Update – Mental Health, Finances

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I know I tend to put a lot of myself out there on these blogs, which can be pretty unprofessional. For instance, I wouldn’t use this blog as a way to show someone my writing skills, even though there are posts on here that demonstrate that. It’s by far more of a way for me to put out there online what is going on in my head and maybe get feedback on things I can do to fix it.

This post is an update after my last one which was written in a very bad spot and then I took a long break.

Issues with my financials and my boyfriend combined into a mess of a headspace that for the last few weeks has left me really deflated. I want to write but every time I look at my computer I can’t bring myself to put words down, I want to be creative but I’m so exhausted from worrying about money I have nothing left to be creative with.

I even tried stepping back into RP but without someone to help me keep active and talk to people, I just couldn’t bring myself to be social and outgoing.

I’m picking up streaming again for a few different reasons. 1) I absolutely missed it. I loved playing games and having people talk to me in chat and seem like they actually cared about what I said. I loved it. 2)… when I did it last I actually made some side money that helped a lot. I’m sort of hoping I can build back up to that again because the biggest reason I’ve been in such a bad spot has been my finances.

My job pays me 13.60/hr to do mind-numbingly boring work. I mean… sitting for 8 hours a day right-clicking and hitting enter occasionally kind of work. I’m completely brain-dead and have been doing this for more than a year. I only just recently got the .60 raise… which apparently was something they based off my performance even though they never said that, I only know because my sister works at these same place and I saw how much her raise was and it was .10 MORE. For no reason given.

I’ve been desperately putting my resume out there trying to find something higher paying, took the time to apply for benefits, health insurance, and something cheaper because the insurance my company has literally brought my pay down to a bit over 9 an hour after what the insurance takes out per paycheck. I am literally drowning right now and struggling to breathe.

Which is why these posts are so few and far between. By the end of the workday I tend to just lay on the couch and nap, try not to eat too much food so what I have will last, and watch myself sink even more as I do. I want to be a writer, I always have… In fact, I decided to start a GoFundMe for my book that I’ve been desperately wanting to write. I put a link on the sidebar but here it is as well. https://gofund.me/e1fb47fa

Basically, the synopsis is this:

After a mysterious visit to a fortune teller, Rena starts to notice strange things happening around her. Inconsistencies, objects moved, doors opening and closing, and whispers around her house in the dead of night. When she’s suddenly struck by a black-and-white vision of what can only be the future, Rena knows she has to figure out what’s going on in her family home. Follow Rena’s journey to find out why she’s seeing visions of the future, what or who is haunting her house, and if there’s anything that she can do to help.

I’ve not got a lot but I know how I want it to go, but with my finances being… awful… I just can’t focus on it. Too much stress. So I thought, hey, why not give it a try? Don’t know if anyone cares enough and I’m horrible at marketing myself but at least on this blog it’s kind of my place to talk about what’s going on and that’s what I’ve done.

I’m not depending on this at all, by the way, this is mostly just a… help ease the tension of my life so I can feel free to write again. Trying to find a new job and putting out apps every single day and getting zero responses 98% of the time (The last 2% are automated, ‘we went with someone else’ emails).

I’m hoping one day I’ll find a job I can do that will actually help me succeed, I’m hoping streaming on my Twitch channel will help out, I’m hoping some benefits I applied for will come through and I can breathe a little bit with food too.

I live in an RV on my sister’s property with really cheap rent but winter is almost here and it’s not rated to do well in winter so I’m frantically throwing what money I can at it to block up windows, skirt the outside edge and just keep it functional for a winter until some things change…

I don’t know… I guess that’s my update that I’m throwing into the void. Sorry, my blog posts are depressing as hell but I really am hoping some of the steps I’ve taken will turn this blog from a pit of sorrow into a place of creativity again.

Thanks for reading this long.

Hobbies and Updates

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So last week I mentioned that things are pretty crazy and I just moved into my new RV. I even mentioned that I wanted to write more and update every weekend well here I am! I’m trying really hard to stay up with that so bear with me while I start finding my voice and getting into the habit of doing this.

