The need to be enough

In a place that was neither land nor sky, where thoughts grew like plants and feelings swam like strange tiny creatures, lived a thousand souls who shared the same heartbeat.

Each morning, the queen would rise up from the warm current that carried her across the sea of dreams. She was ever learning who she wanted to be, so she had no face. Yet her spine stayed straight, because neither fate nor chance would forge the path of who she might become. Whenever she reached out to touch the world, her hand re-shaped itself, unsure whether to become a gesture of welcome or defence.

A sun floated at the centre, carved in spirals and stitched lines, as though assembled from old stories and borrowed expectations. Around it, creatures whispered suggestions and murmured judgments.

She felt the tug of imagined obligations and carried the weight of questions without answers. Why am I like this? Why aren’t I more? Why do I feel shaped by things I cannot see? Every time she asked, a new creature bloomed.

On the far edge of their world stood a blue camel, calm and unbothered. No one knew the many reasons he was there. Perhaps he was a guardian, or perhaps he simply wandered in from another dream. But he observed everything with slow-blinking kindness, as if he knew that being enough was never something one proved, it was something one felt. – L/C