had left behind, 'freaking out', spending nights and days tense and anxious, worrying about the safety of those she had left behind. I met this girl, who I had never met before, today, connected through a friend as she was looking for a job, for a year of peace and stability and no doubt healing, before applying to grad school. I recognized this girl; impossibly young, but I thought she was older than many of my grad school classmates at 30; from the way she talked, her grasp of policy, her kindness and most of all, her quietness. I thought about the things that she had seen, which no childhood could have prepared her for; and I recognized her loneliness in the modern world, and her sense of being out of place, everywhere she went. Most of all, I understood her confusion about the path that lay in front of her, and the choices she had to make. I hope she sticks to the courage she has shown, but I also hope that she becomes happy in the life she makes for herself, and sometimes the two paths do not converge.