Purple Heron
She spent the majority of her day creating stories in her mind. Everything was a story. It might be a story grounded in reality—typically it was. A story about the news, about who the Japanese ambassador is and why he only eats tomatoes when he is alone. Maybe he is embarrassed by the way he chews them, the way the juice squirts into his mouth. Maybe it reminds him of something sexual, something too intimate to be shared. She had no idea if the Japanese ambassador ate tomatoes or not but she knew there was a Japanese ambassador, she knew he existed, that he’d eaten alone in a room before, there may or may not have been tomatoes in his meal, he’d probably thought of sex while chewing. She could see him chewing now, thinking about the juice, reveling in the sound of each squirt.
Although her stories were grounded in reality they weren’t real—She wasn’t sure much of what people said or thought was. Language is a story in itself. Terms we made up to categorize things so people wouldn’t create the wrong narrative about us. They, she decided, want everything to be real. She had no interest in the fullness of reality and because of that She’d never been allured to spaces that were soaked in it. She was interested in spaces that allowed one to imagine—to work within the possibility of unknown realms as if they were in existence. Spaces like hospital rooms, where transcendence sat on the horizon, or swaths of nature where unknown sounds and creatures fondled one another. She didn’t like living in a world another people created.
She wasn’t impressed by most peoples perusings. For example, who thought up a world where everyday is consumed with paperwork. A place where you can’t do anything that holds power without signing your name to a bunch of documents you don’t understand or need to understand. Someone imagined that. Spent time creating it. Someone imagined a nuclear bomb and created it. Someone imagined that people should have the same way of thinking about things like sex or marriage or god. Someone thought that people thinking the same was normal and spent centuries trying to convince the world to agree. In some sense it worked. Someone imagined an age segregated education system. Someone imagined a law that stated we all had to be taught by people with certificates and that in order to get a certificate you had to pay a shitload of money—make sure ideas were managed before being spewed and listened to. Someone thought annual flowers made sense—going out and buying new seeds every year rather that planting perennials. She didn’t like people’s imagination so she used her own to escape them.
