When Dreaming Ends

This is a story about a girl. No, I guess she's a woman now (much as she'd like to not be yet); this is a story about a woman.

This woman often lives in a make-believe world. And this world is beautiful. In it reside all of the most vivid emotions, colors, characters, and stories that could ever be (or have ever been) imagined.

The woman visits this world often. Some days it is all this woman can do to keep from spending the long hours lost in the world. One blink of the eye and she is easily there. One deep breath and her clothes are transformed, another era has taken over, people exist who have never existed.

In her night-time dreams the woman can see this world, it shimmers and flashes vividly, but when she wakes she finds herself lying in her bed, face up, staring at a moon-lit map on her ceiling.

On long summer days the woman walks among the forests near her home and imagines herself into a new landscape. She dances and twirls among different faces, along long corridors that only exist in the deep pool of her imagination.

But one day, far far in the passage of Time, the woman rocks alone in her chair on her porch. She is old and white; wrinkly and wizened. Back and forth she rocks, singing tuneless melodies to an empty sky. Alone with her dreams, she rocks.

And when a small boy comes down the lane and pauses at her front gate, her eyes flicker to her bare hands spotted with age. She shrugs him away. And she turns her ear to listen to his whistle as he continues down the road, fading into the dust one step at a time.