Through the Woods and Back

      It was the first day of winter.  The snow had covered everything over the course of the night and it was beautiful.  Winter was always Sarah's favorite season.  Everything was white and clean.  It also reminded her of a time when she was free to be free and enjoy her life as she wanted.  She had never listened to karen about how her imagination would ruin any chance she had of a, quote, "normal life."  But she hadn't cared at the time.  She had been a teenager then, she hadn't had to think of bills and feeding and clothing herself.  She had her father to worry about that at the time, but now she was an adult and she had learned quick that dreaming and imagination got you no where.
      
      But when she was alone in her home, she was free to think of the time when she had met her only real friends.  The friends she could never tell anyone else about, or else they would put her in a loony bin.  Sometimes she thought she really was crazy, but when she would call Hoggle or the others, they always showed up, reminding her that everything had actually happened.  She didn't know what she would do if she had dreamt it all up and she didn't have her friends to turn to when things went wrong.
      
      As she stood there at her window day dreaming, she couldn't help but think of the one man that had caused a lot of things to happen to her.  After she had gotten Toby back, she had changed.  She became the obedient daughter her stepmother had always wanted and the big sister that Toby needed.  But the one thing that hadn't changed was her dreams.  Even at 15 she was more mature in her thoughts than most of the girls her age.  She wasn't dreaming of a knight in shining armor or a prince charming to come sweep her away and she wasn't obsessed with her clothes and whatnot, she was practical.  She knew what she needed to do with her life. Well, she knew what she wanted to do, but also understood that it would never happen.  She wasn't the great actress she thought she was, she was only mediocre, unlike her mother.

      Since she had grown up, she had seen her mother again.  She had used one of those people finder websites, and despite her thoughts on how these things never worked, she had tried it thinking, "What's the worst that could happen?"  She was surprised when it had actually worked and she had found her mother.  It was kind of anticlimactic when they met.  She had always imagined the day when she saw her mother again that as soon as they saw each other they would hug each other tightly and cry tears of joy, but that wasn't what happened.  Her mother had seen her and hugged her, but after that she was snobbish and cold, not the mother she remembered.  After that, neither of them made any attempt to contact the other.

      "Well Merlin, another winter alone," she said to her dog.  He had been the one thing from her childhood that had stayed the same, with the exception of getting older.

      "It's okay.  We've got each other.  We don't need anyone else," she crouched down, pet her friend, then got up, went to the closet and grabbed the leash, "so are you ready to go outside?"  The dog jumped up on her and licked her face.

      "Okay okay," she laughed, pushing the dog off her and clipping the leash to his collar, "let me put my coat on and we'll go."  She pulled her coat off the hook and put it on.  "Alright let's go, Merlin!" When they got outside, Merlin started pulling on the leash, trying to get her to hurry up.

      "Hang on Merlin.  I have to lock the door," chuckling at his antics, she locked the door.  Walking the dog was always fun, but today he was being unusually energetic.  She wondered what he was pulling her towards.  After walking for about a half mile, he turned off the sidewalk and went into the woods bordering town.

      "No Merlin, you know you aren't supposed to go in there.  It's dangerous," she told him, trying to pull him away, but it was no use.  He just had to get to whatever it was he wanted, so she went along with him seeing as she had no choice.  As they crossed the boundary between the woods and the open field that was the town's version of the park, she felt a sort of film pass over her.  She felt nothing more after that.