Imagination

When Maya was seven, she built a castle out of couch cushions and ruled over it with a crown made from silver pipe cleaners. To the world, it was an untidy living room on a rainy afternoon, but to Maya, it was a fortress of magic and possibility. She never needed much—just a quiet corner, a spark of thought, and the freedom to let it wander.

Now, Maya was thirty-two, and her couch was clean, her apartment minimalist, and her world tightly structured by color-coded calendars. Somewhere between overdue rent, office deadlines, and the steady ache behind her eyes, the castle had vanished.

Or so she thought.

It started with a post-it note. Yellow, crumpled, with only one word:

Imagine.

She found it on her desk Monday morning at 8:03 a.m., wedged between her laptop and a cold mug of peppermint tea. She assumed she’d written it herself—maybe an attempt to motivate herself over the weekend. Still, the handwriting was...odd. Not hers. Slightly slanted, the ink feathered as if written with a fountain pen.

She crumpled it and dropped it into the trash. A moment later, she paused, then fished it out again and smoothed it on her desk.

Imagine.

It clung to her like a whisper in a quiet room.

That night, she had a dream.

She stood barefoot on a crimson beach, waves of soft light lapping at the shore. Above her, the sky shimmered—not blue, not black, but a kaleidoscope of stars shifting like wind-tossed silk. A shadow moved across the water—tall, elegant, and smiling.

"You're late," the figure said. He wore a coat stitched with stardust and had eyes like twilight. "You used to visit every day."

Maya blinked. "I...don’t know this place."

"You did once," he said. “Before you stopped believing in it.”

She woke with a strange ache in her chest and sand—actual, real sand—sprinkled across her bedsheets.

No beach trips. No pets. No children sneaking in. She lived alone.

And she remembered the name now. The place from her dream: Elowen. It wasn’t from a book or a movie. It was hers. She had created it when she was nine, scribbling maps and names in the margins of her school notebooks. It had mountains that sang when the wind passed through, a talking fox who gave riddles instead of greetings, and a floating library guarded by invisible owls.

She had forgotten Elowen. But it hadn't forgotten her.

The notes began appearing more frequently.

Don't forget the fox.

Try the left door next time.

Elowen needs you.

She tried to ignore them, but every time she dismissed a note, her dreams deepened. She explored silver forests, spoke with ancient trees, and once, leapt from a mountain ledge only to land gently in a pond of liquid moonlight.

What frightened her most wasn't that these dreams felt real. It was that they were real. She returned from sleep with grass stains, feathers in her hair, and once, a cut on her hand where the bramble vines had tried to test her courage.

At work, she became distant. Her coworkers whispered. Her manager sent her a polite but pointed email about "focus" and "declining productivity."

She wanted to explain—about Elowen, about the fox, about the way the dreams wrapped around her heart like a memory she couldn’t quite let go—but how do you describe a world made of thoughts to people who no longer believed in their own?

One night, she returned to Elowen and found the library in flames.

Smoke poured from the floating island as shadowy creatures gnawed at the ancient shelves. The fox limped toward her, singed and coughing.

“They’re breaking through,” he rasped. “The Skeptics. They feed on disbelief. On grown-ups who stop imagining.”

Maya stared at the fire. “What can I do?”

“You created Elowen,” said the fox. “You are its guardian. You must believe in us again. You must tell others. Make them see.”

She awoke with soot on her hands and the scent of smoke in her hair.

She didn’t go to work that day. Or the next.

Instead, she pulled out a leather journal and began to write.

She wrote everything: about the twilight man and the crimson shores, the library of floating books, and the fox who once tricked a giant out of destroying the world with laughter. She drew maps. She scribbled dialogue. She built Elowen again, brick by word, magic by memory.

Then she opened a blank document on her laptop and began transcribing.

The story went viral.

“Modern fairytale,” one blogger called it. “A return to wonder,” said another.

People messaged her from around the world. Children drew fan art. Adults confessed they'd started dreaming again. Schools asked to read it aloud. Parents asked if their kids could write their own Elowen stories.

Maya smiled. The Skeptics, once gnawing at the edges of her creation, faded like shadows at dawn.

It’s been five years now.

Maya lives in a cottage near the sea, where she writes full-time. She still visits Elowen in her dreams, though the fox says she doesn’t have to sleep to return anymore. She teaches workshops on world-building and imagination. She tells people—kids and grown-ups alike—that imagination isn’t just escapism. It’s survival.

A place to go when the world gets too heavy.

A place to remember who we are before the world tells us what to be.

On her desk, a single note remains—framed in glass.

Imagine.

It’s not a command. It’s an invitation.