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There once was a window. A glass tinted with the naive hopes of a place that had only existed in daydreams.
She grew up staring though it, the outside world warped into something intimidating but exciting; beautifully unreachable. Brainwashed by an illusion, she festered in this cage behind the glass, long enough for the bars to become invisible; inevitable. Her world narrowed down to four walls and nothing more, nothing less.
Her hope of the fairytale beyond the window, dwindled with every day that passed. Slowly, unnoticeably, it slipped through the grasp of her desperate mind, like sand through fingers. Maybe an hourglass would be more accurate.
Then, somehow - impossibly - the hourglass shattered. The familiar glass of that window simply.... ceased to exist. She stumbled through it like she had been leaning against it, when it vanished. Tumbled head first into the world; the untouchable, blurry, distant dream.
Except, it wasn't all that dream-like. It was real; unexpectedly, brutally real. Suddenly, she was a newborn fawn, finding her footing on the slipperiest patch of land. She was a sailor caught in a storm, gripping the helm for dear life. A bird who had been caged long enough to forget how to fly. Forget that it could fly. What that treacherous window had morphed into an enticing fantasy was, in reality, a twisted world - maze - of uncertainty and she was lost in it.
But then, there was him. A beacon in the storm. A flicker in the darkness. A spark that exploded into a flame, and spread into a fire so fast, she hadn't even blinked before the maze was burning down. It scared her, how suddenly her small world, her concrete beliefs, had gone up in smoke. It terrified her, standing amidst the ashes of a past life; embers falling around her in the aftermath, taunting in the way they sizzled out on her skin, leaving their marks. You can't escape it, they seemed to hiss; etch into her flesh.
He caught them. Closed his bare hand around the worst of them, like it was nothing. Like it didn't burn him too. He soothed the scars, old and new. Balmed them with the sincerest words and unwavering persistence (maybe stubbornness, she thought later). It wasn't quick. It wasn't easy. He was climbing a mountain, while she hurled the occasional rock at him. But he was her oasis in the driest desert, and for the first time in her life, she was worth something. Someone's effort. Someone's love.
It was war. Sometimes, the supposed ashes re-ignited like a damned avenging pheonix. The fire raged, she screamed her defiance, he picked up her broken pieces at the end of it all. But somehow, after each survival, there were fewer of them to stitch back together.
Every whispered word, every encouraging smile she saw through misted eyes, and every touch of lips that reached her very soul.... they held her together; perfectly imperfect. Here was this incredible thing, this oneiric clarity in the chaos of her world; it reminded her of the ghosts of a childhood fantasy. A scene through a window.
But he stayed. He was real. And she healed; the tell-tale cracks between her once shattered pieces, started to fade with his touch; like he was coaxing them. The world didn't seem so large anymore. So unfamilair. He was there; unavoidable. Like gravity. And she allowed the safety of his arms, to replace the bars of the cage that had once been her world.
And the remnants of a hazy view through a window, faded into a distant memory; like something she had once read, in a fairytale.