JLR
01-15-2017, 06:44 PM
Thank you for taking the time to read this. Any feedback would be helpful. I've never posted before. Thank you!
I was lost, deeply and hopelessly lost, inside of my own head. What a strange feeling it is to be lost in a place that is so intimate to you. A place where I once wandered following the paths of thought worn over and over, or running and chasing after a will of the wisp of an idea with no thought to where I would end up. Sometimes my imagination would take me afar, to the scary reaches of my mind; a vast wasteland of dark ideas, but more often than not, I would end up in a place of comfort, that place at the center of your mind where the light is brighter, the air is cleaner and simply put, it was home.
My home was a glade in the center of a giant forest, with a river and cool grass to lay on. The sun was usually shining and I would spend hours imagining what this tree or that blade of grass would look like. The texture and layers of the land grew with each visit, until it no longer was a place that a simple girl would go to daydream, but it had real weight a solid sense of physics and truly a life of its own.
I was 7 when I realized that I held an entire world inside of my head, and 8 when I discovered that I could manipulate it. Now at 12 any thought could create entire cities or test new theories or discover new places. I was a pirate, a brave explorer, and I could always find my way home, and yet here I was lost. How did I end up here?
My daydream began as most daydreams do for children, in front of a window on a rather dreary, cold, foggy, rainy day. A soccer ball laid lazily at my feet and was quite clearly not in any sort of mood to be kicked about. Arms folded, I rested my forehead against the window, my breath leaving a trail of fog behind on the cool glass. Sitting back, I wrote my name, and studied it for a moment before wiping it away with the arm of my sweater resulting in a rather unsightly smear across the glass. Sighing, I shut my eyes.
Whoosh! I was off like a shot running down the familiar path to my glade, the warm sun on my skin. Reaching out I grazed tree branches feeling the soft leaves between my fingers. For some reason I was always older in my head, instead of being a gawky 12 year old I felt about 18 or 19, having never been those ages it was tough to put an exact finger on it, but I just instinctively knew I was older here. Eventually I directed my thoughts to things that would create a short cut to my glade, my home.
Of all the things in my glade I focused the most on my tree. It was rather grand and I was quite proud of it. The leaves on it alone had taken me hours of dreaming time, perfecting each individual one, molding it, making sure the veins were hearty enough to keep the tree alive. Each leaf had a slightly different shape than the last, inspired by a sassafras tree. Leaves then morphed into branches that were wide enough in several places for me to lie down comfortably in the canopy. Branches wound their way to the trunk, which was a massive thing nearly 15 feet across, for I had learned in science that trees grew a little wider each year and my tree had to be thousands of years old, so tirelessly, I made the trunk. The tree had smooth bark like a beech but it was covered with little knobs to make climbing a bit easier, as there was no possible way for me to reach my scrawny limbs all away around the trunk.
Whenever I came to my glade I was always barefooted since shoes were far too practical to be allowed. I wandered barefoot over to the tree and grazed my hands over its bumpy bark before walking down to the river and finding a nice sunny spot to warm my chilled bones. In the glade, I was always alone. Sure I would run into some shadow people in other parts of my world, but here in my center, there was only me. I liked to think that I was always alone here because I was the most centered in this place. Any other parts of me that I saw outside of the glade seem to disappear and in this place I was the most basic I could be. My thoughts did not race here, here was a place where time stopped, and life did not seem so complicated.
There were several paths leading out of the glade, some more worn than others, some lay completely undiscovered. Each path started with a question or idea that I pondered and ended when I had come up with either a theory or actually figured out the answer. The theory paths were my favorite. They reminded me a bit of those choose your own ending books, there were always different ways to look at a problem and I felt I could explore them all, and if I had had enough time I might have, but that is a different story.
