“I Color In The World I See. I Pick Apart The Melodies.”

I had a lot of friends as a kid, but I guess because I was the youngest in my family and never had to take care of anyone else, I was still left with a lot of hours to fill by myself.  I didn’t mind.

I spent a lot of time with imaginary people.  I always knew they were imaginary.  I didn’t make my mom pour a glass of milk at the dinner table for my imaginary best friend or yell at my sister for sitting on my imaginary little brother.  I didn’t see them as if they were real people.  When I asked them questions, I didn’t expect responses.  But still I could spend hours with them, which is saying a lot if you remember how slowly time passes when you’re a kid.

Mostly I taught imaginary students, assigning them pages to color and reading out loud to them.  There’s this picture of me that was taken at day care when I was probably 4 or 5, and I’m facing rows of empty chairs (occupied by my students, of course), and I have my head down so all you can see is my bowl-cut hair.  I was pretending to read to them and then I would lift up the book, so they could all see the pictures.  When I was a little older and in school myself, I would sometimes set up my classroom under our dining room table at home and there I would teach to imaginary versions of the kids in my own class at school.  That, I knew, was a little creepy even as I was doing it.

I was recognized at a young age for having quite an imagination.   That’s how adults always put it.  I also had a habit of basically zoning out, distracted by that imagination even when I was in the company of others.  My friends would make fun of me for that.

I would write stories and revel in anything creative my teachers could think of, but I didn’t produce anything special.  I was just a mediocre student–a girl without a lot of ambition.  I think we have this expectation that creative people are necessarily talented, and I really wasn’t.  It was much more true that fiction and imagining things was a way of life for me.  It was how I experienced the world.

And it still is.  I’ve grown up, developed some goals in life, and earned some degrees.  I am a grounded and practical girl.  I spend my time studying things that are sometimes so technical you wouldn’t recognize them as theology.  But my mind wanders more than it stays in place and I think of the stories I’m writing.  The characters I’ve created seem to have lives of their own.  I have no idea how other people think, so at the risk of sounding crazy, I’ll admit to all the time I spend imagining the lives of people who are right in front of me.  It’s mostly projection, fueled by observation and scant facts.  I assign to them motivations and histories and thoughts.  That thing people do where they walk away from a situation, thinking of all the things they should have said but didn’t, I take to an extreme, imagining the many other ways things could have gone.  Some times I do it consciously, but usually it’s just where my mind goes.

If I never write a brilliant piece of fiction, I will be disappointed, but all that time spent imagining won’t have gone to waste.  Fiction, whether in literature or movies, has this way of enchanting the the world I live in.  Combined with good music, it’s sometimes enough to make me think this life is full of magic.