When you’re a kid and the world keeps moving you (state to state, country to country, school to school )you learn fast that people don’t stay.
So you stop trying.
I spent my 11th grade in a stairwell. Sometimes the gym. Once or twice the lunchroom, until a couple of girls sat across from me and I realized even wanted connection felt like an intrusion. So I went back to the stairwell. Back to the book.
Goosebumps. Harry Potter. Charlie Bucket and his golden ticket. Stories where the gray tedium cracked open and you got pulled into a world that made sense ….
….Where growth meant something, where you could transform, where you weren’t just another kid starting over in another cafeteria in another state.
Fantasy gave me what the real world wouldn’t: a place that stayed coherent long enough to matter.
And it worked. Kind of.
I learned to be alone without falling apart. I learned to love stories, to disappear into them, to survive in solitude. Even now (married, kids, the whole thing) I’m fine being alone for hours. Days, if I’m honest.
But there’s a price: I got so good at being alone that I forgot how to be with people. College, work, marriage: I had to relearn how to exist in rooms with other humans. I had to fight my way back from the worlds I’d hidden in.
Because that’s the risk with fantasy. At its best, it’s supposed to send you back. Dorothy returns to Kansas. Frodo returns to the Shire. The journey matters because of what you bring home: the growth, the maturity, the scar that says I was there, and I survived, and now I’m here.
But if you never come back and just stay in the fantasy?
Then it stops being a facilitator of growth. It becomes a crutch. That’s why so many millennials (sorry, guys) are overgrown children with no family, no prospects, no responsibilities outside of what they consume.
Fantasy, at its best, is the journey out. And the journey back.
The question is: are you coming home?
Step through the Veil:https://talesofkhayr.com/blood-tax/