The age of make believe
Children play make-believe games all the time. Mums and dads, hospitals and schools. They act out situations and scenarios that they see in their everyday life. It is a natural part of their play, learning and development. But at what age does this type of play stop. At what age are the dolls put away, the lists of names of the make-believe school register stopped being made, when is this time that a child just doesn’t play that game again. Around the age of 10 at the end of their primary education, just before they enter ‘big school’. But for one child these games did not stop, they became real.
Sapphire Jameson was an ordinary little girl who loved playing make-believe games with her friends or alone as most young children do. Sapphire would make believe fantasy worlds in which she would spend hours, but when with her friends she would play make believe games such as mums and dads just like her friends. Only her parents noticed this difference. Only her parents noticed that when sapphires friends stopped playing with dolls and plastic fruit and vegetables so did sapphire, but unlike her friends her own make-believe games in her own imaginary worlds still existed.
At the age of 13 these games occurred more often than ever. 13 is the age that most girls start to change, they start to take an interest in boys, they begin to read teen magazines instead of tween mags and they start to wear makeup and obsess about how they look. Sapphire did do all of these things but only when her friends were there. Her parents noticed how different Sapphire was to her friends and her cousin Amy. When Sapphire was younger she and Amy were almost inseparable, but as they hit secondary school age they drifted apart. Everybody drifts apart from people that they were once very close to especially when leaving childhood and entering adulthood but it was like Sapphire was drifting apart from everybody. Sapphire spent more time alone than she did with her friends. She would make up excuses not to hang out with them and when she had no excuse although she might act like a normal teenager ogling at lads in mags and experimenting with makeup, she didn’t seem to enjoy it as her friends did, it was like she was just going through the motions until she could go back to being alone in her own world.
Sapphires parents became more worried as Sapphire withdrew more and more into her own world they took her to see a ‘shrink’, a psychiatrist. Nothing came from going to see the shrink except Sapphire becoming more and more withdrawn. All the shrink saw of Sapphire was the act she put on of being an ordinary teenager. To the shrink her parents described what Sapphire did as going into her own world, cutting herself of from everything and everyone around her except on a subconscious level.
Her parents were more right that they could imagine.
Sapphires world was amazing and only she could see it, she was born into this world. Sapphire didn’t cry when she was born because what she saw was amazing. Swirls of different colours, the most beautiful mix of colours and patterns, it took her breath away. As Sapphire was only seconds old when she saw all this she cannot remember her world looking like this nor can she remember the smells and the sounds that just didn’t exist in the world that you or I live in. As sapphire got older her world changed to fit in with what she was learning in the ‘real’ world. The colours formed to make houses, meadows, rivers and trees. These things were not the types of houses or meadow or rivers or trees that we get in our world they were the kind that expanded from Sapphires imagination. There were even things there which Sapphire didn’t even know she could imagine. The smells although many unique turned into the most wonderful mixtures of the smells we smell in our world, as was the same with the sounds.
As a child Sapphire believed that all children saw their own worlds as none of the children she knew in the real world were ever in her world. This was not to say there weren’t any other people because there was. There was people of all different languages and colours, young and old, male and female, but none of this mattered in Sapphires world for all the people were just as wonderful as the world itself.
