March 13, 2012

She spent her whole life reading about fairies and fey of all kinds. She read stories about good fairies and bad fairies, humans becoming fairies and fairies becoming humans, and fairies of the Winter Court and fairies of the Summer Court. She spent countless hours drawing all sorts of fairies on every scrap of paper she could get her hands on. In her dreams, they came to her. She danced with the fey, ate with the fey, sometimes she was even believed she was one of them.

Her father feared her obsession. He took away her books, kept her from the libraries, even took away her drawings. When even that did not stop her following her passion, he sent her away to a strict boarding school. Here, she was told she must only focus on her studies. She was often punished for talking of these fictions with other students or drawing fairies on her school work.


The one thing they could never take away, however, were her dreams. At night, she was still free to laugh and dance and sing with the fey. She often wished she could go to sleep and never wake up, free to stay in her dreamland forever. So, one day, while writing out her lines in detention, somewhere between I will not make up stories and I will not tell lies she decided that she would do exactly that.

That night, she told herself she would sleep, but she would not wake up in the morning. She would stay with her fairy friends to laugh and sing and dance for all of eternity. She lay down in her bed, closed her eyes, and soon, she was asleep. She was off to the land of the fey, just like every other night. But when morning came, she felt herself waking up. She didn't want to leave, she belonged here! She begged the fey to help her, to keep here there, don't let her go! But alas, the fey could do nothing to help her, for as much as she wished it, she did not truly belong with them.

Once awake, she was furious. It wasn't fair! How could they let her come back to this horrid place? She hated them, she decided. Hated them for not helping her, for watching her go. She wanted nothing to do with the fairies anymore. She took the few books she'd managed to hide among her things at the school and tossed them out the window. She gathered all of her drawings that had not yet been taken from her and threw them in the fire place. Without a second thought, she struck a match, tossed it in, and watched her dreams go up in flames. She sat there, tears in her eyes, watching as everything she'd ever loved turned to ash.

Without the fairies clouding her mind, the girl began to focus on her school work. Her grades went up, the amount of punishment went down. Her books were consistently non-fiction, her school work was doodle free. Soon, her father sent for her, and she was able to return home to continue her studies there.

The girl grew older, into an adult. She met a boy fell in love, and soon had a daughter and son of her own. Both of them loved reading stories of mystical little creature with wings that lived in far off places. They read about them, made up their own stories, drew them, even pretended they were fairies themselves. Knowing exactly where this was headed, the girl took away the story books and drawings, just as her father once did to her.