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When you were younger, your mother used to tell you stories. Stories of castles and fairies, princes and princesses, homes and families, forgotten soldiers, and tales of war, she spun a multitude of universes for you to hold on to and a multitude of planets for you to journey off in your mind. She gifted these stories to you as a way to fuel your creativity, a way to make you look at the stars and see your dreams come to fruition.

What she didn't realize she gifted in turn, was an escape.

Every time life got a little bit too hard, or when you were faced with demons you were too young to handle, you went back to that expansive universe in your mind. You found yourself lost within the serenity and silence that the space and planets enveloped you in.

For when you were among the stars, it wasn't so hard to breathe.

Staring at yourself in the mirror, you can't tell if you're really here, or once more lost.

You've been practicing for a few hours, you should feel drained or tired but all you can feel is numb. A numbing sadness that you have been trying to chase away and yet never leaves, no matter how hard you fight, how hard you douse it, it stays. As though it had clung to your soul and was feeding off of you, and your loneliness.

But you have to keep going, you have to keep fighting.

And so you dance, surrounded by your reflection, surrounded by the mirrors, surrounded by an enclosure of your pain and suffering. When you mess up, you redo the move over and over and over again until it has become burned into your memory, the figure that you see dancing before you acting like your own version of a puppeteer that guides your movements, every step you take.

It becomes a cycle, something that your muscles grow used to it until they can no longer feel anything, your brain honing in on the centerpiece until all it's focused on is the dance, the movements, the beats, and the music.

The neverending loop of music, a gateway that takes you to your universe, helps you escape from the harsh realities of the world. Until it is just you dancing within a studio full of flowers and starlight, the mirrors faded but sparkling, the world around you blossoming in the vision of a new light. You almost smile at the beauty and the peace. For the first time in a long time, you feel as though there is hope, as though for just a small moment you can be just a little bit happy.

But then comes the crack.

A splinter that forms itself along the surface of the mirror, breaking into your psyche, your facade of perfection, and tears everything down.

The room begins to shake, the walls begin to cave in, and the flowers wilt. The world you have created has become poisoned and no matter what you do you can't fix it. It's a disease that spreads from that one fracture and grows to the rest of the room, the rest of your escape, and destroys even that.

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