Free. That was how I felt when I came here. Free. The wind brushed my face, a soft kiss, that could just have easily turned into a gust that would fly me away. Quite honestly I wouldn't have minded. Everywhere else I felt the expectations of what everyone wanted from me pressing down, threatening to crush me under their weight.
This was my place, the place where I could be myself and no other, the place where the only person who could dictate what I did was me.
"Pocahontas!" The call came from a hundred feet below, but it was loud enough for me to hear it, a testament to the speaker's abnormally vociferous voice. I knew who it was, yet still I opened my eyes wearily, knowing that my time here was at an end for today.
Every moment spent on the cliff was one stolen from time, every moment here was one lost in the world where I should be. I stood and looked down over the edge of the steep cliff, down to the water below where the lake flowed out to the river. "Your father's back!" Nakoma yelled from below, floating in a canoe. Nakoma was my best, and really my only, friend. She was the one person in the tribe who I could count on never to question why I shied away from spending time with my father, learning how to govern the tribe.
I think she understood, in part at least, why I hated being there, around my father, around the people who had known me my entire life. Everywhere I went, my past followed me.
My mother had died when I was little more than a year old, of an illness that even our shaman could not cure. All the people of our tribe knew it and pitied me for it, pity that I did not ask for and did not want.
People viewed me as the poor girl who had lost her mother at such a young age, and was raised by a father that was absent more often than not. And just as much as everyone accepted that as a fact of life, so it was accepted that someday I would help my husband rule the tribe once my father was gone.
That was maybe what irked me the most. That I, that everyone, could see my future as clearly as it had already happened. That wasn't what I wanted out of life.
I craved the excitement of not knowing what was coming, of what was yet to come, of all those little surprises that most people found everyday. My life had been written for me since I was born, and I hated it.
"Better hurry if you want to get home in time!" Nakoma called, gesturing with her slim arm to the steep rock face that I would have to scale in order to get back down, at least without going around half of the forest. "I'm coming!" I shouted back.
It wasn't that I didn't consider consequences, that I was completely careless about everything, it was more that I knew that I had to get my fill of excitement where I could get it.
I strode back a few steps, and pivoted forward again, and sprinted towards the edge and over it, falling forward. I pulled my body downward, relishing the feeling of pure weightlessness, before it was over all too quickly and I slipped under the water.
"Pocahontas! Pocahontas! You better not be dead, because if you are I'm not coming in after you!" Nakoma screamed as I reached. "Sorry to deprive you of the drama, but I'm fine", I teased. She sighed and shook her head at me, "You are the craziest person I know". "I'm the only crazy person you know".
I hauled myself into the canoe, tilting it perilously side to side. "So, my father's back from bloodying his hands, is he?" "You're in for a lot of war stories tonight. And Kococuom features prominently in most of them", she said, smirking. "That sounds more like your kind of story than mine", I sighed, trailing a hand through the water.
"You know he's just going to push him even harder at me after this". "I don't understand what's so bad about him. Even you have to admit it. He. Is. Gorgeous", Nakoma said, picking up an oar and starting to row us back. "I haven't heard him utter a single word that does not somehow pertain to him gutting something", I replied, starting to assist her with the rowing.
"I don't know, I could probably look past it for those muscles". "And that, Nakoma, is the difference between you and me", I laughed, flicking water in her face, as floated downstream toward my awaiting father.