So of all the different hobbies I’ve tried in my life, there’s only ever been one that I really honestly stuck to the most. I am a roleplayer.

Now… when I say roleplayer I know a LOT of people’s minds jump right to D&D or tabletop or whatever. I do play those games occasionally but it is not my source of roleplay. I roleplay on games that have a voice chat that allows you to talk to other people in the game as your character.

It started with GTA: San Andreas on the SAMP mod that allowed people to text chat with each other and added jobs and other roleplayable things so you could play as a character living in San Andreas. When I first started doing that I’d already been a forum rper for many years so the step into that kind of medium wasn’t that difficult. Text-based rp to a slightly different text-based rp; nothing crazy.

It’s kind of silly to think about but at the time I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I had no idea the depths of the story could be developed in such a medium. That even tho it’s been more than ten years I still have logs saved from the story that was created.

It’s a secret hidden gem still in the internet age. When things grow in popularity so quickly, it often loses its quality. Even my hobby isn’t exempt. Most articles are written about what streamers are doing on GTA: V now, on NoPixel, on the silly little shenanigans going on there, and to some people that is the extent of their knowledge into this crazy world of roleplay.

I bring all this up because with the recent surge in people joining my hobby and turning it into either a money-maker or an article producer, I stopped roleplaying. I was sick and tired of seeing the same old characters doing the same things on loop and people acting like it was top-notch RP. I was sick and tired of seeing a farce of my hobby become what was known.

Then a friend of mine told me about a game he was playing with an active rp community that I’d heard about in the past… I even owned the game and had rped on it before. However, I hadn’t particularly liked the game and had stopped playing, but I was desperate. Roleplay can be addicting and finding a new home can be so so difficult. So I asked if I could join him.

I feel like I’m back to those early days of SAMP where the potential is limitless and the people you’re around have the same goal in mind, to make a story. Next week I’ll post about all the stuff I’ve been up to. But last night was the first time in a very long time I stayed up until 4 AM because I was so engrossed in what was going on. I’ll try and keep up with what’s going on but next week will more than likely be a more… story-driven post.

Looking forward to telling the story! Have a great week everyone!

Moving in 2022

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So!

It’s been a while!

I actually have a very good reason for it being so long this time. Back in 2020 after battling some pretty severe depression, going through a breakup (and then being forced to live with that person for months because of Covid) I got a dog and moved in with my sister.

Long story short, I’m feeling a lot better now and far more confident about myself, and I have been working hard on figuring out my future plans and what I’m hoping to do with my life now that I’m almost 30. It’s been a rough ride of it though, my job doesn’t pay well AT ALL and on top of that my sister and her family moved to a piece of land (10 acres) 30 minutes outside of the city we lived in before.

Due to not having enough money to get an apartment, plus having a dog on top of that… I moved with them…

Into a tiny 2 bedroom farmhouse, with 7 people.

Yea… so I decided to get an RV and move into that instead… cause… yea… no.

That has… incurred some expenses and a LOT of time with basically zero free time to do anything I’d like to do at all! As moving tends to go… now I’m not only living far outside of town, but I live in an RV. A cheap RV… with issues.

I never intended this blog to become something I write in to talk about my life but it’s not every day you suddenly find yourself living in an RV with zero experience and having to learn everything from scratch so might as well blog about it and maybe entertain some people along the way.

So for a while at least I’m hoping to write more often, write more in general, and get my skills back up to what they used to be. I have the desire to get things done, but the motivation is hard to achieve and it’s something I’m constantly working on.

So keep rooting for me! I’m going to push REALLY hard to update the blog at least once a week. It may not be much but it gets me writing and gives me practice that I desperately need.

For now, ta-ta! I love you all and thanks so much for the likes and comments on other posts I’ve done. I know I’m not something you read regularly or anything but the few I get really brighten up my day!

So from one person in seven billion to another, I’ll see you all next week for more exciting updates on my life now that I’m living on a farm in an RV.

