IV. The Girl Who Dreamed of Dragons

She lived entirely in her head.

At school, she sat in the back of the classroom, sketching on the edges of her textbook pages. The teachers called her absentminded. The other students called her a freak. When they would occasionally stare and whisper, she’d never look up. She couldn’t hear them. She was somewhere else, somewhere far away from the whitewashed cement block walls and cold overhead lighting of the classroom. In her mind, she lived among castles and forests, and the sky was never gray.

At home, her father’s voice filled the rooms like thunder. He would slam doors, curse her for existing, tell her she’d ruined his life. It didn’t matter what venom he threw at her, she would always nod blankly and retreat into her stories. There, his words couldn’t reach her. There, she was someone brave, someone loved. Someone who mattered.

She wrote at night, when the house was quiet. Her handwriting was delicate, her words small, as if she were afraid to break the world she was building. Her stories were full of princesses and dragons, fairies and evil sorcerers, magic and mighty gods. And the endings were always the same: the heroes died tragically.

Each passing day, she sank deeper into her dreaming. Reality had become a dull echo. Only something she was forced to tolerate between the periods of escape. She drifted through her part-time job, her classes, her chores, always thinking of other worlds. People in town thought she was slow. High on drugs. On the spectrum. She stopped trying to prove them wrong.

On this particular afternoon, she sat in the backyard, cross-legged in the dirt, her notebook open on her knees. The sun was low, pouring over her like liquid gold. Her black hair shimmered in it. Ink stained the tips of her fingers.

I watched her write for hours. The world around her seemed to fade, replaced by whatever she saw inside that fragile mind of hers. Every few minutes, she’d smile softly, as if someone she loved had whispered her name.

When she finally lifted her head, her expression shifted into something rare. Peace. Innocent, delicate, almost holy. The kind of peace you find only when you’ve given up on reality entirely.

For a moment, I forgot myself. The light caught her eyes in a way that made them seem alive, violet and burning with some faint, unreachable magic. She was...almost beautiful.

Then I remembered what I was looking at. A ghost of potential. A girl whose dreams were scaffolding over a collapsing mind. Take the dreams away, and she would crumble.

Detachment returned easily. It always does.

I marked the observation, noted her stability, and moved on.

The search continues.

M.

Up Next: The Girl Who Fed Her Darkness