Day 4 of the 300 a day challenge…. I’m getting into a habit, generally, of doing these early in the morning when I seem to be thinking the freshest!

He fell deeper into confusion than ever he had been, permitting his life to escape from any reality and drip slowly into a fantasy he shaped into the thing he thought he wanted. She was his fantasy and he was hers. They engaged one another in talks and thoughts of the maybes, the one days, the what ifs and the if onlys. They lived a perfect pixel life in wooden cabins in snow filled forests, in penthouse apartments in the sky, in beach homes, on their own private island… They lived anywhere they wanted and the world was their own. Each the master of their own success and engineering joint successes that might be the envy of others… were others not too busy engineering their own fantasies.

The wake up was a disjointing jolt from the other side – the real side, as one he loved slipped away into an untimely non-existence.

Death does funny things. One effect – an almost overnight change in his outlook. He no longer desired perfect fantasy homes, what ifs and one days with a perfect stranger and slipped solidly back into a reality that was, without doubt, a little darker than he’d like, but was a place he simply had to be. He had real responsibilities to a real little boy. And though that little boy and he did not live in penthouses in the sky and they didn’t live on their own private island… their joint existence and battle through the storm, was more beautiful than anything he’d experienced in the perfect place.

The withdrawal was not from the perfect place. It was not from the perfect escapism and immersion in a platform he’d come to love. The withdrawal was from a life he thought was really his, but one, it emerged, didn’t even really exist. The jolt turned his perfect pixel place from his ‘life,’ into his ‘hobby’ and restored balance.