It has begun

~ molz6659 ~ 1 Comment

I have finally gotten two lenses for my camera at… honestly a steal of a price. Found a website called Mercari that is basically just a place for people to sell their items but it feels far more regulated than I’ve seen other places.

I found a person who put in their description that they were a professional photographer who was going through their old lenses they had gotten and only used a few times. Moving onto other things basically… and were selling a couple of their old ones just to get rid of them.

So I messaged them and asked ‘hey, will this work for my camera? I’m new… blah blah blah’ and yes! He said they’d work with my camera… I figured they did based on my research but I’m nervous and wanted to double check.

Anyway… I order them, they come about a week later.

And I’ve been taking a few pictures here and there (it’s cold outside and I don’t deal well with cold, I’ll be taking far more when it warms up I swear)

Here are the fruits of my labor so far: Forgive me for basic mistakes I’m probably making, and I’ve done only a little bit of editing to the pictures in Adobe Lightroom.

These are some seed starting things that my sister is growing in the basement. She keeps them under special lights to help them grow:

I was very happy with how well my camera kept the color.. I know the focus isn’t amazing I’m still fooling around with it.

This is my dog Merlin. I was sitting on the stairs above him to get the pictures of the plants and he was being cute:

Here are some pictures I took of some already grown plants my sister had upstairs in a windowsill. The first picture is from up close, the second is from about 10 feet away, using the different lenses.

Up close
About 10 feet away

And last but not least is my grumpy little goldfish. He’s about 15 years old (he used to be completely orange). He sits in that exact spot most days and only occasionally swims around his tank. His favorite hobbies are sleeping and putting little rocks from the bottom of his tank into the openings on the plant behind him (you can see some of the blue rocks sitting on it)

That’s all I got for now. Hopefully you don’t mind this dramatic change in topic. I’ve been working on and off on a book mostly and haven’t been doing a lot of short stories recently, but getting into photography has been a really fun ride so far!

Thanks everyone!

Journeying Into A New Hobby

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There are so many blog posts out there that talk about ways to start/monetize/work on / motivate yourself to do a new hobby.

Many people are authorities on their subject. They have years of training and they decide to blog about it because they KNOW about it.

This is literally the opposite of one of those blogs.

I am a hobby skipper.

I don’t know what else to call it really. I go from one hobby to the next, trying my hand at it before inevitably finding that it’s really hard to START a hobby. It’s so easy to say from someone who is highly motivated to say “You just gotta keep going at it!” or “It’s all about hard work, you won’t get there overnight”

I totally understand that. My issue mostly stems from my inability to stick to one thing at a time. My therapist once told me it’s because of my anxiety and that’s… probably very true. Here is a list of different hobbies I’ve tried in the last 5 years:

Walking, Piano, guitar, Kalimba, Ocarina, writing, miniature painting, painting in general, whittling, stick art, yoga, video games, streaming, roleplay, ghost hunting, and my most recent venture: Photography.

And yes, all of those in the last 5 years. Roleplay and video games are the ones I tend to go back to after a little bit but always kinda drift from again.

So with this newest venture of mine, I thought I would try something different. I’m going to combine writing and photography together into one. I want to try and keep myself going with one thing by writing about what I’m doing and how I’m doing it.

My First Step

For Christmas, my family does a Secret Santa instead of buying gifts for every single person in our house. Basically, it’s a suggested $75 gift for one single person instead of a bunch of small gifts for a lot of people. It means you can get something you actually want instead of things you probably won’t use.

This year I decided to ask for something related to photography to help motivate me to put the effort in and start.

My Secret Santa (My aunt) got me three amazing things. (pictures taken from my phone as my camera doesn’t have a lens yet..)

First: She got me a cleaning kit for a camera

Second: A lighting kit that lets me use different gels to change the color of my backgrounds and such:

And Third: A prism set

All really lovely things to help get me started! So I did some research and managed to purchase for about $350: A Nikon D3500 DSLR Camera

Unfortunately, it’s missing any lenses/cables but it did come with a nice bag, but for being more than half the price and used I had to get it for that cheap. I’m working on saving up for a good first lens as I figure out what style of photography I’m going to try and get into.

