As posted on Facebook.
This is to you, artists and dreamers and people who make worlds of their own :D
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This is the house I built myself.
This is my world. I paved the roads with rainbows, and wrote the trees to life on the backs of my hands. And it was this, my little treasure for the times when handkerchiefs and hugs wouldn't dry my tears. It was sincerely my own, and all I longed it to be.
This is my creation. It is a song—but the ocarinas play effortless glissandos and the cellos harmonise with the stars. The apples float away when they fall from the tree, the doors open in four directions, the stars draw pictures in the velvet night. I'll jump from the hundredth floor, and land on the thousandth—and under the dust in the attic, I'll find a river that will take me to the sea.
Everyone tells me: let go. Leave. Throw it away. Because this Fantasy of mine, it'll never be any more than what it is now: a wish. Pointless, being servant to a wish. But how can I deny that this wish brings me laughter? How can I forget that there are souls here, souls like butterflies that sing with me; that there are roads waiting to be walked, sunrises waiting to be coloured?
I love this world so. Here, it doesn't matter how silly, how unorthodox, how crazy I am—because this world will always be sillier, weirder, crazier! Isn't that what we all want? Isn't it what we need—a place where you can dream, and draw, and build your card house as high as you want without fearing the limit of the ceiling, because there is no ceiling?
I wish there were a front door.
I wish I could invite you in and show you the stars. We could sail streams made of lyrics—and share a world of wonders that will vanish by sunset tomorrow! I wish it could be yours, as much as it is mine. I wish you could watch the apples float into the sky, then we could laugh at Newton as we have a rainbow picnic on the riverbank. And we could take the lift to the thousandth floor, and have conversations with the stars about things that never die!
But I can't take you inside, because there isn't a front door. How I search, yet I cannot find the gates to my kingdom!
I can only give you impressions. I can sing a strain of the stars' song to you. Or perhaps dance out, for you, the shifting dapples from under the cedar tree—or paint you a fraction of the river we'll never sail together.
That's art, after all, isn't it? The dancer on-stage, scoured by the spotlight—she has a tale to tell to you, a tale that can't stay in chains forever. And her, that girl who doodles on the margins of her worksheets, as if she doesn't give a damn:
Because she has a world, and she wishes you knew how beautiful it really is.
No, they'll always and forever be a mere shadow of what you see and taste and breathe in that world called Fantasy. You'll never do your wonderland justice, because the cages of reality won't let you.
But this what an artist is meant to do. She is a rebel, who will keep dreaming and keep dreaming however many times she is told to let it go. She will keep trying and fighting to bring her wondrous creation into light, because she knows the beauty of things that will never, never be. She knows that special joy like the back of her hand.
And she knows that if she draws, dances, writes long enough, you will someday know it too.
But we'll find the back door someday.
