ADYNATON

A mass of nothing. Darkness at work until something clicks. A sound quietly repeats, a constant swoosh. Clouds start to form, spiraling slowly, building bigger and bigger. Faded colors are born, weak, but more vivid as the spiral turns. A window into a false reality. The window shows a movie star, with the face of the one imagining it.

 

At first, the first windows we create seem large, but they’re shallow in reality. The windows show what we see with our eyes, and whatever we see that we find cool, our imagination creates a window of aspiration, impossible, but even then, it's a desire. A good one.

 

As we grow, so does our imagination. But our imagination is only so big, it needs space for more windows. So it shutters the ridiculous ones, and widens the more “mature” windows. Instead of looking into windows of wanting to be a firefighter, we think about what brings us into our teenage years. Our imagination is filled with wanting to own weapons, or getting to watch movies that our parents would never allow. Still, these windows are locked. But unlike the impossible ones, these are possible.

 

All it takes for our imagination to be corrupted, our windows to become clouded, is one event. This event can change how our imagination works. As we discover and grow, our imagination becomes less than it used to be in the beginning. Our imagination during our childhood was so innocent, but as it learned new things, our windows became more vulgar, perverted, disturbing.

 

But no matter what kind of imagination you had as a kid, everyone’s imagination deteriorates as they age. We use it less, since we are so grounded in what we’re left with. There's no point in imagining being an astronaut, if you're stuck being a janitor after slacking off. There's no reason to think that you can still become a Broadway dancer if you can barely walk out your house. Imagination becomes pointless.

 

The reason why that first window popped up in our imagination was that we wanted to believe it could happen, no matter how outlandish or impossible it was. It gave hope for what we wanted to do. We waste our imagination on silly things, when it could be used to open our windows. Our dreams.