Once upon a time there was a delightful girl…

Once upon a time there was this girl who had a delightful imagination. She was well-behaved and rather quiet, but only because the world in her head was much more alluring than what she saw around her. She never broke the rules. She was charming and never scared, not even of her idealistic thoughts. She was friendly with children because they were the only ones that found it natural to understand her whimsical nature. She collected bubblegum stickers, but only the pretty and colourful ones. She kept them in the lacy jewelry box her grandmother gave her. She loved it, but she didn’t like wearing shiny rings, not even delicate bracelets, she didn’t feel like she needed to impress anyone. She didn’t need it truly, she always made an impression with her winding ruby hair, perfectly fitted pastel dresses and lips as soft as a dragonfly’s wings.

She went to sleep at night hypnothised by the shadows on her on ceiling, thinking about how much better it would be if life were a perfect tale. She couldn’t remember the moment she closed her eyes but as soon as she did, an iridescent sky was spreading above her. She got up from the perfectly groomed grass, knocking over a porcelain tea cup that was sitting precariously close to the edge of a metal garden table with rusty paint. The white surface turned for an instant into a deep purple, just before it pourred off the table and onto her delicate sundress. She felt a passing scent of berries before she realized the lilac stain will prove rather difficult to take out from the silky fabric. She must be dreaming, surely, and this must be barely a footnote in a big dramatic chapter.

She looked up and noticed the winding street, the symetric houses painted in pure pastel colours and the personalized mailboxes that told a perfect story about their owners. It seemed like one of those places with pampered flowering hedges that you’re not allowed to touch, where you can leave the kids’ bicycle in the front yard without any worries and where dogs are too blissful to bark away at squirrels. That must be true enough, it’s a dream after all, isn’t it?

While she passed the freshly painted little white fences she thought these were the kind of people that were always respectul, that helped their neighbours fix their porch, that did their laundry on time and never fought over what cereal to buy or whose family to visit for Christmas. Oh, Christmas, just imagine the sprinkly lights covering every inch of those cozy welcoming walls. As she admired an adorable square house next to a dusty yellow dog house, she noticed a tremendous hot air ballon in the boldest, most hypnotising of colours. She barely noticed that the playground around it was as deserted as the rest of that tiny town. Surely this is meant to lead to the plot of this chapter, right?

She climbed into it without fear, she knew it couldn’t crash anyway. The colossal puffy ballon lifted softly and slowly until she could see how peaceful and perfect everything was from above. Terribly peaceful. While the playful wind made her dress rustle slighly, it became more and more obvious to her that there was genuinely no one down there; she had imagined those perfect strangers around her but there were no friends to throw her birthday parties and then forget the cake, and no family to remind her of that Easter when she ruined her fancy dress by chasing a baby possum or the summer she gave up her favourite doll for a postcard depicting a fairytale cottage lost in colourful wild flowers and a freshly painted little white fence.

Maybe that purple stain wasn’t as bad as she thought.

Back to basics!

Morning! I finally got around to scanning my drawings so here’s a quick collection. Most of them are already published in previous posts so you can find more photos there 🙂

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Suit up!

A well-tailored suit is to women what lingerie is to men. Well, after you take off the funky colourful bow tie in this case 🙂

Once upon a time there was this charming girl…

Once upon a time there was this girl who wasn’t afraid of loneliness. She was charming and well-mannered, she always did a little curtsey and men greeted her with a bow. They would occasionally kiss her hand but she disliked it most times. She never turned her back on someone and always assumed the best about people. She hid the way she felt and her words were as pleasant and polished as a porcelain swan but just as plain too. She never dared to say no and always knew the proper thing to do. Her hair was always smooth and tied up in a chignon. She only wore long dresses with delicate lace and small ribbons and never came down to breakfast in pajamas.

She took long walks in her tame garden because it was the place she felt safe in. Her skin was fair, and her cheeks were never rosy. She never liked afternoon teas or balls or dinners and just like every Tuesday night, she was sitting in the grass outside her faithful butler’s window, waiting for him to play the piano. She didn’t know what the song was but he always played it at the same time every Tuesday evening. Every evening until that day; he would never play again.

She never felt pain like that before. Or maybe she had but she never showed it. She spend a gloomy day and a grievous night looking at that grey rusty piano. In the late hours she heard a neigh outside, the one horse she didn’t know it was her job to take to the stable now. She gently walked towards him, while he stepped mercilessly on her fragile iris flowers. She didn’t know how to ride a horse so she just grabbed the harness and went wherever he took her. They walked out of the garden and into the tempestuous wild woods surrounding it.

They walked long hours and never-ending miles, with her holding him tight while the gentle flowery lace on her dress got caught in rough hedges and torn branches. He finally stopped in a wild flower meadow, full of half-faded poppies. She lay down on the ground and watched the stars. They looked different in her garden, the sky didn’t seem endless anymore but the green tree tops seemed to embrace and caress it softly. It might have been the most mesmerizing thing she ever saw, the blinking lights, the rough grass, the faint trill, the intoxicating smell, the fascina…

In the early hours her dress was shredded and stained and her horse wasn’t anywhere in sight but she never felt more safe and affectionate, like in a cherished lucid dream.

Once upon a time there was this lovely girl…

Once upon a time there was this girl who always said the right thing. She collected buttons and postcards. She always lost her umbrellas. She loved flowers and always wanted a bicycle with a little basket  to carry them around town on Sundays. She never bought one. She wore dresses only on weekends and only read books with a happy-ending. She never believed in fairytales but never lost hope. She went to the market every Saturday morning, unless it was raining and she had lost her umbrella.

One Saturday, as the traders hastily packed what was left of their apples and carrot crates, the rain started pouring like an angry mountain cascade. If only she hadn’t forgotten her red dotted umbrella in the clockmaker’s workshop last week. She could run to the post office across the street to seek for shelter. She did. It was closed and the gentle bunch of lillies of the valley got half-wet in her hand. She sat on the stairs, hanging over her precious flowers and watching drops falling down from the tips of her brown hair. There was no noise, no cars passing by, no thunder. In the happy-ending novels there could only be two similar scenarios: one where they stand alone and heartbroken in pouring rain on a moonlit night or one where two silly lovers dance in the rain like they could never catch a cold and water never gets into their eyes. This third one proved much less poetic.

She could hear a slight rustling sound coming from the street and a brown and yellow shadow fighting with the rain. It stopped suddenly and moved towards her. The tall blue-eyed shadow opened a purple umbrella and sat next to her on the wet steps. The yellow shadow had two big wheels but no flower basket. She never needed another one anyway.

Go your own way…

Emotive unstable you’re like an unwinding cable car
Listening for voices, but it’s the choices that make us who we are
Go your own way, even seasons have changed just burn those new leaves over
So self-absorbed you’ve seemed to ignore the prayers that have already come about
( Anberlin ~ The Unwinding Cable Car)

Owl Serenade


“Breathe and I’ll carry you away into the velvet sky
And we’ll stir the stars around and watch them fall away
Into the Hudson Bay and plummet out of sight and sound
The open summer breeze will sweep you through the hills
Where I live in the Alpine heights
Below the northern lights I spend my coldest nights alone awake
And thinking of the weekend we were in love.”

( Owl City ~ On The Wing )