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She sits curled into the smallest ball possible on the couch. This takes concentration- a great amount of it. Joy has always had a great deal of concentration... There was a time when that one, small girl could put that energy into something that surpassed what most humans could do. She created life from life. Joy had a way of taking the most ordinary things and turning them into something magical. But lately, things have been taking the magic from her.
The lights flicker in a phantasmic paleness of blue and in that dark room; one, small girl becomes even smaller. The round of tightly held muscles pinned to that spot on the couch does not stir as the spectres of a hundred different people, that all look the same, dance on the walls.Little girls, with ribbons in their hair, singing, skipping. Learning the alphabet and reading fairytales for the first time.
These twirl away into what can only be described as mirror images of the old Joy, bright, young women, writing and laughing, thinking and creating- a sun seems to burst into the room and for just one moment, Joy can almost remember what the green grass felt like beneath her feet when she used to run her way through the summers. She can almost remember the scent of the breeze ruffling through her hair. As she just begins to warm under these golden, waltzing figures- everything halts.
Not even the blue of the low lights is left behind. As the room grows cold and dark, it also grows empty. Slowly, creeping their way up the walls, like shadows, are the epitome of those children of the sun- old, haggard, ghosts of time yet to come begin to appear on the walls.
Before they can reach their pale and sickly arms out to her- Joy grabs what she has been curled around on the couch, and pulls the trigger, and with that millisecond of an action-kills the entire lifetime of herself.
But that's the thing, with dreams we can see the future, but a future without dreams is not one worth seeing through.
Thus ends the tale of how the loss of dreams killed a life of Joy.