***
She gazed up at the blurry ceiling until her eyes watered and the ceiling began to shift. She blinked and tried hard to focus on the brown-ish star shaped form above her. She knew it was a ceiling fan, but without her glasses it was merely a brown blob. The lights in the fan could have been anything from stars to tiny suns, but they were simply bright glowing circles.
It was so much like what the rest of the world saw. Only her own sense of wonderment could make the blurs more than what they were.
She couldn't stare for long. The need for vision tugged at her and she cleaned her glasses idly before slipping them back on.
People seemed to assume that with clarity brought stark logic and without it was where imagination ruled. But she heartily disagreed. The blurred, washed out colors were what people saw and defined as clarity. True clarity was seeing the defined lines in their colors and designs and recognizing the adventure that the world still held. It wasn't so hard for her to imagine the movement out of the corner of her eye to be a faerie or recall the entirely romantic, but utterly true notion that somewhere, in a world she had yet to see, she was a princess and her very existence mattered more than she could even comprehend.
It was hard, though, in the mundane, dying embers to see that there was still a fire under the logs.
Imagination was distorted, the definitions had changed and something had died without a sound. She mourned it everyday as her peers considered another night of drinking as exciting and books about the everyday mundane dramas and memoirs of painful times seemed to gain popularity. There was no escape and she felt trapped in the gray, bleak place that everyone else only ever saw.
There was still something left in the embers, not that anyone ever cared to shift the logs and she had always dreamed in bright color.
