In My Own Little World

Some kids have imaginary friends. All kids play pretend. They may dream of being star athletes, scientific geniuses, or respected everyday heroes (doctors, lawyers, politicians... oh wait, I think I meant firemen). Thanks to video games, I'm not sure if kids still join the adult world of tea parties, Monopoly, or Risk. When I was in 4th grade, I designed an entire planet with different continents, countries and cultures. I drew extensive maps and spent all my school recess time writing the history but also planning the future of this planet. I put myself into it - I may have been leader of the world, because I was the creator, but I was a fellow citizen too.

It all started with G.I. Joe. In 3rd grade, I ran into a classmate after school who was riding his bike past my block to go play G.I. Joes with an upperclassman (4th grade) at our school playground. Up to this point, I had never considered that kids would return to schoolgrounds after class ended for the day. I followed him over and met this "upperclassman" who I should have known through my church, and he had more action figures than anyone I'd known before. He introduced me to another kid (in my same grade but from another class), who was also into G.I. Joe, but even more than that, he was into author J.R.R. Tolkien.

This other kid was always talking about how Tolkien invented languages and drew his own maps when he created his fictional worlds. This kid had some pretty advanced ideas for his own world-building, stuff that incorporated everything from King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table to anime-style robot suits. He prompted me to invent my own world, more contemporary than his and far less mythological. We were in the same class in 4th grade, and we spent both our recesses walking the perimeter of the playground discussing new ideas we had for our "worlds." We would have sleepovers on the weekends and talk nonstop for most of the night. Other times, we would get together to trade comic books and not say a word for hours while reading.

In 5th grade, my friend transferred to private school. He got into conservative talk radio and Christian heavy metal and we talked less about imaginary things. In junior high, I scaled back on my world and it became nothing more than a tropical island with a medieval European-style castle, invisible to passersby, tangible only to those I teleported onto it. It became less a world unto itself and more an escape from the real world which seemed to be taking over my previously contained and controllable existence. My new world (or imaginary place, since it was no longer a full-scale world) was all about slowing things down - a minute in the real world was an hour on mine, an hour in the real world was a couple days on mine, and so forth. When I got into skating, I included skate parks in my castle.

Eventually my friend moved to another town and I only saw him once after that. I tried to get him to talk about the stuff we were into as kids, but he kept bringing the conversation back to girls and driving. Eventually my world disappeared altogether, replaced by a superficial fantasy where I took a dozen or so of my high school friends to Disney World and we would make out on roller coasters and stuff like that. I started collecting annual updates of travel agency brochures to Disney World and I familiarized myself with all the hotels, which came in handy almost a decade later when my wife and I honeymooned there. One childhood dream down, a whole planet of dreams to go.