Right now, however, that’s where I am at. I’ve STARTED my journey… I just need a lens and I can really get going to learn how to create something new and exciting. I’m hoping to have my lens before Spring so I can take some pictures of budding plants outside as it’s always something I love to see.

Thanks for tuning in! Hope you all are having a wonderful new year and things are going well for you!

The Impact on Niche Hobbies by Popularization / Twitch Streaming

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Quick disclaimer: This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot and will use examples from my own niche hobbies and how I’ve seen them change over time thanks to Twitch Streaming and the overall popularization of the hobby. This however can apply to pretty much any hobby that’s become far more widespread/popular thanks to any number of ways from tv shows to youtube channels.

When I was twelve years old my father suggested that I put some of my creativity to a new use he’d just learned about. A website dedicated to pretending to be a person who went to Hogwarts from Harry Potter. It was called Hogwarts Online and allowed me to write posts as this person going to school and learning magic. At this very early age, I fell in love with writing and roleplaying.

That was 17 years ago… I am now 29 years old and have enjoyed roleplaying in many formats throughout my life. From the text-based, forum-type, third-person, past tense roleplay, to voice roleplay that requires a decent microphone and a game to talk to others on. I first started into gaming roleplay (Text-based) around 2011 and moved gradually into voice only a few years later.

I created stories that could bring a person to tears, labored over the life and death of fictional people whose stories would never be known to more people than myself and a handful of others who watched the events unfold in real-time. We created lives in these fictional worlds that were far different than our own but were deep and meaningful all the same.

I know people who speak about things like this when they first started any number of hobbies. From Dungeons and Dragons, photography, antiquing, restoration, there are so many things that start off fantastic. They have a golden age where everything felt right. Then things change.

For me it was Twitch. Streamers started to see the potential of high earnings from people who wanted to see the stories played out. Certain servers became massively popular: NoPixel, FamilyRP, TwitchRP… all servers that catered to the idea that streamers played there and brought in massive amounts of views and attention to the hobby. However, quickly, the streamers learned that waiting for the roleplay to build in tension through natural means got far fewer views than “Boom Boom, I killed the 15th cop today and went to jail for 20 minutes.” The storytelling aspect was driven to the wayside as the cyclical fashion of just doing the same thing over and over got more popular.

And of course, as things got more popular, more people viewed that style of roleplay as the correct way to do it. And over time… the hobby changed. Fewer people were digging hard into stories that were thoughtful, meaningful, fulfilling, and instead opted for the simplistic stereotyping of people who got more views.

People like xQc who doesn’t really play a character but just runs around as himself shooting cops. Summit1g who lashes out at anyone who criticizes the way he roleplays, and most streamers who play on servers like NoPixel whose interest is not in creating interesting stories like the hobby once centered itself around, but instead in pulling in money from limiting applications to donators only and allowing people to pay for priority to play on an open, public server.

I’ve delved into specifics on my own personal views of how my hobby has changed over time, but I know for a fact things like this exist in other hobbies as well. Dungeons and Dragons is one I have experienced and heard tales from. With things like Critical Role changing how people play the game from having fun and investing their time into playing the game… into trying to one-up the other people in the game. Trying their hardest to emulate the people who are seen to be popular.

It is the general feel as things get more popular over time. The emulation of the people considered ‘cool’ without knowing how the hobby started at its roots and how it’s changed over time.

It used to be viewed that popularizing niche hobbies would help bring in new talent to the hobby, in general, to shape it into being something better than it was. However, in many cases instead what happens is a flattening of the thing that made it niche in the first place. Replacing it with a standard formatted copy of what it once was; devoid of the soul it once had.

I no longer roleplay to the extent that I once did. After meeting the same person with a different name three times in a single day I realized that the creativity felt like it had died from something that had once been so incredibly meaningful to me. I’ve tried many times over the past 2-3 years or so to recapture that magic my hobby once made me feel but as time goes on I wonder how it became the simple thing it is now. Viewed by the masses through the eyes of people using it only to make a quick buck before moving on, leaving the destruction behind them as they move onto something else to monetize.