For awhile I just lay there in the sun, listening to the river slide over the polished stones beneath it’s surface. However, after some time, I felt the pricklings of an idea at the edge of my consciousness. I lay still as to not scare it away. Ideas can be a bit skiddish and you need to let them work up to it or they might just disappear, they aren’t at all confident things. Just look at how many ideas you throw out of your mind every day before wholly considering them. If you take the time to listen and let them form themselves you’d be surprised how many good ones there actually are, and we just toss them out like old rubbish without even giving them a fair chance.
Slowly I saw the idea begin to take shape, at first it was small and dark but it grew and grew until it was filling up almost all of the space in my mind! I struggled to keep the picture in my head of my glade but I felt myself slipping back into the dreary, rainy world. Suddenly, I heard a popping noise and the idea was gone. Sitting up I peered around my glade, watching it solidify as I held its image in my mind.
“eh hummm….”
I whirled my head around quickly and there sitting upon my perfect grass next to my bubbly river of smooth stones sat the strangest looking creature. My eyes widened and the edges started to blur until….
Whoosh!! I was back in my bedroom. Standing up I shook my head gently trying to figure out what I had seen. Whenever I had day dreamed before I had total and complete control or rather my imagination did, but I most certainly did not create that little creature. Glancing at my alarm clock a giant 3:30pm glowed green from the display. I panicked, I was supposed to be at my friend Veronica’s house half an hour ago for a study session.
Grabbing my grungy blue backpack off my floor I sprinted for the door. Running down the stairs I nearly tackled my mother at the bottom.
“What have you been doing up there! I’ve been shouting for the past 10 minutes, I thought I was supposed to drop you off at the Paplov’s on my way to book club.”
“You are, I just fell asleep, I’m sorry mom.” She sighed heavily.
“Its alright, are you ready to go?”
“Yea, just gotta grab my shoes”
Quietly, I put my shoes on not even bothering to double knot them. Walking to the car the grass squished under the pressure of my worn sneakers. The rain drizzled down my forehead and I felt my hair begin to frizz. Finally we got to the car. I pulled the handle but it didn’t give. Pushing my bangs out of my face I glanced up just in time to see mom digging in her purse. We, my dad and I, always called it her Mary Poppins purse. For some reason unknown to man, she never seemed to run out of room, and was always elbow deep looking for something. She stomped her foot against the ground causing mud to spatter up on her pant legs, she muttered under her breath.
“Hold on Cameron, I think I left them in the void.”
The void she was referring to was a large catch all my parents came up with to keep things from disappearing, they called it the void because our house was like a black hole; always taking objects in and never spitting the out again. This not so unique idea, stemmed from the fact that they were hopelessly careless with everything. We were a family of day dreamers and all shared the same aversion to mundane tasks like tidying up .
After what seemed like forever she came back, waving the keys in the air like some sort of trophy. I heard the automatic locks click back and I opened the door. The rain had turned into one of those slow, soak you clear to the bones drizzles. Luckily I always carried an extra set of clothes in my bag, for such times. I set my bag down at my feet and reached behind me for the seat belt. After I had buckled in I reached over for the heater. Just being in the car was causing the windows to fog up. Mom slowly backed out of our driveway and into the street.
My Neighborhood was the no nonsense kind where everyone kept their lawn at the perfect length behind their picket fences like a type of giant green moat that protected their red brick castles with neat little window boxes out front. It was frowned upon to mow your lawn on Thursdays and Sunday afternoons, and you were likely to get excommunicated if you even whispered the word yard sale. How my parents had survived so long in this cookie cutter neighborhood was beyond me. My family, most definitely, did not fit in. Our lawn was always looking either long and more like a jungle than a yard or brown and dead, the grass turned to a crisp under the unyielding sun of summer. The neighbors might have forgiven us had it not been for the garish lawn ornaments my father collected from various thrift stores. We were reminded constantly of our deviations by perfectly scripted notices that were folded in embossed envelopes, which were then slid through our mail slot promptly every Tuesday and Friday.
