Her eyes are pried, fixed to the ceiling, lids unable to flutter closed in sleep any longer. Rigid, motionless, she stares.
So tired.
It is too late to sleep and all her dreams have dissolved besides. Tarnished and corroded fancies were never given the chance to fly; they simply died and rotted away.
Baby teeth in a glass of Coke.
Sometimes she misses her dreams, she thinks.
She longs to be young again.
The toys scattered about her, ratty and torn by time, they never used to be locked in her cage. Once they frolicked and flourished in a landscape maintained by vivid imagination. Now they prowl, menacingly pacing an enclosure for which the key has vanished.
Snap, hiss, growl.
Continually teething.
They never used to bite.
She wishes she could cry as easily as she did before. Tears flowed freely when she skinned her knee, yet now, when her very spirit is flayed, those tears are suppressed and pool inside.
Someone always came to lick her wounds, back when she was young. Now she always wraps herself up, has forgotten how to allow another to dress the cuts and scrapes.
She wonders that she can never be someone's little girl again.
Everything is her responsibility; she controls all and owns nothing.
Information was spoon fed to her, digested quickly, and developed her self. So readily absorbed.
Isn't she a clever girl?
Curiosity made her precocious, gave her intelligence and bloated her brain. Had to know everything, understand, ask for answers.
Why, why, why?
People told her she could do anything she wanted to if she studied hard. She could be anything she ever dreamed.
But she doesn't dream anymore.
Why?
She knows.
She picked an apple from the tree that grows by the stream of knowledge, fed by those soupy waters called wisdom. Kernels of truth and the seeds of experience sprouted in her belly, shooting into her system and infesting her mind. Reality pricks with thorns, constricts with parasitic tendrils, and its vile suckers refuse to let go.
She knows she can never be young, ignorant, peaceful, nor anything she never dreams of. Awareness keeps her perpetually awake, staring at that blank slate of a ceiling. She can't blink, can't move, can't stop the tatty toys from gnawing at her being.
All she desires is to forget.
She needs to be young again.
Frivolous, impossible as all else, this longing is all she is now capable of.
She ate the apple, core and all, but wishes instead she had drunk from the fountain of youth.