Sorry for the very… negative tone throughout this post. It’s something that’s on my mind a lot as I really miss being able to delve into a character and seeing how their story developed. It’s become such a rare thing in my hobby that I’ve lost all interest in trying again.

If you’d like to hear some stories of some of my characters throughout roleplay just let me know! I have so many I could talk people’s ears off any day about all the fun and interesting things my characters got into. And thanks to everyone who read through to this point, I know it might not be an entirely interesting article to read but definitely one I’ve noticed and wanted to put into words for a long time.

Anxiety and Writing

~ molz6659 ~ 2 Comments

Some days I sit and stare at my computer screen with longing… wishing for the words in my head to appear.

I want nothing more than to float into the world my mind had created, making it easy to tell the story it wanted to share.

I’m not very good at blogging, having the motivation, capacity, ability to make new words appear on a screen every single week. My brain isn’t built for it as much as I wish it was. I have the desire to create, the need to write, the skill to do so in words people enjoy reading.

But to sit down and have the ability to do it is another thing entirely.

I went to a therapist once and explained that I had jumped a lot between hobbies that interested me but every time I tried to focus on one I’d lose interest in it exceedingly quickly. I wanted to know why I flitted so much between hobbies and things to do.

She immediately recognized that it all boiled down to Anxiety. Anxiety can cause you to move between hobbies, anxious to be good at the thing, worried you’ll be awful, and Depression liking to rear its ugly head and make it hard to continue. Throwing away any motivation I had at one point to create. Instead forcing me to nap right after work, making me helpless as I just get tired so easily from the world.

I’m working on a book right now.

I’m a whole half a page in, and many pages of notebook writing ideas down. I’m going to do research on Dec. 1st with friends to help motivate me to keep working at it. I think it’s a good idea, I think it’s something people can get interested in. I’ve said this many times but this time I actually have a working plot. The beginning, middle, end, character ideas, basic outlines, call to action, climax, denouement.

I have an idea in my head and I am going to write it. If it takes me years and thousands of lines of research and retries. I will write this one… A life goal I will have always is to one day hold a physical copy of a book I’ve written. One that even if it doesn’t sell amazing, I will be able to look at with pride.

It’s nice to have a dream.

Does anyone have suggestions on ways to keep active in writing when my brain goes full ‘nvm’? Any comments / suggestions would be extremely appreciated!

A Simple Blog Post

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Sometimes you get this voice in your head… a nagging little thought in the back of your mind (almost literally), that tells you it’s craving creation. It desires creativity with a thirst that rivals a man lost at sea. It pulls on you mentally and physically, finally forcing you to bring that nagging thought to the forefront and realize that it’s there.

I’ve had this voice for a few months now but was hit with the most extraordinary amount of writers block I’ve ever experienced. I opened an empty document, had an idea in mind, put my fingers on the keyboard and… didn’t move. Sometimes I think when people say they do these things they are exaggerating, they are putting an image to a mental idea that they feel.

I wish I could say that, I can’t count how many times I opened google docs, had such a clear idea in mind to write something or anything interesting. Not even interesting, half of what I wanted to do was just… write SOMETHING. Put my fingers on my home row of the keyboard and stared at the blank page until I cried. Nothing would come out, the words weren’t magically placing themselves in front of me. It wasn’t like it had been before where I could open a page and words would fly off my fingers faster than my brain could comprehend that I was wanting to say them.

It took some weird circumstances to finally get writing again and when I did I realized something about myself. It felt… good. It felt so good, I almost cried when I finally got even a few words on a page, and then more words, pages, a chapter, soon I had written 1500 words in only a couple of hours as though a dam had broken and I could speak again.

I’m still struggling to write, those open dam days aren’t everyday, the last short story I put on this blog I wasn’t entirely proud of but I never said that what I would post here would be good. The goal wasn’t to display my amazing narratives or publish incredible stories every single week.

