There once was a girl who dreamed. Every girl dreams, but her dreams were something special. In her dreams she found the world.
She explored the deepest oceans, the blue and black seas filled with monsters as old as time who swam alongside her as a guide. The greenest jungles and rainforests were her playgrounds, with sunlight filtering between patterned leaves and kissing the fur of predators and prey, both of which were her playmates. The farthest depths of space- the suns and stars and planets that appeared as only minute points of light to others- those were as close as the books she placed on her nightstand each evening before bed.
Oh, the girl, she dreamed. She created new worlds with every blink, with every breath. She explored the worlds that others had painted or wrote or spoke of and built upon them. Using her own stories, with crayon and water color illustrations, she shared her dreams with every person who would take the time to listen. She was magnificent, this dreamer. Her love of her worlds and the world around her knew no bounds. The dreamer in her foresaw all the good that would come out of her peers, out of the world, out of herself.
The dreamer’s iridescence did not go unnoticed; there was no earthly way that it could have. Her parents saw in her the promise of all she would create, all the wondrous things she would share with the world. Her teachers, when they watched her bent over her classwork, her brow furrowed in concentration but her mouth set in the beginnings of a secret smile, they would say;
“Now there is a girl who is going places.”
“There is a girl with so much potential.”
And her classmates? They never knew quite what do with the dreamer. But they recognized her iridescence, her ability to create new life just by the power of her thoughts and imagination. The girl’s classmates loved to hear her stories, her fantastic explanations of the world and its workings. She was never matter of fact, but always in awe of the things she saw, of the way in which the universe fit together. When she saw the potential in others, it was often before they themselves did. The dreamer gave them not just stories of what the outside world held, but she told them her dreams of what they possessed within. And they loved her for it. Her classmates, they loved the dreamer in their midst.
Until the day they didn’t. The dreamer kept her spark, her difference, long after its novelty had worn out. Where her teachers and parents still saw an “impressive little girl”, her classmates saw the freak who wouldn’t grow up. They took her drawings and paintings and tore them to shreds. They ignored her stories and stole the breath from her lips when she tried to tell them again.
But none of that hurt her. The dreamer would pick herself up, one hand smoothing her clothes, the other her hair. She’d close her eyes for one brief second and then- then she’d begin again. She’d dream again and again, over and over. Her classmates turned from vicious to murderous. The girl would not face reality, but still dreamed of better places. She wouldn’t stop, and she had to be destroyed.
“Grow up,” they told her. “You’re a child who clings to fantasy. You think you know how the world works? You know nothing.”
And that hurt the dreamer. She had never in her life thought of herself as too young. Youth was not a bad thing, or so she had thought. Did she truly not understand the world? Was she too naïve? Her classmates’ attacks were painted again, anew. She was the outcast, the one who needed to change. Wasn’t she?
So she did change. She stopped dreaming. It surprised her, how simple it was to grow up. When she closed her eyes, she saw only black. Her cynicism became her armor, her method of conformity. Where in the past marvelous words had spilled from her lips, only real portraits of the world came forth. She never thought of other places that were beyond her grasp.
Her teachers, her parents? They looked at her and they said,
“She has grown up so much these last few years.”
They never realized what that meant. They did not understand that in their admiration of her maturity, they were placing the final nails in the coffin of the dreamer.
She happened to meet a classmate from before her growth. For whatever reason, he, unlike the others, had clung to her dreams. He was different from those others. He had believed in the things she said, and for the long years after he’d last seen her, those words had sustained him, had kept him afloat in a world where no one believed in him.
He saw her then and did not recognize her. She was not the dreamer; she bore only a passing resemblance to the dreamer. But she called out to him, and when he looked again he saw her; he saw her garish new skin, her shattered image made by the mirror the others had held to her. When he spoke to her, he heard her intelligence, her maturity, but the iridescence of the dreamer was gone. He spoke of the future, its potential and she laughed cruelly and spoke words that held no story. There was no potential in the future, she informed him.
He said to her, “I thought you were the dreamer.”
And the dreamer who was dead, the girl who was now a woman, laughed again, even crueler than before, and replied with an iron voice and flat eyes, “That was once upon a time.”