Dreams of the Fairytale

I was once that dark haired child that danced and sang and lived in a world of fairy stories and make-believe, maybe because my mother told me I looked like snow white and I believed her.

Once upon a time as a queen sits sewing at her window, she pricks her finger on her needle and three drops of blood fall on the snow that had fallen on her ebony window frame. As she looks at the blood on the snow, she says to herself, "Oh, how I wish that I had a daughter that had skin white as snow, lips red as blood, and hair black as ebony". Soon after that, the queen gives birth to a baby girl who has skin white as snow, lips red as blood, and hair black as ebony. They name her Princess Snow White.

That little girl, who still lives inside me, spent hours telling herself stories, dreaming up castles, princes, mythical creatures and as she grew older that didn’t change- perhaps she no longer dreamt of living in a castle, of meeting Prince Charming or escaping into the waves on a white unicorn but nonetheless, she continued to dream, to ride away into a world of make-believe.

as she rode they thinned out more and more, the beeches and oak-trees and bushes of golden gorse giving place to solitary groups of wind twisted pines, with here and there boulders of grey rock pushing their way through the tussocks of heather. To the cold fresh tang of the frost there was added now the salt tang of the sea.

Sometimes those beautiful stories and enchanted forests would be hacked away by black nightmares of real life and that dark haired child would want to run away, dancing further and further into her imagination, sliding between trees and swimming across glass lakes to a world more beautiful than the one before her, sometimes the dreams would slip away and reveal a world brighter and more brilliant than that she could ever have conjured and she would leave her magical kingdom to follow the track of adventure, to experience sights and sounds and smells of a new kingdom, one that would enrich her own walls of imagination and she would sometimes dance and sing and let the joy she'd carried into her heart overflow into the world.
Sometimes, she'd stop in hertracks, faced by the nightmares of 'real' life, and retreat to her own world where she knew she would always be safe.Grasping hands and fingers would pull and drag at her body, willing her back into their world of horrors and sometimes she could be brave and return to face the demons and fight battles as she had done years ago with dragons and witches.
She longs for a companion, someone to share in the dance, the song, to make love with under a sky full of stars, moons and planets, to melt away into a wash of colours; someone who would not laugh as they lay back and point out pictures in the clouds.
As she grew older, she started working on that mud brick wall between the two realities, a wall that would keep the monsters out of her world and stop her dreams and mythical beasts straying into the nightmare and she musters up courage to hop onto that wall and face the shades of grey ahead.
I say to myself: they are two “me’s”: the dreamer and the observer. They communicate and accept each other. Each one serves a different purpose: one is the sweetness of the dream, the other is the bitterness of life.