I watched the houses slide by as my mother rambled on about missus so and so and her terrible interpretation of this bit of text or that. Her voice sounded like a constant humming in my head, leading to imagine her as a giant bumblebee and me as a bee princess along for a ride. We weren’t riding in a car, but I was flying through the air on her back, a sword on my hip and a cape billowed out behind me. The image was so absurd that a giggle forced its way from between my lips.
“What’s so funny Cameron?”, my mother asked
I debated whether I should tell her about my daydream, and decided against it. My mother took her book club extremely seriously and she probably wouldn’t have appreciated my ……..
BANG!
I felt myself fly forward, everything turned black, and then nothing…………
I felt something gently shaking me, I lifted my hand to my face and heard myself groan. My eyes fluttered open. Above me, the sky was blue and I was laying on the grass. As things came into greater focus, I began to recognize my surroundings. For one, I was most definitely not in my mother’s car anymore and secondly I was in my glade, with absolutely no recollection of how I got there. Placing my hands behind me on the grass I pushed myself up on to my elbows.
Everything felt startlingly real. Despite my best imagination, touch had always been something that required extreme concentration, but for once everything seemed, if possible, more real than the hard cloth seat of the mini van where I had last been. My head was pounding. When I sat up the blood rush to my head was nearly paralyzing. I watched as my world swam before my eyes. It was like one of those old timey movies, where the black and white count down showed at the beginning of the reel; I felt myself losing consciousness and as if in slow motion, I felt my body slowly fall back to the ground. I felt the grass wrap its warm blades around me as if putting me in a cocoon before I finally passed out.
When I finally came to it was dark, which was strange because I had never imagined my glade in a nighttime setting. Glancing upwards I saw the stars for the first time, they were more beautiful than anything I had ever seen. Each one shone with a light that connected it to all the others. It was like seeing the constellations drawn across the sky and it was moving, all around me. The stars were shifting shape. In the sky directly above me I watched as stars arranged into the shape of a rabbit bound its way across the sky, behind it a dragon blew flames from its larger than life nose, and behind that a train, complete with a caboose found its way across the dark expanses. Honestly, I could have laid there forever, watching its wonders unfold before me . However, something else caught my attention.
I sat up quickly. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something move. Although my head still ached, it was more of a dull throbbing rather than a sharp stabbing pain. Blinking my eyes to clear away any remaining sleep I looked around. There, behind a bush, was the creature I had seen earlier. My curiosity got the best of me and I went to stand up. I put out my hand and imagined a walking stick. You know the kind that was straight out of a Tolkien novel, about 5 inches taller than me, all gnarled and well worn. It appeared as I expected, it was my world after all, but there was something wrong with it, an element that I had not imagined. Engrained on the nearly pure white wood were several glacier blue pictograms. They glowed brightly in the surrounding darkness. Something like that had never happened before. When I would imagine or create something it always appeared exactly as I pictured it, and despite the limitless feeling to my power I had always faced the greatest of all limitations, myself. Feeling it in my hand, a strange thought entered my mind; well it was more of a sensation. Upon touching it, I knew that I was not the only one who had contributed to its creation.
I looked around. It had to be that strange creature from earlier, that had to be the movement from behind the bush. Taking a slow deep breath I stood up. Turning I went towards the area where I had seen the movement. There standing on my perfectly manicured grass under my tree stood a creature no more than 3 ½ foot tall. It was greenish in color and had big feet with long thin toes, its limbs were spindly and sapling like. The creature appeared to be something right out of a Grimm’s fairy tale. We stood there staring at each other for a rather inappropriate amount of time before it finally took a step towards me. Startled, I matched his step and in my haste to walk further away I tripped and fell head long into the grass, my head nearly landing on his toes.
A great laugh, way to large to come from so small a creature, erupted from his tiny pot belly. The laugh shook his entire body, and I could feel its resounding energy pulse through the ground. It was like the entire glade was laughing with him. Eventually his laughter was so contagious that I too began snickering despite my fear. Slowly I felt my fear begin to dissipate and finally we both stopped laughing and the glade returned to its normal stillness.
