She loved stories. Ever since a child, hearing the hypnotic rhythm of her mother's voice reading illustrated books. Like old poetries, like water flowing, like leaves falling, like so many things. She wondered if the stories were magic. Where was that princess,or her evil step-mother. She would find them one day, the apple trees, the golden stairs and the glass slipper. When she grew old enough, she would journey to find these wonderous places, she would touch them and live with them, for she knew that they were real. It was in a world that was lying just beneath our everyday one, she thought and swore to remember. This is the secret that all children know, but will forget.

And she did. She went to school, studied, made friends, had crushes. Grew up. She forgot, turned her back on the magic world. Letting it slip away. It once breathed beneath the living world. Now it was lost, trapped in pages, became a ridiculous child-thing. It was faraway. Fairytales. She still loved them and haunted fairytales sections in libraries, hoping to catch a glimpse of the entrance to that world, she once saw, felt, heard, was certain of. Somehow along the way, time became a commodity. Broken up into measurable segments. Her life was governed by these things. Responsibility took the place of childhood fantasies. Her mind sometimes stretched back to those earlier times, but always there was a wall. Somehow, she had crossed an invisible line and could not return.

That magical rhythm of the voices, of the stories became mechanized time slots for her day to day activities. Work, lunch, work, knock off. Study, break, study, study, home. She was awake, but she slumbered; Sleep-walked like many others. On rush hour trains, in school libraries. Hoping one day, she would wake up to find that dream world of hers, now replaced by another one of another kind. And like many heroines in her favourite stories, she will. One day, with enough determination or prehaps desperation, she would.

On that day, she would be in the midst of working on some seemingly important frivolous document. Then in a strange momemt, she would drop her work. walk out of her office. She will keep walking. She walked past her present life, walked out of the demands of the people around her, crossed that bridge of her teenhood, entered that garden of her childhood, still as it had been, unchanged. Cross a river of consciousness, fall into the abyss of her unconscious mind. Walk to the other side of the forest where a grandmother once waited for her granddaughter's visit in a red riding cape. Where a wolf stalks. Where a wood cutter is hard at work. Then at the end of her journey, she would find the source of all stories. The one story teller standing in that meadow, dressed in lights, weaving dreams. She would slowly appraoch the figure at once both infinitely old and a new born every second. She would ask him "If he is god or if he is destiny and if she is dreaming or dead." He would just take her hand without a word and smile.