[Lady Of Light]

When I was a little girl I remember being read fairy tales like Cinderella and all of the classics. I knew them all, but I didn't believe in them. Adults would read me the stories and leave it at that. That's all. A story. About a place that dosn't really exist and about people who never really lived. And for me, that was okay. I went on through school to read realistic fiction. Most of it was sad, people died, people were abused, but I found it to be terribly uninteresting. The people in those books were just like the people I met. Ugly and judgemental. It was terribly depressing, and fantasy was forgotten.

It wasn't until junior high that I discovered just how disgusting the human race can be. People were terrible thoughtless drones, yet they were accepted as part of the school and of the community and I was not allowed to yell at them even as they screamed at me and that made me mad. Can you tell that I was a frustrated child? [img]smilies/mad.gif[/img] Anyway, as I neared high school I read Tolkien. It was like a breath of fresh air, a beautiful place where wonderful and intelligent people banded together to end evil and ignorance.

Fantasy was like an escape then, it let me take part in the characters lives and share their joy as well as their greif. It took me away from the woes of the evil that we now call middle school, and then it gave me something to think about. I thought of scenes between characters from my favorite novels and I created new characters of my own. Eventually that gave way to my own land, where even now all of my most frustrating battles are fought. For me, fantasy is both an escape and a dream, for are they not both one in the same?