Once Upon a Time

Once upon a time, there was a girl who was afraid that she'd misplaced her originality. She remembered having it at one point, or so she thought, because she'd look out any window at any given moment and appreciate things that no one around her appreciated. But one day, when reading a book, she read words that she wished she had the eloquence to say, describing all the beautiful things in her world. It was then she realized that her ideas weren't new, but instead, very old; and probably done over thousands of times.
She was beyond discouraged. She was in pain. Soon, nothing she felt or thought felt worth sharing. "This has all been felt before," she thought, "nobody cares to hear about things they already know so much about."
But she needed to do something. Days turned into months and months turned into years and she had barely spoken of anything she saw, or thought about. Her mind was merely sitting, filling up with ideas that rotted away right where they were, until her whole soul was overflowing with dead creatures made of creativity.
All the good parts still left in her head and in her heart were being blackened, suffocated by the corpses.
When she looked out a rain covered window, she no longer made stories of the droplets, and the meetings and dates they ran off to in such a hurry. She stopped pretending to be fooled by natures magic tricks, claiming she knew it was commonplace, and not to be looked at as anything special. She even stopped thinking too much of her dreams during the day, knowing that the moon would bring them back the next night.
But one night, they didn't come back. She awoke the next morning untouched by the phenomenon. She made breakfast as usual, and headed off to school, sat through all her classes fantasy-less, ate lunch and headed to work. After work, she drove home, brushed her teeth and went to bed to have another dreamless night.
This continued for months.
Until one day, she awoke, remembering a memory from her childhood. She was playing princess dress-up with her best friend. Common for little girls. And the princess aspect just made it even more cliche. But she was having fun, and that is what's important. She was probably dreaming every night and daydreaming all day long then, allowing herself to live in a fantasy world, no matter how Disney-typical it was.
Then she started to look closer at her current way of life. Nothing was more overdone and tired out as her current daily routine.
It was those bursts of creative ideas (that she thought weren't so creative) that set her apart from everyone else in the world. The fact that she struggled to keep her imagination alive was enough to earn her, her dreams.
Before going to school, she sat outside for a while and listened to the world hum and whistle around her.
The wind started blowing away the old rotted fragments of dead creativity and planting new seeds of ideas.
She was happy once again, and content with being an artist.