The goal was to write again.

Free some of the words trapped in my mind that were fighting desperately to come out. I shared some of my writing with friends and they acted… excited? They wanted to see more, it made me excited, I wanted to write more. It had been years since I’d felt that desire to write so strongly in the forefront of my head. Like somehow the words had been ripped from the base of my skull just over the top of my spine, to the middle of my forehead.

I bought a laptop, partially to use for work from home, but also partially to be able to take… out of my room. Write on, I have a USB keyboard and mouse I can hook up to it and I’m able to write from anywhere. They say often writers find some of the best inspiration by getting away from what they know and I want to experience that at some point. I want to go somewhere… else and be able to write something new. I want to be a writer.

I need experience and I need to allow my brain… to let me write. I know a lot of it stems from anxiety, the anxiety of it not being good enough. The anxiety of it being cliché, of it being boring, of it having those tropes that you want to avoid in writing. I stressed over finding good grammar classes before realizing that most writers don’t care about good grammar when they are constructing their first draft. That comes later, that comes with editing (Which I’m totally not doing for this blog post, this is more of a stream of consciousness).

I still struggle to write, which is why there is no short story this week, just a rambling mess from an anxious 28 year old girl on the internet. A post like so many other posts, nothing special or unique to my thoughts or feelings that haven’t been expressed in a million similar ways on this crazy place we call the internet.

I’ve been working to convince myself that it’s okay. It’s okay to not be unique, but to try and do unique things. Everything in my life is unique to such a strange degree. The things that led me to where I am, the stresses, the anxiety, my ups and downs, no one in this entire world can relate exactly to the thoughts in my head and that’s… kind of incredible.

I hate when people say as a blanket statement that they care about the struggles of others. You can’t care if you don’t know, and I suppose part of this writing adventure on my little boat guided by my quill… is to help myself learn to care, to open myself up in a way I’ve never been able to open up before to most people. Even if that way is just in the silly little stories and prompts I write on a blog no one visits.

It’s unique…

And I like that.

Prompt: [WP] You sneak out every night and go to the farthest cottage in the darkest region of the forest to play the lute for the lonely, beautiful person that hides there. They tell you to stay away from that monster, that you won’t come out alive, but has there even been a monster that couldn’t be loved? (From Reddit)

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The silence of the forest settled in around her as she stepped carefully through the dense underbrush. It was a path she had taken many times before, and knew she would take many times more. A path that no other person travelled, and honestly it didn’t look like many animals did either. She was in the darkest area of the forest near her home, not many things decided to try their luck out here and those that did tended to prey on anything that wandered in accidentally.

The quiet pressed in on her almost like a sound in itself. The lack of breeze, there was no chirping of crickets or singing of katydid’s. Not a hint of a stream or sound of an animal walking it’s paths. She knew why, but it still was somber as she hiked her way through the woods, disturbing this peace with every step she took.

Eventually the path loosened up a bit and she felt as though she could breathe a bit easier when the stars came into view above her head. She was close and even with the comfort of the familiar above her head, she knew she was in a dangerous area. She sat down on a log and started to tune the lute that had been slung over her shoulder on her trek here. 

The notes hit the air like she’d shone a light into the darkness. She let her fingers play a few chords before adjusting a string ever so slightly and playing again. Happy with the tune it struck, she strummed for a moment before standing back up and walking further into the woods.

She walked for another ten minutes before finally a light shone through the darkness. The trees slowly parted to reveal a cottage, set deep in a clearing with no visible path leading to it. She paused once again, her heart hammering too loudly, her breath still in her chest. She waited just within sight of the cottage. 

Danger pulsed around her almost visibly as she found a resting spot near a tree and pulled her lute onto her lap. The monster was inside, she knew, waiting anxiously for the first note… she’d only seen it once so far, a slim beautiful face peeking out a window on one of the first times she’d visited. A small female that fluttered in a strange way out of sight again when it caught sight of her.

She’d been back every night since then to play her lute for the creature, kshe knew from that one glance that the ‘beast’ could not be as bad as the tales said… it simply couldn’t be that bad.

