Flowers and forests filled faraway lands and fantasy worlds. Once the first color hits the canvas, the picture slowly starts to trickle to life. Strokes create shapes, shapes create objects, and shades create perspective. Strokes, shapes, and shades is all she needed, to create a beautiful landscape in her mind. The seconds turned to minutes, and the green strokes became green triangles. The minutes turned to hours, and the green triangles became trees in the distance.

She swept her paintbrush into more colors, creating more strokes, and shapes. Shading them with other colors to create more pieces for the final puzzle. After more hours, she had a beautiful waterfall that tumbled over rocks that, once rough, now appeared soft and smooth like a baby’s blanket.

The waterfall flowed into a river, the sunlight dancing around the water’s current and peaking through the trees. The shadows on the ground created patterns on the pebbles below. "I wonder if I could turn this into a rainy day," she thought to herself. She added grays and blues, covering up the sun and the clear blue sky. Clouds rolled in and the sky grew dark, the leaves started dripping through the forest of trees.

There was now a squirrel, who sat on a rock overlooking the river. He had one big leaf acting like an umbrella over his head, protecting him from the rain. I will name you Sam and you like to protect the animals in the river, don’t you Sam? In her mind, Sam happily agreed to her statement and she added a small crown atop Sam’s head. King Sam, King of the Radwitz River.

The King watched carefully over the rushing river which was completely still to everyone around her. He looked for any animals in need, but to everyone else, there were no animals around him. The water raced over the edge of the rocks and occasionally splashed King Sam, but nobody noticed. The trees blew harder and their leaves and branches shook from them, falling to the ground as the storm rolled in, but nobody heard them.

Though this world might have been real to her, the truth is, it’s just a white canvas with layers upon layers of different colored paints. Paints which were put in specific places in specific ways to create something beautiful; but to her, it was something much more than beautiful. It was a world. A world where there was a squirrel named Sam who was King of a river and wanted nothing more than to sit on his rock, under his leaf, watching over the animals of the river.