Neverland

    

Anne sat in her office, going through her tedious paperwork that had to be done for the day. Her life was repetitive; she woke up at 6 o'clock sharp every day, left for work at 7, and got right to work at 7:30, where she stifled through mounds of papers and answered phone calls till 5 in the afternoon. By the time Anne got home, she was too exhausted to do a single thing, so she would get in her sweats and relaxed, maybe grabbing a nice book or watching TV. The life of an adult was boring and Anne needed something different, something new. Spontaneously, she decided to take the next day off purely to focus on herself.

The following morning, Anne's alarm went off at her usual time, but she didn't get out of her comfy bed right away. She lied there, hugging her pillows and stared at the ceiling, debating what she should do today, but her mind wondered elsewhere. Anne remembered when she was a child, how before bed, her mother would tell her stories of Peter Pan, the boy who never grew up. Then more childhood memories flooded in, ones she never had time to reminiscence and almost forgot she even had. A particular memory popped in her head, a place her parent’s had taken her to as a child. They drove about an hour away from the city to an area of absolute serenity. There were lush fields of grass and trees as far as the eyes could see and sparkling blue skies. But in a patch of open field, there was one lone tree. It looked different from the rest: the trunk was split in two and wrapped around each other, and there was a single vine that dropped to its side. As a little girl, she curiously wondered towards it and grabbed the vine. She started swinging around the tree, pretending she was Peter Pan flying through the air.

Anne softly giggled to herself by her sudden remembrance, but then felt a sudden urge to go back to the mystical field. She found herself dressed and in her car in a matter of minutes. She then headed to her destination, to the lush fields of her past. After about an hour, Anne made it to countryside but was a little sadden by the overcast, as she had hoped to see the beautiful sky again. But then she spotted it, the tree of her childhood. It seemed exactly the same from what Anne remembered, the same twisted trunk and the same single vine flowing down its side. Anne walked to the tree and placed her hand on the wood, feeling a childish flutter in her stomach, an unfamiliar sensation to her older self. Her hand automatically reached for the vine and she pulled on it, making sure it would hold her weight. Leaning towards the tree for balance, Anne jumped as high as she could and started flying.