I am ashamed to say that I asked the very first question that popped into my head it was awful and cliché but given the circumstances, I am not certain that I could have asked anything else. “Who are you?” The words fell out of my mouth faster than I could speak and it kind of came out as a jumbled mess sounding something like “wo r ou”. I blushed with embarrassment. Smiling gently the creature replied,
“I’m not sure”
Which completely threw me off. How could a clearly sentient being not know what it was or who it was for that matter. The silence between us was thick as we stared at each other, assessing the strangeness that hung between us. After a few deafiining moments the creature continued,
“You see, I was just born, is it not impossible for a creature, just created to not quite have worked out the meaning of its existence. I did not intend for your question to be answered so hastily, I am afraid that I allowed myself to be over concise which could be construed as rude. As for who I am, I think the more pressing question is what am I, and that my dear, falls to you. As my creator it is your responsibility to give me a name.”
“I did not create you.” I responded a bit harshly.
“you did in fact have and original thought, which blossomed into an idea and in turn gained substance and thus, created a life of sorts.”
I began to think back, that idea that grew into my mind until I thought it would explode, the popping noise, seeing the creature. The pieces fell together creating a picture that I was none too fond of. In all the years that I had been creating, I had never created something on accident. Everything in the glade or even in my whole imagined world had purpose, it was exactly how I had planned it, envisioned it, dreamt it; yet here in front of me was a creature whom I had unintentionally given life to. I felt a wave of responsibility wash over me before settling on my shoulders with a weight that would have crippled Atlas.
Now that’s a bit dramatic, but for a twelve year old girl, the emotion seemed rather fitting at the time. Now to find a name. I had never named something before, my parents were not really pet people and besides the few lazy gold fish, of which were named Goldy and Bubbles, I had little to no experience. Still there he stood (if he was in fact a he) waiting for me to provide him with an identity.
I was lost, deeply and hopelessly lost, inside of my own head. What a strange feeling it is to be lost in a place that is so intimate to you. A place where I once wandered following the paths of thought worn over and over, or running and chasing after a will of the wisp of an idea with no thought to where I would end up. Sometimes my imagination would take me afar, to the scary reaches of my mind; a vast wasteland of dark ideas, but more often than not, I would end up in a place of comfort, that place at the center of your mind where the light is brighter, the air is cleaner and simply put, it was home.
My home was a glade in the center of a giant forest, with a river and cool grass to lay on. The sun was usually shining and I would spend hours imagining what this tree or that blade of grass would look like. The texture and layers of the land grew with each visit, until it no longer was a place that a simple girl would go to daydream, but it had real weight a solid sense of physics and truly a life of its own.
I was 7 when I realized that I held an entire world inside of my head, and 8 when I discovered that I could manipulate it. Now at 12 any thought could create entire cities or test new theories or discover new places. I was a pirate, a brave explorer, and I could always find my way home, and yet here I was lost. How did I end up here?
My daydream began as most daydreams do for children, in front of a window on a rather dreary, cold, foggy, rainy day. A soccer ball laid lazily at my feet and was quite clearly not in any sort of mood to be kicked about. Arms folded, I rested my forehead against the window, my breath leaving a trail of fog behind on the cool glass. Sitting back, I wrote my name, and studied it for a moment before wiping it away with the arm of my sweater resulting in a rather unsightly smear across the glass. Sighing, I shut my eyes.
Whoosh! I was off like a shot running down the familiar path to my glade, the warm sun on my skin. Reaching out I grazed tree branches feeling the soft leaves between my fingers. For some reason I was always older in my head, instead of being a gawky 12 year old I felt about 18 or 19, having never been those ages it was tough to put an exact finger on it, but I just instinctively knew I was older here. Eventually I directed my thoughts to things that would create a short cut to my glade, my home.
