This Is Not A Fairy Tale

There once was a little girl who dreamed.
She flew on angel’s wings and dove
To great heights and beyond
The realm of thought and even feeling
To a world where only true hearts
Have access; a land of cotton candy
Hopes and honey-toothed soliloquies.

In this land she learned more than
Books could ever teach her,
About love, warmth, home, and hearth,
About friendship, honor, duty, and nobility.
This world held infinite wonder
And safely engendered a kind heart
And warm spirit in a soul who would
Otherwise know nothing of these things.

One day, the girl met a mysterious person.
He was quickly enamored of her innocence
And empathy, deciding at once that he
Could not live without her by his side.
A trap was laid, one of finely spun promises
And thinly veiled desires, one in which
A true heart such as her own would easily
Become tangled; knowing much less of
The difference between intention and action
Than most, believing the best in all creatures
As she had been taught to do.

Once snared, the little girl became subject
To rougher lessons of the heart and reality
In rather short order, and they eroded away
The strands of sanity that tied her to her world,
In time leaving an empty shell of what once was
Good, hopeful, bright and kind, cutting off
All sustenance of dreams, so that
She withered away into a
State of numbed
Existence.

With her innocence lost, the person lost interest
In her, unable to understand that her soul no longer
Sparkled with the life she once believed existed
And the despair that came with knowing she could
Never regain that which had fueled her imagination.

And so the girl was left alone.

There once was a little girl who dreamed.
This little girl dreams no longer.