I have a wild imagination. For as long as I can remember I’ve played this game with myself where I imagine that I am being followed by two government-like agents dressed in simple dark suits. I’ve never known why they are following me exactly, but they are always just a few steps behind me and are never quite able to catch up to me. Every time I make a footprint in the snow or dirt, I leave them one tempting clue as to my current location. Their full-time job is to search me out for reasons I’ve never allowed myself to discover. All I know is that I have always imagined that perhaps their need to find me isn’t totally evil… perhaps I’m the last living person in an ancient royal family and I’m needed to bring peace and order back to my native country. Maybe, I’m the missing link in a fascinating and complex crime! Or maybe, my great great great great great great grandfather was a tomb raider and left me a cavern-full of gold Aztec coins, ancient royal jewelry and the Holy Grail itself!
Like I said, I have always had a wild imagination. At some point I outgrew that particular fantasy even though I do revisit it from time to time just for fun, but there is another ongoing imagining I’ve never been able to fully release.
When I was in seventh grade, I went to a private school and became a cheerleader for the first time. Every August the school had an orientation night before classes began and the cheerleaders were to come in uniform and perform. Before we went into the gym, most of the other cheerleaders and I were in the bathroom teasing our hair or whatever it is cheerleaders do. For some stupid reason, a few of us were doing jumps in the bathroom to warm-up. I was stupid too, and did a few jumps before attempting an “around-the-world,” which is something like a two touch, but your roll your hips out to reach your feet. As I came down from the jump, I lost my footing on the uneven tile floor and fell hard on my butt and hit the back of my head on the ground. I actually saw stars. I never understood what that meant before, but trust me; you actually see sparkling lights before your eyes when you hit your head that hard. I still think it knocked me out for a few seconds because when I looked up, all the girls were around me—a few looked concerned and the rest were laughing. It wasn’t my proudest moment, but I’m only confessing this to illustrate the background to my most persistent fantastic belief. That night, it occurred to me to wonder if perhaps I still wasn’t conscious. Maybe I was still flat on my back on that bathroom floor, out cold and simply dreaming every moment that followed.
It has been almost fifteen years since that night and every once and a while I still allow myself to imagine that I’m laying on that floor and all the events of my life, of the world, have been nothing more than the dream of a silly young girl. If I ever wake up, I would be thirteen again and have the millions of inventions, stories and events stored in my head that I could share with the world. Everything that happened and everything I learned since that night would be new to that alternative world. I would either be committed or lauded as some kind of sudden genius!
I would start my own band and we’d be known for performing songs like, “Like A Rolling Stone,” “Where the Streets Have No Name,” and “Ring of Fire.” I wouldn’t pair up with a physicist and we wouldn’t create the atomic bomb. I would know the outcome to all kinds of sporting events and would win millions by betting on them (plot stolen from a certain movie sequel starring Michael J. Fox). I could have imagined the vulnerability of buildings like the Word Trade Center and been able to warn people of an attack by plane. I would write the Harry Potter books and dictate all fashion trends. That’s all if that timeline differed from this one. If they were the same—well, I’d be the greatest psychic in the history of mankind!
You know the phrase, “if only I knew then, what I know now.” Perhaps I don’t just imagine alternate realities—maybe I need to make them plausible too. I’m simply Alice staring through a looking glass; except this rabbit hole leads me to the here and now instead of a Wonderland.
