The Place Where We Made Worlds
I had a dream last night, about two kids, sitting on a rock. They sat in the bushes off the sidewalk next to the park, so they could watch strangers go by. They sat together and laughed, making stories up on the spot. About the people living there lives. Where they were going, or where they were coming from. A back story, support characters.
You always had the fastest imagination. You were able to create a character instantly, and almost immediately knew everything about them. You knew all of your characters so deeply so quickly. They were all such a deep rooted part of you, but all of them different. Each one of them so unique.
I remember sitting on our rock and watching you draw the most beautiful places, right from your own head. I remember the worlds we conjured together with the words, and the way we wrote them out together, and how you sketched them so perfectly right alongside the words. Your pictures may have been worth a thousand words, but your words created thousands of pictures, and none of them were worth half of what you had in that amazing mind of yours. I always loved Tolkien for the rich depth and completion of his world, but you made a thousand worlds that could set his all to shame. And I loved you for that. I remember our first poem together.
I remember kissing you and being so scared. Because compared to you my writing was clumsy. Compared to you my kisses were clumsy. I never could compare to you. And you never said a word on it. You never made me feel what I knew, that I could and would try my whole life to write like you, to create like you, to conjure into being the amazing things in the mind.
I remember how we used to make a metaphor from everything and in the end they all came back to the concept of making reality from ideas and reaching out to our dreams. The metaphors always came back to writing, and we loved it. I remember you tell me that the end of summer was the end of a chapter. And that since you were leaving it also meant the end of a book. And how we should make the last page of this book a damn good one. But you knew better didn't you?
Because that summer wasn't a chapter for you, I was. And our relationship wasn't a book. Your life was a book. And you knew exactly how you wanted it to end. You were a writer through and through, and you never could let someone interfere with a story you put your heart into. Were you happy with how you wrote that last chapter? Would you be happy knowing how you didn't just write the end of your story, but the end of a chapter in mine that would change my story forever. I never knew leaving was leaving, or that ending was ending, but you always did love the witty word play.
It's ironic though. The last thing you wrote could have been beautiful. Everything else you ever had a hand in certainly was. But you never let anyone read your writing did you? You always said it was too personal. That it was a way to see and touch your mind, and how that was so much more intimate than anything your body could accomplish. You let me have, and keep so much of it, but in your last words you never mentioned me.
So what does a little boy sitting alone on a rock behind the bushes in the park write about?
You always said that you hated drugs, and anything that might take away the edge of your imagination, or the depth of your mind. Well, I might not be you, but that young boy had an imagination, too, and now it had turned against him. All of your beautiful worlds had become dark, and the inspiration and joy you filled him with became his biggest demon. So I did whatever I could to kill it, to burn away at the edge on my imagination that threatened to choke me at all times, to hide from my self the dark places in my mind where you hid.
But the drugs never lasted forever, and you'd show up when I slept, to make me remember. Damn you.
I always wondered. Where you went. If you made it to the worlds you loved so much. I read through your stories trying to find you, hoping somehow I'd know if you made it or not. And the first time I tried to get there myself, I hoped I'd wake up with you in one of our worlds so much. That we'd be together and we'd live out one of the amazing stories we created.
There are days I hate you for leaving, because I know I'll never find a place more rich and beautiful and full of life than the ones that came out of your head. There are days I miss escaping all of this lonely drab all around me just listening to you or writing together or watching you sketch.
But you were the one who told me that being different was a good thing. That the only characters worth writing about were dynamic, and well rounded, and that the stories worth experiencing were through the eyes of someone interesting or unique, and the words worth listening to were from the mouth of someone with a colorful back story.
So now you're a part of my back story. Now you're a part of my character's development. And I will keep on writing this story. Because without this story, I'm terrified that yours will truly end as well. As long as your influence stays in my story, then maybe a piece of that amazing imagination and depth is still affecting the world. And I don't think I can let that go.
Just remember that somewhere among all of the worlds in my head, somewhere in the back is my favorite one on a rock behind the bushes in the park, where a little boy is still waiting for the girl who taught me everything I know about dreaming.
And I don't have the heart to tell him, she'll never write with him again.
