The Curse of Imagination

I spend a lot of time dwelling in my imagination.

It's where I go when a certain thing (word, phrase, scent, scene) catches my fancy. It's where I go before I fall asleep. It's where I go when I write. It's where I go when I sit down of an evening to roll dice with friends.

As a writer, and a role player, one strives to render the tactile mental. How do you describe the feel of the rain? The smell of dinner cooking? The washer banging on the spin cycle? How do you describe the tightening of your belly when you hear somebody scream outside, only to realize it's just a drunk college student, but now your scalp is tingling and your eyes see too much and you have to wait for the adrenaline to wear off before you can go back to bed?

When you get it right, when you're so immersed in your head-words that the reality before you fades at the edges and gets hazy with your imagining, it's magical. This immersion leaves you feeling dazed when it's time to be done, wake up, turn the computer off, put the dice back in the bag. It leaves you with imaginary scents, and colors. It leaves you looking at things that you don't recognize, but feel as though you ought.

The problem, though. Sometimes there are situations you hear about, in the news mostly, and reactions are of shock, visceral and wordless. You think "oh no" you think "I'm sorry" and so many people say "I just can't imagine...."

When you are a dreamer, you can imagine. It doesn't render the unspeakable any more understandable, it doesn't make you better. It certainly helps lend to the truth of your dreams, dimension to your song. It is an empathy that can't be taught, and indeed you might not even know you have it until you get that twist in your stomach one day when you hear of a tragedy that isn't yours, not really. Until you imagine somebody's last moments as though a dream, or vision, or well rendered film.

Singular Sensation

Sometimes, when writing, you want to shed normal descriptions. You want to describe something as it's never been described before, while leaving no doubt whatsoever as to what that something is.

In your day to day life, you catalog senses, feelings, experiences, trying to shelve them like rare antiquities, squirreled away to relate later, in different lights.

My soap, bought on vacation and jealously guarded, used slice by slice from the main bar, had sharp edges this morning. The patchouli scent of it dulled the sharpness and made me want more.

I got a new kind of gum, hard white pillows in a plastic tray, foil backed like pills. When I bit them, the shells cracked and there was a tiny drop of liquid inside. It was how I imagined biting an insect to be; crack the carapace, liquid hitting the tongue.

Black ink on my fingers, fading purple with repeated scrubbings, nails dirty, then grey, then pale.

A papercut, too shallow to bleed my dry skin, edges of the loose skin white like a flower petal.

Purple prose is to be avoided, but sometimes, you just need to skate that line. You need to think of your words and roll them on your tongue, like somebody sampling a wine. Too much and it's too dense, too sweet. Too little, and everything is bones.