Sleeping Beauty and the Kiss of the World

Once upon a time there was a girl.
A girl with ideals and principles. 
She was like Sleeping Beauty. 
Pink and beautiful and unkissed. 
For many years the girl had lived as if behind glass. 
She breathed against the insurmountable wall 
Between her and the living world. 
She knew it only petrified from books and films. 
Carefully she stroked through the fine pearls of her breath, 
which slowly ran down the glass dome. 
Her eyes fixed on the everyday life and the lives of others. 
She watched, but was never seen. 
She did not live life. 
She wrote it. 
She read it. 
And she saw it. 
But she did not live it. 
One day it became summer. 
It was an unusually hot summer
And the glass of the dome cracked. 
Long fine branching cracks. 
And came the hour when the dome shattered 
And the girl was left defenceless to the living world. 
The girl was naive.
She did not know much. 
To sort out her still so unknown feelings 
She compared it with stories from books she had already read. 
And then came the day when
The girl was 
Pink and beautiful and kissed. 
And the last changed attribute made her immortal. 
She now experienced life herself and wrote her own stories. 
She blew her memories into the lands of this earth. 
It was a kiss
not given by a muscular man 
not given by a pitying mother 
not given by a panting pet.
It was a kiss of promise. 
A kiss of departure, of self-discovery 
A kiss that hurt and burned. 
A kiss that guided her away from her dome.
Something had seized her heart. 
Freedom held it mischievously in her hands. 
The heart trembled in the long and graceful fingers of freedom  
and if she did not go, her heart would be crushed.
For her happiness no longer lay at home, but in the distant world. 
And that hurt terribly. 
Saying goodbye hurts. 
Going out, with the uncertainty that wobbly legs might give way, hurts.   
The fresh and distant horizon, 
it promised happiness, adventure, an exciting love and her own children
it promised fame and self-realisation 
it promised strange people with familiar dreams.
Incongruence in congruence. 
Softly it whispered within her:  
Go. Go out. Into the wide world. Come, I will accompany you. 
But the voice had no body. 
It was not there when she left her sheltered nest. 
Going into the distance hurts and not doing it hurts. 
She had to balance 
On the highest rooftops of the largest city. 
That is, on the rooftops of Chongqing. 
So far removed from the West. 
Then she became free.