Energy and the Law of Balance

There is a lot going on inside her head. She creates worlds and landscapes, complete with maps filled with mountains, rivers, and valleys. Little people appear there and she breathes life into them, giving them words and faces until they take over the job and begin to act on their own. And she sits back, breathless, and watches as her new planet comes to life, a place as real as a truckstop on I-95.

From the outside it appears that she is quiet. A girl whose dreams don't show in her eyes, do others wonder what she is thinking? Or is she passed by, not noticed as she lives two lives - one in the present world, one in her own mind?

Art by Irving Amen.
You can see more of his work here.

She spends the mornings typing frantically, as the characters and their adventures wrestle their way out of her fingers and bloom on the page. At that point, as she paints her thoughts she is lost. A phone rings and she hears it, dimly, as if it were ringing in another house.

When she emerges, she is exhausted. That journey to her world and back again is tiring - her brain has been firing on all cylinders, and she is left, for a while, empty.

She wonders if this act of creation is a sort of insanity, a sort of vampire that sucks part of her. But she knows she cannot give it up.

As this girl, the swimmer in the stream between two lives, negotiates two paths at once, she searches for a balance - a way to keep something for herself, to survive in the real world while she creates her own. It is a constant struggle, that juggling act - to interact with real flesh, the friends and family that she loves, and to return to the paper skin of characters that she also loves, perhaps almost as much.

She is tired. She is dreamy. She wouldn't have it any other way.