• Dear lost child, my unfortunate dreamer doomed to imagination,

    You're just a little girl, wanting to be anything but what you are. Jamming to the happy songs in your heart and dreaming of anywhere but here, wishing to fly away through time and space and see it all for yourself.

    You're just a little dreamer, a schemer, you have these ideas in your head that you will never make real because you feel your hands are tied. You want it to come to you, you want it to be quick and easy like saying 'yes' or 'no,' like making a single choice and in a second you're worth knowing, worth loving and worth idolization.

    You delve into a deep everything of magic and storybooks, when the quiet protagonists like yourself get swept off their feet into a world where everything is possible. You wouldn't play dumb like them, you'd say "I know what faeries are, I know how to stop the big bad wolf and save the day, just give me the chance and I'll prove everything to you. I want to save the world," but no matter how many nights you lay awake, thinking that perpetual 'If only, if only,' your heart's cry is never answered.

    You're screaming into nothing, for no one, because no one can grant you such a thing.

    You want to be a hero, a savior, to walk among the great Gods and Angels like nothing, like it's 'just another day', to be powerful and strong and smart and beautiful. You want to save them all on a daily basis and you know you'd never crash under the pressure, the need, the cry for help because you would smile at every cry, because you want it. You knew what you asked for, and it was this, to be adored forevermore by people who may never even meet you. That anonymous adoration, that invisible fame of fairy tales...

    You want to be the only one, the every one, the forever one, the one who saves the world and the day and the night and the universe.

    You want to touch the stars.

    You retreat more and more to a fantasy world in your own mind, awaiting sleep like a child awaits Christmas day because while you sleep, while you dream your fantasies are reality and you are happy.

    But then you wake again and you're faced with pain, and not the heroic pain of your stories, but the everyday, mundane pain of life. Of reality. The grey, dank, soot-covered reality that you're forced to live in, to walk in, a Technicolor soul in a black-and-white world. You know that there's nothing new to be found, no adventures to seek, no magic to know. You could be a anything, yes - a doctor, a dentist, a painter, a secretary or the President, but never a sorceress or a faerie or an adored hero or anything other than those limited, realistic possibilities.

    No matter how good you are, you'll never be good enough in your own mind, because you've seen things in your dreams that you long to touch but never can.

    So retreat into your mind and pay no attention to me. Make yourself up in lipstick and liner, put on a fancy dress and dance your little heart out to your lovely songs. Dream of poetic words and vivid fantasies of grandiosity, but know that when you look in the mirror you'll see me. I am that voice in the back of your mind, the one keeping you grounded. You hate me, I know - you wish nothing more than to destroy me, like I'm a wicked witch in your fairy tales, but I'm the tether to your sanity. I'll never let you leave this earth, to float away like a lost helium balloon and explode into nothingness in the atmosphere.

    I'm sorry, I'm sorry, but I just can't let you go...


    Love,

    reality.