“When I was three or four years old, the idea of life was so terrifying and confusing to me that I decided that it was actually a bedtime story being read to a little girl not unlike myself. This was probably a major factor in why I decided very early on that my life was like something out of a fairytale. Each night I would dream of haunted houses and buried treasure, walled gardens and mysterious locked rooms. When I discovered a slightly loose floorboard in my closet, I refused to let my mother fix it, preferring instead to imagine the wonders it obviously hid. Just to be safe, I never did lift the board. I couldn’t have been more than six or seven, but I already knew better than to let real life intrude on my imaginings. A truly disconcerting amount of brainpower went towards upholding a strange sort of double reality; I questioned and over-intellectualized everything, but sobbed for days whenever my depressingly mundane suspicions were confirmed.”

by Ellisa Goldberg