Her fingers found the notes and she played, a rich beautiful melody sang out of the lute that almost seemed to bring an air of sadness with it into the air. The song changed, the sadness lightened, tension filled the notes. A story unfolded in the music that was played. The tale of sadness moved to terror, fleeting and frightened, it jumped between notes like a rabbit being chased.

As the song continued to play, a second melody started to join the first sad one, a happier, joyful tune that flitted between the sadness and the fear. It popped up before  it vanished again, a melody that flitted through the song like a bird through the branches of a tree.

Then all at once the fear vanished from the song and the sadness and the joy seemed to spin around one another in a cascade of nervous laughter. The song ended abruptly, the notes sitting in the air as though they had been a physical object, a question that needed answered. Where did this story end? It wasn’t finished yet… She sat breathless, in shock at the story that had unfolded on her lute.

Slowly, her eyes rose to look at the door to the cottage. 

It was open.

She stood, silhouetted against the doorframe, a woman barely 4 foot tall. Her hair was long and seemed to be a strange shade that was hard to make out in the light. Not hard to see however, were the slender dragonfly wings that fluttered from her back, almost as long as she was tall. They glistened in the light like dew on a grass blade in the early morning.

They stared at each other for what felt like hours, though it could only have been the space of a breath. She put the lute aside and stood up, she felt tall near this tiny creature. “They said it was dangerous… to come here… were they right?” She said softly, her voice cut through the tension like a knife.

“No…”

The voice was gentle and almost sounded like she’d played a note on her lute instead of a voice speaking it from the doorway. 

The word hung in the air thickly until she bent to pick up her lute from the tree and took a step forward. “May I come in?” 

Silence… a flutter of wings… a pause…

“Yes.”

She walked forward, her eyes darted around the clearing and took in the sight of the house before her. It was a simple place, made of wood and obviously handcrafted. There were carvings that covered every inch of the building, intricate creatures that strolled through the wood like a painting.

As she grew closer however… the world around her shifted. The air itself seemed to shimmer with a quality of light hitting fresh snow. The house changed completely, no longer a simple log cabin in the woods, she was stood in a clearing of huge trees… trees with chunks missing from their trunks.

“What… happened here?” She whispered, setting her lute down against one of the broken trees. 

“The dragon came and destroyed everything… I’m the only one left.” The little fairy next to her spoke sadly. “Anyone who came to try and help… the dragon took them too… So I started scaring people away, that way no one would get hurt anymore.” 

The lute player frowned and then held out her hand towards the fairy. “I’m Mia, and I’ll help you.”

The fairy fluttered her wings, took a deep breath and shook her hand. “Lilah.” She muttered and looked up at the lute player. “We have work to do then.” She turned and headed into the woods.

They said there was a monster in the cabin and no one came out alive, well technically both were true. There was a monster in the cabin, but it wasn’t the reason no one came out alive. But Mia was determined to help the creature rid the forest of the dragon… even if that meant she was just one of those that never returned.

Star Dance

~ molz6659 ~ Leave a comment

No one ever told her it would be like this. The world seemed blurred around the edges as she took in the dancing that was going on above her head. Little specks of light that seemed to have a pulsing rhythm that made sense in some bizarre way in the back of her mind. Like a dance to a song that she’d heard long ago and forgotten the moves to. A choreographed rhythm that spun and jumped, twirled and pranced, walked, ran, and moved in a way that was twined in the very fabric of existence. It was peaceful and strong, gentle but insistent. It was, at the core of itself, Life.

No one ever told her it would be like this. She was starting to believe that nobody actually knew. That there really wasn’t any plan or way to know that contemplative thoughtfulness that had filled life itself. She wondered how many others had been in her place, watching that gentle rhythm play out above their heads. Understanding in that moment that the world was connected in such brilliant and beautiful ways, in ways that no normal person had the ability to comprehend. 

