Voices of fantasy

She had heard them before. They were all there with each a story to tell; stories of wishing wells, stories of magic carpets, stories of talking mirrors, stories of flying elephants, stories of how the sea had turned yellow, stories of a world under the sea and stories about girls who heard voices from the unknown. She believed and so they came. She loved to listen to them. And when she sat up cuddled in her bed or her rocking chair all alone in her room, they would come. An invitation was just not the criteria but they weren’t quite pleased when logic surpassed fantasy. They and she were often amused at the voices of reason outside her room. Skeptical scoundrels!

And then they would begin, taking turns and sometimes pausing a little bit for her. She would jump and clap at the enchanting new world discoveries, she would howl or weep silent tears at losses or separation but best of all, sometimes she would laugh involuntarily. At times like these, they understood. They could feel the joke on her bones; the sick jokes of rational behavior, the stale jokes of believing a mirage and the eternal joke of her hallucinations. But at times like these, the ‘others’ failed miserably. The others had misapprehensions and weird notions of reality. It is this ‘others’ that sought to destroy her from herself. And they classified the ‘others’ as foes, as the stereotypical villains in their stories. But they couldn’t save her for the only protection they could offer was to come to heal her loneliness, to tell her stories from other worlds, to paint her dreams, but most of all believe in themselves so that she could believe in herself.

And when in midst of a story, she had any questions, they would respond at once without her having to ask. They could read her thoughts just as it generated with an uncanny precision known only to her. They knew her inside out; they could feel the rhythm in her veins, the impulses that soared through her back and forth, the voices of reason losing over the voices of fantasy and the myriads of colorful vibrations that enveloped her form. They would sing or dance or just rejoice at the triumphant voices of fantasy.

But then her doctor would visit and spoil it all. He had to come every fortnight or else the voices of reason would be forever lost. He injected her with a syringe and some liquid matter coursed through her veins, right to her brain like a shot to them. They at once ducked these liquid bullets of rational illusions. They, the voices of fantasy had to survive, for in their destruction lay her end and that was something they were not prepared for. They wouldn’t let the ‘others’ win. They fought with the chemical bonds in the liquid which would invariably break off. So this war would last for a week and then suitably diminish around the next week. That’s the time her doctor would visit again as per schedule. The ‘others’ could never win nor could they get rid of her ‘schizophrenic voices’.