the concealed reality of dreams.
On TV,  no one lived like we did, not even during the commercials. Things happened on TV.  And for 30 exact minutes every day, those things happened to the seven year old me. Then at the same time every day, my mom would walk in with a remote and a smile and with a blink, and those things would just simply stop happening to me. Then our cable got canceled. Then, I started answering to any name other than mine. Yet every night I went to sleep as myself, and as the Earth spun, my mind spun too. My mind started spinning tales of unannounced massive earthquakes, the roots of trees crumbling beneath my toes, being sucked into the deep, deep core of the world under us. It spun a tale about a single sink hole, but a tiny one; a sinkhole only big enough to fit one imaginative seven year old and her mind. It spun a tale of another galaxy hidden in mine, a galaxy of my monsters that hurt anyone who would try to harm me, a galaxy of my monsters that were creatures that were far from humans. And then it spun a last tale.  A tale of a monster that I could not defeat.  All the unexpected had lovingly faded into a new monster; a monster of banality. Then, my randoms unscatttered themselves, secretly just patterns with a concealed edge. They were exactly the same, like every episode. Then with a blink, I shut the TV off forever and I reclaimed myself. The only me that was drifting in a cluster of stars, gazing upon layers and layers of debris.