Once upon a time, there was a girl who lived in a land of pure peace and bliss, where everything she imagined became real.
Her home was a fantastical land with houses of mushroom and moss, where sunshine kissed the walking paths, and flowers bloomed everywhere there was love (flowers were everywhere!) and the girl rode the skies on the back of a dragon.
Her heart was full and content. Nothing was missing.
Then one day, a single thought drifted into her mind:
“Perhaps there is something more. Something better…”
The faint thought shimmered like dragon silver. She followed it down a shadowed path where the air cooled and the birds felt silent. The flowers vanished.
Before she knew it, she stood in a strange forest, thick with mist, her home nowhere in sight.
She tried to retrace her steps, but the more she searched, the stranger her surroundings became, and the farther from home she seemed to be.
The girl yanked her hair in frustration. The sun set and strange beasts howled in the darkness. She was lost.
The girl climbed into a hollow tree where she shivered and shook through the night until the gray dawn once again cast shadows across the forest.
Loneliness fell over her as she wandered through a fog that obscured all but a few feet before her. The thick, clammy air sickened her skin and slowed her pace.
“Where is my home?” she cried to the desolate woods. “I’ve searched everywhere. This is wrong!”
She grabbed handfuls of dirty leaves and threw them into the air. Then twigs and branches, stones, flung in every direction until a tornado swirled around her. Nothing was visible except the dust and bits of decaying wood spiraling around the girl.
Finally, the girl collapsed onto the forest floor and wept.
There was nothing left to try.
Another day and night passed. The girl drank the fetid liquid left by the night mist and ate a few rotten nuts on the ground.
She grew pale and shrunken. It was enough to keep her alive, barely.
The girl haunted the forest like a ghost in search of home.
“I found a way in. There must be a way out,” she declared to the dead woods.
She scavenged and found two jagged stones. She fastened them to her feet with twisted vines, and drove them into the tallest tree, climbing and pulling herself upwards with all her strength.
The girl screamed in triumph as she broke through the mist above the tree tops. She looked out, hungry for home.
Only gray clouds over an endless forest greeted her.
She cried out again and fell backwards, scratched and clawed by branches, all the way to the ground where she landed with a thud that knocked the wind out of her.
Bruised and broken, the girl finally gave up. She lay in silence. In the hush, a soft sensation fluttered in her chest like a tiny bird.
She followed the lovely feeling with her attention.
Hope blossomed from the quiet within. Eyes closed, she smelled lavender, lilac, heather and roses on the wind. She felt the rush of air as though flying on her dragon’s back. Peace spread like warm sunlight across her skin.
She opened her eyes.
The desolate forest thinned, then melted away, revealing the valley she loved and the winding path she’d known since forever.
She had never left.
It had only seemed so because she believed a thought that said something better was “out there.”
From that day on, whenever the whisper of “something more” appeared and the haunted forest beckoned, the girl paused and remembered the paradise she lived in. Now.
She knew there was nowhere she needed to go. The thought would drift away like smoke and the feeling of home would return, bright and ever-present, right where it had always lived:
Inside her.
(Listen to an inspirational soundtrack for this story here.)
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