Running through the sky, the stars seemed to light up each time the tiny foot of her small frame stepped on them. They resembled brilliantly colored gems, each of them giving off their own flashing light from time to time. The walls were clouds lined with the gems and each cloud was a different color than the next. Music so beautiful and so unfathomably exquisite filled the glittering sky giving the girl great ecstasy. The stars sounded like little seashells being pushed aside by the souls of her feet and gave more substance to the angelic music heard. She always ran far and long but the journey was always worth it just to get to where she longed to be. Though no one else was there, there seemed to be a loving familiarity with each vague character’s face she smiled and waved passed. They seemed to know her well and watch her with the tenderness and love of a child’s mother. Her thin white nightgown flowed as valiantly as a flag through the chilled air. She kept running and running, forever it seemed, with no purpose or knowledge of when to stop. But whenever she came to the place, she knew nothing of the time it took to get there, nor of the doubt of why she stopped at that spot.
Stepping onto the last of the brilliant gems, her eyes grew wide with wonder and her laughter joined melodiously to the music heard in the star-filled sky. There she pushed the clouds aside with as much effort as it took to breathe and they revealed to her the one place she felt the most joy. It was the moon, grand and large, and in all its luminosity. The moon was unlike any seen in any awake state. It was high in the sky, impossibly high to reach. Two moonbeam ropes came down from it’s base to a impossibly smaller crescent moon. The crescent moon was turned horizontally and gave the likeness and shape of a swing. Its curvature grinned on moonbeam ropes awaiting the occupancy of someone to make their dream a reality. Awaiting the one person who’s name was written in the stars in the sky. Gladly, the girl ran onto the moon swing, flying into the seat and settled down on it with as much weight as a snowflake on the ground. She pushed off on the gem-lined ground so high and so forceful it turned a revolution up and around the enormous moon, dizzying the girl with delight and excitement. Faces smiled and laughed with joy as the stars shined their prismatic show. She touched the stars and grazed the sky, hoping never to set foot on the ground again. As she came hurdling down to the ground head-on, she felt no fear and had her eyes wide open as a chorus of blissful song swelled to a climax.
Always and all the time, the girl became sad when she heard this. She knew this would be the part when she would awake, not to a star bed in the sky in a beautiful white nightdress, but to a filth-ridden floor in a large T-shirt. She would rise slowly and not open her eyes until the very last moment, wistful and wishing for a moment more of the beautiful dream world her mind had created for her in the midst of her own disastrous life.
She crawled into the same pair of pants that she had worn for the past 2 years. Maybe it was the illness she bore into, or maybe her body seemed to understand the poverty and impossibility of her situation to buy new clothes. Whatever the reason, her body seemed to refuse to grow. Making her way into the barren kitchen, she stepped outside of the dilapidated shack she called home with the other destitute and wandered into the street. Every day she prayed to God that someone would take her and love her the way that she wanted to feel loved. She prayed to an end to the sadness she felt in the core of her soul, something to take away the pain she felt. She prayed for something to cure her of the crippling illness that plagued her since her youth that made it impossible for her mother to care for her and so gave her away to the monster next store, who in turn gave her away to the street. And most often, she would pray for whatever took her mother’s pain away to take her own away.
Crossing the street, she made it to the gates of the school she’d gone to since her early childhood. Not going inside, she’d wait until the other children made their way outside for lunch where she would make a meal of unwanted fruit, vegetables, and other unacceptable things to eat from well-fed children. This would be her only meal. She always brought some home to the woman who cared for her. Though mentally unsound, this was the only family she had known or had been told about. The woman, who had seen visions of a woman in white on a daily basis since her medication had dissolved, spun stories about a wonderful place where everyone had enough on their tables to eat and the best clothes to wear and never had a worry in the world. The woman thought the child to be a gift from the man and kept the child with her in the filth ridden one room home since her discovery in a dumpster many years ago.
She fed on these stories. She craved to hear them over and over again. She wished for them to happen. But little girls don’t like to face what’s in front of them unless they are faced with them head on. One day, the woman’s perpetual delusional visions had instructed her that the way to this wondrous utopia was to dive into a ravine with little rainwater on the bottom. She was instructed by the hallucination to jump into the ravine and drink of what little water was there and have the power to heal and therefore be fit to enter the utopia awaiting her arrival. Having told the little girl this, she wanted to go, too. The woman and the young girl made their way to the ravine, not having any trace or sensation of fear or thought process. They marched on, hand in hand, happy and ecstatic. The girl was overjoyed when this vision was explained to her. Finally, a cure! A place to rest one’s head and have some sort of peace and solitude.
From witnesses on the street, an old woman and child were seen walking to an unknown destination. The girl was laughing and smiling, unbelievably happy for what the looks of her where. The witnesses could see them peering into the ravine, smiling at each other and hugging one last time. The witnesses looked on in horror as the woman and the girl, hand in hand and smiling eerily, let their bodies succumb to gravity as they journeyed down the bottomless ravine head-on without a scream to be heard until the witnesses heard their own kind doing so. Some witnesses with unnatural observation noticed that the girl’s eyes were as wide as her smile when facing her doom head-on. A sickening sound of flesh on a muddy rain-kissed ground could be heard amidst the gasps and terror of the witnesses. Though heard by all and seen by few, the woman and the girl where gone from site and mute by default.
The girl swung happily from her moonbeam held swing and felt the air gently tug at her exquisite gown as she was approached.
“Do you like it here?”
“I love it! It is my dream…” the girl said, drifting off into melancholy.
“Why does your smile fad?”
“I love it, and yet, I know I cannot stay here,” the girl said with a heavy heart.
The woman in white approached her and raised the girl’s chin with her dazzling hand and said, “You can stay as long as you like. This is your gift. This is your reward for doing as I told you to do.”
And the girl was overjoyed. For she knew she never had to leave. She never had to face the world and never had to live in pain again. She never had to feel morose or depression or had to pray for something to end it. For she had found her utopia.

And she never had to awake from her moon beam dreams again.