Life, which had previously been viewed in bright, vivid colors, now only appeared in shades of gray. The pain of sleep deprivation and anxiety over her dreams were nothing compared to this hell; the hell of ordinary life.

If she had been told years ago that she had a gift inside of her, a gift that made her special, she would have scoffed. Now, however, it was a daily struggle to get used to living without that light inside of her. It was like learning to walk all over again. She had learned nothing from the Labyrinth; she had still assumed, still taken for granted everything about her life. And now it was gone.

Days passed, weeks, months. She remained hollow; empty. The time when she was supposed to have left for college came and went. She didn’t know how she did it, but she convinced her parents that college was not something she could handle; instead she needed some time alone. So she took her savings and, with a loan from her father, moved across town into a small loft apartment overlooking the ocean. It was private, solitary, and all hers. Slowly Sarah began to adapt to life without magic. She was past the point where she cried for hours on end, curled into a fetal position. She was past lying awake at night, burning for his phantom touch. She was even past the point of sitting in front of the mirror, calling in vain for the Goblin King to take her away.

Sarah tried to throw herself into auditioning for companies around town, only to find that without that spark inside her, she was actually quite afraid of speaking on front of people. Her stories, which had flowed freely before, dried up. Her confidence was destroyed. Instead, she got a part time job in a small bookstore; a local place secluded and out of the way, where the most frequent visitor was a plump calico that took to napping in a patch of sunlight near the register.

In her abundant spare time, she began to take art classes at night from a local college, slowly forming goals in her mind to work towards. First, learn how to sketch. Lines forming and crossing, no it doesn’t look quite right…try it again, try again Sarah. Okay, its time to learn how to paint, take the brush and move it across the paper-no wait-that’s all right, no one is a Michelangelo in their first year…between the bookstore and her frustration at her lack of skills, she resembled a hermit, only leaving her apartment to work or to purchase more art supplies. Her loft was a mess; paint splattered drop cloths strewn about from when she began to experiment with oils, mounds of sketchbooks haphazardly thrown in corners. Sarah discovered she had to work ten times as hard to create a light inside herself, and even then, it in no way resembled the space that he had once filled with his power.

Although it hurt to think of him, the Goblin King, she often found her thoughts drifting to him as she spent long hours painting. Aside from the heat that flowed as she remembered his kiss, she desperately missed…him. She missed his voice, his friendship…everything about him that caused her to turn to him night after night for the three years following the Labyrinth. He had been her best friend…

It was nighttime, and Sarah was painting.  Tears spilled from her eyes as sadness overwhelmed her, and she frantically drew the brush across her latest canvas. She painted blindly, her mind’s eye utterly filled with his image; how he had looked, wild and free, in the middle of the punk rock concert. How his eyes had glowed with inner fires when she danced for him, and especially the pleasure that crossed his normally cold features when her mouth ran over his hardness…she was a fool, a stupid child to have closed her mind to the possibilities she knew were real!

Sarah’s tears dripped onto the canvas, and blended with the wild array of colors that she was painting. All of her sorrows, including her tears, were being pushed out of her body into this one creation. She was painting blind, her eyes focused completely on her misery as the brushes were dipped in colors, her arms sweeping over the canvas in broad strokes, her head bending until her chin was tucked against her chest, sobbing aloud like a little lost child.

When she had no strength left to even hold up a paintbrush, she let her arms drop and curled into a ball on the floor, falling asleep.

Hollow, cleansed of all emotion, Sarah slept like a baby for the first time in months. She was snoring for thirteen hours before she woke, the hardness of the wooden floor and the insistent sunshine glaring in front of her closed eyelids prompting her to roll over, yawn, and open one eye.

It was a new day.

She stood, stretching as she faced the morning light through the windows, a wide smile on her face. Nothing like a good night’s sleep!  She looked down.  Paint dotted her arms and tank top, her shorts and bare legs in a colorful rainbow. This was going to require a loooong shower and much scrubbing.

She turned, smoothing her sleep-mussed hair over one shoulder, and her eyes landed on the painting she had been so lost in the night before. She gasped, her body rigid.