Imagination

The human imagination is an astonishing thing. From the day we are born until we depart, it is present to some extent. When you are a child, every stick becomes a mighty sword or a rifle, ready to strike down that enemy only you see. As a teen, when playing football with your friends, you are no longer in the neighborhood playground, but instead, you are under the floodlights on the biggest stage. Many people will claim that once you become an adult your imagination disappears, that the only thing an adult needs is a nice dose of rational thinking, but I don’t believe so.

Regardless of age, the true essence of our imagination is giving life to inanimate objects. Like when you look at the clouds and sometimes you can see a giant bird soaring through the sky, or a mighty dragon breathing white-hot flames. Or the characteristics you would assign to your robot vacuum cleaner, of course, it is just a thing that moves around and keeps your floor clean, but that doesn’t stop humans from claiming their little robot is overdramatic or just plain sassy.

There is the other side of imagination as well, the one that plays messed-up tricks on you, like the chair in your bedroom that doubles as a dresser stacked high with clothes so that when you wake up in the middle of the night the first thing you see there is a shadowy figure. When you are having a walk and the weather starts getting chilly and the leaves are more on the ground than on the trees. You see something in the distance, something just vaguely human but not exactly. When you come near it, of course, it is just a weird-looking tree, you know it is just a tree but there is one small voice at the back of your mind saying “Yeah, but what if it wasn’t?”.

Every person has done this or has had something like that happen to them, and not everyone will be truthful about it. Take me, for example. I don’t have a sassy robot vacuum. But what my weird imagination does is when I go out to have a cigarette in the evening, I look up at the sky. With time, I noticed two stars relatively close to one another, at least from my insignificant perspective. Day after day I would gaze upwards and try to spot them, at first a little difficult thanks to the light pollution from the city, but the more and more I did it, the easier it became. And as time progressed, my imagination started working its magic. They looked like two eyes in the sky belonging to a celestial giant or perhaps an ancient deity looking down on us. But, of course, once the cigarette went out and I went back inside, they remained just that, two stars.

Now I only hope it was my imagination playing tricks on me. One night, as the ritual dictated, I was outside smoking and looking up, but this time I was unable to see them. That was odd, as the sky was perfectly clear. I looked down, took off my glasses, rubbed my eyes, looked up again, and there they were, looking down at me. Crisis averted, I told myself I must be more tired than I thought, though it wasn’t the first time I was unable to see something right in front of me, let alone a billion light-years away. As I was preparing to extinguish my cigarette and head back, I glanced one final time, then one of the Sky Eyes winked at me, and a giant toothy grin formed below it.