Of all the things in my glade I focused the most on my tree. It was rather grand and I was quite proud of it. The leaves on it alone had taken me hours of dreaming time, perfecting each individual one, molding it, making sure the veins were hearty enough to keep the tree alive. Each leaf had a slightly different shape than the last, inspired by a sassafras tree. Leaves then morphed into branches that were wide enough in several places for me to lie down comfortably in the canopy. Branches wound their way to the trunk, which was a massive thing nearly 15 feet across, for I had learned in science that trees grew a little wider each year and my tree had to be thousands of years old, so tirelessly, I made the trunk. The tree had smooth bark like a beech but it was covered with little knobs to make climbing a bit easier, as there was no possible way for me to reach my scrawny limbs all away around the trunk.
Whenever I came to my glade I was always barefooted since shoes were far too practical to be allowed. I wandered barefoot over to the tree and grazed my hands over its bumpy bark before walking down to the river and finding a nice sunny spot to warm my chilled bones. In the glade, I was always alone. Sure I would run into some shadow people in other parts of my world, but here in my center, there was only me. I liked to think that I was always alone here because I was the most centered in this place. Any other parts of me that I saw outside of the glade seem to disappear and in this place I was the most basic I could be. My thoughts did not race here, here was a place where time stopped, and life did not seem so complicated.
There were several paths leading out of the glade, some more worn than others, some lay completely undiscovered. Each path started with a question or idea that I pondered and ended when I had come up with either a theory or actually figured out the answer. The theory paths were my favorite. They reminded me a bit of those choose your own ending books, there were always different ways to look at a problem and I felt I could explore them all, and if I had had enough time I might have, but that is a different story.
For awhile I just lay there in the sun, listening to the river slide over the polished stones beneath it’s surface. However, after some time, I felt the pricklings of an idea at the edge of my consciousness. I lay still as to not scare it away. Ideas can be a bit skiddish and you need to let them work up to it or they might just disappear, they aren’t at all confident things. Just look at how many ideas you throw out of your mind every day before wholly considering them. If you take the time to listen and let them form themselves you’d be surprised how many good ones there actually are, and we just toss them out like old rubbish without even giving them a fair chance.
Slowly I saw the idea begin to take shape, at first it was small and dark but it grew and grew until it was filling up almost all of the space in my mind! I struggled to keep the picture in my head of my glade but I felt myself slipping back into the dreary, rainy world. Suddenly, I heard a popping noise and the idea was gone. Sitting up I peered around my glade, watching it solidify as I held its image in my mind.
“eh hummm….”
I whirled my head around quickly and there sitting upon my perfect grass next to my bubbly river of smooth stones sat the strangest looking creature. My eyes widened and the edges started to blur until….
Whoosh!! I was back in my bedroom. Standing up I shook my head gently trying to figure out what I had seen. Whenever I had day dreamed before I had total and complete control or rather my imagination did, but I most certainly did not create that little creature. Glancing at my alarm clock a giant 3:30pm glowed green from the display. I panicked, I was supposed to be at my friend Veronica’s house half an hour ago for a study session.
Grabbing my grungy blue backpack off my floor I sprinted for the door. Running down the stairs I nearly tackled my mother at the bottom.
“What have you been doing up there! I’ve been shouting for the past 10 minutes, I thought I was supposed to drop you off at the Paplov’s on my way to book club.”
“You are, I just fell asleep, I’m sorry mom.” She sighed heavily.
“Its alright, are you ready to go?”
“Yea, just gotta grab my shoes”
Quietly, I put my shoes on not even bothering to double knot them. Walking to the car the grass squished under the pressure of my worn sneakers. The rain drizzled down my forehead and I felt my hair begin to frizz. Finally we got to the car. I pulled the handle but it didn’t give. Pushing my bangs out of my face I glanced up just in time to see mom digging in her purse. We, my dad and I, always called it her Mary Poppins purse. For some reason unknown to man, she never seemed to run out of room, and was always elbow deep looking for something. She stomped her foot against the ground causing mud to spatter up on her pant legs, she muttered under her breath.
