There are days when the list of things to be done seems endless and unforgiving, and I find myself staring out of the window, uncaring of the to-dos. I'm staring at the parrots lined up on the telephone wires, the sunlight glinting off a window pane, the languid sweep of a cloud across the sky, the potion that merges memory and make-believe in my mind.
Ever since I can remember, I have always been a daydreamer. Books taught me how to dream.
As a child, I wandered the moors with Jane Eyre, trembled in the attic with Bertha Mason, solved murders with Poirot in sun-drenched villas and shadowed manors. As I grew older, I flew across galaxies with Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, dreamt of alternate futures and doomed planets. I found refuge in Wodehouseβs jazz background scored world of bumbling aristocrats and disapproving butlers. And I learned to be terrified with Stephen King, who taught me that horror, too, had beauty, infinite beauty.
Every book fed my imagination until it brimmed over, becoming something I could not contain within myself. When I looked up from the page, the real world felt paler, diminished, yes, but also full of possibility. A puddle might conceal a portal, as might a mirror. A stranger on the bus might be an immortal who has lived a thousand lives. A locked room might hold more than dust and memory.
That was the genesis of every story I have written. The woman who walked away and did not return. The girl who wandered through universes. The house that remembered what it should have forgotten. They were born in that liminal space between the prosaicness of the everyday and the imagined.
Daydreaming is not escape. It is survival. It is creation. It is the mind stretching its legs, wandering off the path, tripping over stories waiting to be found.
If writing is my work, then daydreaming is the well I draw it from.
So, if you see me lost in thought, be indulgent, forgive me. I am elsewhere, living other lives that will soon unfurl on the page
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