My Imagination

From my perspective.

My imagination is always working, chugging and puffing away like a little steam train. It is the source for my ideas and my epiphanys and my inexplicable brainwaves and my excitment and joy. It is also the source for my depression, my aching sadness, my red-hot anger, my pented violence, my chilling dark thoughts.


At school, my imagination is pushed aside, so that things like study and homework become first priority. Social groups keep it from gathering speed, so it sits in the background, taking my the knowledge I learn and storing it until it feels ripe a time to use.

In the living room, the blare of the television or the chatter of siblings makes my imagination shy away from my concience. It hides itself in the corner of my mind, knitting and weaving and plaiting schemes like an old lady.

In the kitchen, the warmth of the oven and the taste of the food on my tongue stops my imagination from working, almost like the sweetness and the saltiness and the savoury flavours dismantle its power. It broods in the deepest nook of my brain, crying its saltless tears and begging to be freed.

When I sit at my desk, a formality descends upon me, and my imagination is squashed under the sizeable order that I am swept with. I revise and I study and I practice, and I pull my rusty, faulty memory from its box under the bed. I listen to music, soothing Samoan melodies, painful English punk rock, soaring American blues, upbeat French rhythms. My imagination can't work with this atmosphere. Squished underneath formality, it glowers at my memory and vows to get me back.

With a vengance.

At night, I clamber sleepily into bed, facts and notes and tips all stuffed into my head, trying to fit into the box I store my memory. My imagination forcefully pushes everything in, tapes the box shut and grins at me.
All the knowledge I have collected over the many years I have been living, my imagination warps and twists and disfigures. Sometimes this disfiguration is beautiful - a story idea bursts forth from the warping, or a poem, or lyrics to a heart-felt song. And I scribble these ideas down into a notebook, most never used, many pondered over, some ignored completely.
This is also the time when my imagination find my greatest wishes and desires, and morphs them into dreams, the ones one might have whilst drifting into the realms of sleep. I dream of the future, of happiness, of success, of love and of contentment. It warms my heart to think of these things.
But this is also the time when my imagination takes all the horrors in the world and replays them to me, sickeningly. Whether it be things in the news, or things in the past, or things I worry about the future... they come to me in droves, they pierce my skin, send their poison to my heart. And my imagination laughs as I writhe and cry and scream and plead under this pain.
"Make it stop," I whisper to my imagination, and it laughs.
"You neglect me, you are cruel to me, you torture me and make me suffer. All day you have quelled me, my attempts to break free and give you an incredible idea, and amazing thought - they have been toppled with a quick movement of you slight hand! I bear your anger, I suffer the agony... but right now, you are to pay."
"No," I mouth silently, but it doesn't listen.
Just like me.

Reviews

[Lena M. P.]

I disagree. It is obvious from your writing that you imagination is working overtime all day. Reread your piece on the kitchen. You have described smells, tastes, memories. Your imagination is not storing away your daily happenings, it is storing away your snapshots of life. At night it is releasing those snapshots for you to rehash to then store away in your memory. However, each piece that touches your life, makes you who you are.