“Hold on Cameron, I think I left them in the void.”
The void she was referring to was a large catch all my parents came up with to keep things from disappearing, they called it the void because our house was like a black hole; always taking objects in and never spitting the out again. This not so unique idea, stemmed from the fact that they were hopelessly careless with everything. We were a family of day dreamers and all shared the same aversion to mundane tasks like tidying up .
After what seemed like forever she came back, waving the keys in the air like some sort of trophy. I heard the automatic locks click back and I opened the door. The rain had turned into one of those slow, soak you clear to the bones drizzles. Luckily I always carried an extra set of clothes in my bag, for such times. I set my bag down at my feet and reached behind me for the seat belt. After I had buckled in I reached over for the heater. Just being in the car was causing the windows to fog up. Mom slowly backed out of our driveway and into the street.
My Neighborhood was the no nonsense kind where everyone kept their lawn at the perfect length behind their picket fences like a type of giant green moat that protected their red brick castles with neat little window boxes out front. It was frowned upon to mow your lawn on Thursdays and Sunday afternoons, and you were likely to get excommunicated if you even whispered the word yard sale. How my parents had survived so long in this cookie cutter neighborhood was beyond me. My family, most definitely, did not fit in. Our lawn was always looking either long and more like a jungle than a yard or brown and dead, the grass turned to a crisp under the unyielding sun of summer. The neighbors might have forgiven us had it not been for the garish lawn ornaments my father collected from various thrift stores. We were reminded constantly of our deviations by perfectly scripted notices that were folded in embossed envelopes, which were then slid through our mail slot promptly every Tuesday and Friday.
I watched the houses slide by as my mother rambled on about missus so and so and her terrible interpretation of this bit of text or that. Her voice sounded like a constant humming in my head, leading to imagine her as a giant bumblebee and me as a bee princess along for a ride. We weren’t riding in a car, but I was flying through the air on her back, a sword on my hip and a cape billowed out behind me. The image was so absurd that a giggle forced its way from between my lips.
“What’s so funny Cameron?”, my mother asked
I debated whether I should tell her about my daydream, and decided against it. My mother took her book club extremely seriously and she probably wouldn’t have appreciated my ……..
BANG!
I felt myself fly forward, everything turned black, and then nothing…………
I felt something gently shaking me, I lifted my hand to my face and heard myself groan. My eyes fluttered open. Above me, the sky was blue and I was laying on the grass. As things came into greater focus, I began to recognize my surroundings. For one, I was most definitely not in my mother’s car anymore and secondly I was in my glade, with absolutely no recollection of how I got there. Placing my hands behind me on the grass I pushed myself up on to my elbows.
Everything felt startlingly real. Despite my best imagination, touch had always been something that required extreme concentration, but for once everything seemed, if possible, more real than the hard cloth seat of the mini van where I had last been. My head was pounding. When I sat up the blood rush to my head was nearly paralyzing. I watched as my world swam before my eyes. It was like one of those old timey movies, where the black and white count down showed at the beginning of the reel; I felt myself losing consciousness and as if in slow motion, I felt my body slowly fall back to the ground. I felt the grass wrap its warm blades around me as if putting me in a cocoon before I finally passed out.
When I finally came to it was dark, which was strange because I had never imagined my glade in a nighttime setting. Glancing upwards I saw the stars for the first time, they were more beautiful than anything I had ever seen. Each one shone with a light that connected it to all the others. It was like seeing the constellations drawn across the sky and it was moving, all around me. The stars were shifting shape. In the sky directly above me I watched as stars arranged into the shape of a rabbit bound its way across the sky, behind it a dragon blew flames from its larger than life nose, and behind that a train, complete with a caboose found its way across the dark expanses. Honestly, I could have laid there forever, watching its wonders unfold before me . However, something else caught my attention.
