Hidden World

   I've always dreamt of being special in secret. Having a secret super power that nobody knows about that I had to keep a secret or have a secret hideaway nobody knew about or else I’d be experimented on. I wanted to live like Mary Lennox from The Secret Garden or Alice from Alice in Wonderland. Everybody thought I’d grow out of it by the time schoolwork hit me, but it never did.    The only thing that changed was that my love for fantasy grew along with me, because amongst their discoveries, I was following the characters into their secret realms and living with them as if they're carrying me in their hair or between the folds in their petticoats.    I’ve recently read Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children, which, for anyone who has read it will know, only will ever intensify my want of my own world.    Just imagine it. You're a little more special that the crowd around you. You carry within your soul a little itsy-bitsy weight that must not be carried by anyone but you. And this little itsy bitsy little secret is going to be the reason only you can enter and get out of the past. You get to meet never-aging people, ones with less than discreet weights of their own.   And get this: None of your friends know about it.    I've tried countless times over the measly 15 years of my life to find my secret place. I’ve looked under my carpet for the black hole that will transport me somewhere where I am instantly crowned princess. I’ve tried walking through the mirror to find my twin and we'd go around terrifying people in a world where twins were considered the ultimate power. I’d wake up in the middle of the night, and walk into my closet hoping somehow, I’d accidentally step on a piece of wood that will break beneath me and I’d fall straight into a kingdom in a forest.    Alas, obviously, I haven't gotten anywhere, and had to live in the mundane world of reality. It seemed like, at that time, that everything the adults said was true. I was bound to grow out of it, because I stopped looking. I stopped hiding beneath desks and looking for secret trapdoors behind the drawers.    What they hadn’t predicted, though, is that I did find my secret place. It wasn't as elaborate as Narnia or Hogwarts. it wasn't as entertaining as Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. There were no little Oopma-Loompas to trade gold with.     But it was quaint    It was humble    It was magical.     It existed all in my head, and I kept it that way. I moved all the existing furniture from real life and set them aside to burn. My world was not going to have any normality. I saw myself in my world. I gave myself wings. I gave myself the power to manipulate time and seasons and created everything with a touch of the electricity in my brain, which sparked the completion of Hecadia, pronounced 'Hek-Ah-Deyia' after the Greek goddess of magic and night, Hecate.    I built bridges and crossed oceans riddled with 5-headed birds and yodeling whales and rode clouds and nobody, at all, could’ve stopped me. I spent hours on end in there, never slightly bored; not with all that you could do in Hecadia!    I ask you one simple thing: In your presence, in your lifetime, in whatever you call your existence, do try to create your own Hecadia. we're all bound to be brought down by the real world, no matter how adaptable we fool ourselves into thinking we are. Let your own Hecadia bring you up. Until the sun sets again, Nightly Rendezvous