No one ever told her it would be like this. They all had theories of course. Ideas planted in their heads from traditions placed long ago that had long since lost their original meaning. She’d never given them much thought, accepting that it wasn’t her place to know, but now that the moment had come, she finally understood the connections in the universe. 

No one could have told her it would be like this, because up until that moment, no one had known. There was no sound, no color, no taste, or smell. It was truly unique then, this moment of clarity. The world spun on, not understanding what had happened. Not understanding what was the truth of the girl that had once been. 

She’d been like everyone else at one point, a child who’s life was filled with endless possibilities. A child who you could look at and wonder ‘what might this young girl grow up to be? What will they do in this world? Who will they meet? Love? Fight? Will they make a difference or simply blend in?’ Her life hadn’t been unusual, a middle class family making ends meet and providing for a child to give her the best chance at life.

Who could have known where it would lead? Might they have been able to guess as they watched her twirl to her own internal music, playing ballerina for family members to clap and rejoice at. Did they see it when she went off to school for the first time? Waved her off with her new backpack and freshly laced shoes, ready to see what education was like for the first time in her life. Were they able to glimpse it as she graduated college, standing on a stage to shake hands with people who had watched her grow into a young adult. 

How was the world supposed to know that she’d find herself staring at the stars, wondering how it had all come to this. All the hard work, tears, sweat, love, hate, anger, happiness, combined into a single moment as the stars danced above her head to the rhythm of life. 

Was it irony? That some bigger audience had already known the outcome long before she’d been able to put the story together in her head. Watched as the subtle clues played out, knowing how it would be and doing nothing to stop the end result. Did the stars know so that they could come out and grace her with the beautiful dance of the day that she’d finally be able to see what it meant. 

Together it had come, the clues and subtext, the foreshadowing and plot devices. Her life had been a simple story. A story to play out for the amusement or sorrow of others, and now she lay on her back, staring up at the stars that revealed the truth to her. 

It hadn’t hurt, at least not that she could remember. Not the actual act itself, she remembered the moments before it though, the terror and pain that had filled the world before suddenly there was a sweet, blissful silence. Would they figure it out one day? Find out the events that had led her to staring at the stars. She knew time had passed, though how much time now she had no way of knowing. Time seemed to not exist anymore as she watched the flickering light above. 

Somewhere in the back of her mind she knew the truth of her situation, she knew that it had ended for her. This was where she died, lost and forgotten in a forest with only the stars for company. Humanity would move on and forget she’d ever existed and she would lay here, slowly joining the gentle rhythm of the stars. 

At some point she was made aware that something had changed. Though what that change was took her longer to figure out. The change came in stages, first it was just a jolt, a strange jolt like when your brain believes it is falling out of bed but actually isn’t. Then she was aware of a noise, loud and unnecessary in her current state. She felt a tiny prick of annoyance as the noise swelled and became unbearable. Then the lighting changed and the stars disappeared behind the face of a human who had bent over her. 

Fear gripped at her when she was pulled away from her stars, the rhythm was lost to her for a time and she felt a swirling pit of anxiety swell up as she tried desperately to join the dance once more. Humanity had other plans for her… she was taken away, moved from her gentle resting spot, pulled apart and ripped up to find out what had happened. They needed to know and she did not care. There were words said and sobs, and suddenly it was dark. 

This was its own kind of rhythm, one that didn’t make sense to her yet. A throbbing of the earth that surrounded her. She wasn’t able to find her peace with this new sound, wishing only for the dance of her stars. How long she lay in that throbbing she would never know. Millenia perhaps, she lost herself to it, listening but remembering, remembering the dance the stars had shown her. 

Then, as though to finally welcome her home once again, the world changed and there was light. What had happened she didn’t know. The world had decided it was time for her to join the dance again. The silence of the stars filled her with it’s peaceful embrace once more. Finally, she’d done her time and waited in that throbbing darkness. 

She’d died as one person in a sea of others who had died before and after her. She looked up once more at the sky through the crack in the wood that had held the throbbing earth above her head for all those years. Peace settled in and she was allowed, at last, to join the dance of life itself in the twinkling of the stars.