I sat up quickly. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something move. Although my head still ached, it was more of a dull throbbing rather than a sharp stabbing pain. Blinking my eyes to clear away any remaining sleep I looked around. There, behind a bush, was the creature I had seen earlier. My curiosity got the best of me and I went to stand up. I put out my hand and imagined a walking stick. You know the kind that was straight out of a Tolkien novel, about 5 inches taller than me, all gnarled and well worn. It appeared as I expected, it was my world after all, but there was something wrong with it, an element that I had not imagined. Engrained on the nearly pure white wood were several glacier blue pictograms. They glowed brightly in the surrounding darkness. Something like that had never happened before. When I would imagine or create something it always appeared exactly as I pictured it, and despite the limitless feeling to my power I had always faced the greatest of all limitations, myself. Feeling it in my hand, a strange thought entered my mind; well it was more of a sensation. Upon touching it, I knew that I was not the only one who had contributed to its creation.
I looked around. It had to be that strange creature from earlier, that had to be the movement from behind the bush. Taking a slow deep breath I stood up. Turning I went towards the area where I had seen the movement. There standing on my perfectly manicured grass under my tree stood a creature no more than 3 ½ foot tall. It was greenish in color and had big feet with long thin toes, its limbs were spindly and sapling like. The creature appeared to be something right out of a Grimm’s fairy tale. We stood there staring at each other for a rather inappropriate amount of time before it finally took a step towards me. Startled, I matched his step and in my haste to walk further away I tripped and fell head long into the grass, my head nearly landing on his toes.
A great laugh, way to large to come from so small a creature, erupted from his tiny pot belly. The laugh shook his entire body, and I could feel its resounding energy pulse through the ground. It was like the entire glade was laughing with him. Eventually his laughter was so contagious that I too began snickering despite my fear. Slowly I felt my fear begin to dissipate and finally we both stopped laughing and the glade returned to its normal stillness.
I am ashamed to say that I asked the very first question that popped into my head it was awful and cliché but given the circumstances, I am not certain that I could have asked anything else. “Who are you?” The words fell out of my mouth faster than I could speak and it kind of came out as a jumbled mess sounding something like “wo r ou”. I blushed with embarrassment. Smiling gently the creature replied,
“I’m not sure”
Which completely threw me off. How could a clearly sentient being not know what it was or who it was for that matter. The silence between us was thick as we stared at each other, assessing the strangeness that hung between us. After a few deafiining moments the creature continued,
“You see, I was just born, is it not impossible for a creature, just created to not quite have worked out the meaning of its existence. I did not intend for your question to be answered so hastily, I am afraid that I allowed myself to be over concise which could be construed as rude. As for who I am, I think the more pressing question is what am I, and that my dear, falls to you. As my creator it is your responsibility to give me a name.”
“I did not create you.” I responded a bit harshly.
“you did in fact have and original thought, which blossomed into an idea and in turn gained substance and thus, created a life of sorts.”
I began to think back, that idea that grew into my mind until I thought it would explode, the popping noise, seeing the creature. The pieces fell together creating a picture that I was none too fond of. In all the years that I had been creating, I had never created something on accident. Everything in the glade or even in my whole imagined world had purpose, it was exactly how I had planned it, envisioned it, dreamt it; yet here in front of me was a creature whom I had unintentionally given life to. I felt a wave of responsibility wash over me before settling on my shoulders with a weight that would have crippled Atlas.
Now that’s a bit dramatic, but for a twelve year old girl, the emotion seemed rather fitting at the time. Now to find a name. I had never named something before, my parents were not really pet people and besides the few lazy gold fish, of which were named Goldy and Bubbles, I had little to no experience. Still there he stood (if he was in fact a he) waiting for me to provide him with an identity.