Just My Imagination

The other night I was walking through the house doing absolutely nothing interesting when I saw something move. Not move move. Nothing came floating down the hallway carrying chains, and there was no pale woman in a nightgown standing at the end of the stairs, which frankly would have been helpful because at least then we’d have something specific to discuss. It was just that little flicker at the edge of my vision that makes you turn your head before you’ve even decided to.

So I turned and, naturally, there was nothing there. I stood looking into the empty room for another second because apparently when humans see nothing, we like to stare directly at the nothing just to make sure it’s still nothing. It was. I shrugged, said, “Just my imagination,” and kept walking.

That’s such an interesting little phrase when you think about it. We don’t usually say my imagination. We say just my imagination, as if imagination is the slightly unreliable cousin of reality who probably shouldn’t be trusted with anything important.

We use it whenever something happens that doesn’t quite fit into the normal order of things. Maybe you hear a sound in the house after everyone has gone to bed. You stop and listen. The refrigerator hums, the house creaks and somewhere a dog shifts position. Fine. House noise. Then the dog raises his head and looks toward the hallway.

Well, terrific. Now we’re both involved.

Still, you go back to whatever you were doing because what else are you supposed to do? Stand in the kitchen all night waiting for something interesting to happen? That’s the funny thing about these moments. They’re almost never dramatic enough to deserve a story. They’re tiny interruptions in otherwise completely ordinary days, and most of the time we barely give them another thought.

Sometimes it’s a sound or movement. Sometimes it’s thinking about someone you haven’t thought about in years and then, for no apparent reason, their name shows up later that day. Sometimes you walk into a place and immediately want to leave. Nothing happened. Nobody said anything. You simply don’t like it there, and you can’t explain why.

Then there are dreams. Every once in a while I have one so vivid that waking up feels strange. For a few seconds I’m lying there trying to figure out which place I just left and which one I’ve returned to. I know it was a dream. I’m not confused about reality. But that doesn’t change the fact that five seconds earlier I was somewhere else. I saw things, heard things and felt things, and then my eyes opened and an entire world disappeared.

Smells might be even stranger. You can be going about a completely ordinary day when suddenly something in the air smells exactly like a place that hasn’t existed in years. Maybe it’s a kitchen, a perfume, coffee, wood smoke or someone’s house. Whatever it is, you’re not remembering it in the way we normally think about remembering something. For one second you’re there. You can almost see the room. Then, as quickly as it appeared, it’s gone.

That has happened to me enough times that I’ve stopped trying to rush past it, because I’ve realized I’m not particularly interested in proving what any of these things mean. I’m not talking about ghosts or psychic abilities or whether every strange coincidence is the universe desperately trying to get my attention while I’m unloading the dishwasher. I’m interested in why we’re so quick to dismiss the experience itself.

Something odd happens and immediately we need to decide what it was. A shadow. A dream. A coincidence. A memory. A trick of the light. My imagination. There, explained. Now we can continue behaving like respectable adults.

But lately I’ve gotten surprisingly comfortable with another answer: I don’t know.

I don’t know why I suddenly thought about that person. I don’t know why that room felt strange. I don’t know why I woke up from that dream with my heart pounding. I don’t know what moved at the edge of my vision. And strangely enough, not knowing doesn’t bother me nearly as much as it once might have, because somewhere along the way I realized imagination itself is already pretty damn mysterious.

I can sit in my kitchen right now and picture someone I love who isn’t here. Not vaguely, either. I can see their face, hear the way they laugh and remember exactly how they say certain words. I can replay a conversation that happened years ago and suddenly remember some tiny detail I’d completely forgotten.

Where was that memory five minutes ago? Apparently somewhere inside me, waiting.

When you really stop and think about it, we walk around carrying entire worlds nobody else can see. Rooms we’ve lived in, people we’ve loved, dogs we’ve lost, songs we haven’t heard in decades and versions of ourselves we barely recognize anymore are all tucked away somewhere inside us. Whole afternoons that disappeared thirty years ago can suddenly come rushing back because somebody opened a jar of Vicks or played the first few seconds of a song.

And we call all of that imagination as though imagination is somehow the lesser thing.

Maybe that’s the part I’ve gotten wrong. Maybe imagination doesn’t always mean something isn’t real. Maybe sometimes it means something is real somewhere other than directly in front of me.

A memory is real. A dream happened to me even if it didn’t happen in the room. Love remains real when the person isn’t standing beside me, and grief certainly manages to be real without anybody being able to point to exactly where it’s located. Hope, fear and ideas can change the course of a life long before they become anything another person could see or touch.

Maybe imagination isn’t some silly little room in the back of the brain where we keep things that don’t count. Maybe it’s one of the places where we encounter the parts of life that don’t have physical addresses.

That doesn’t mean I’m going to start believing every flickering shadow is somebody’s grandmother dropping by for coffee. Sometimes a shadow is a shadow, the house makes noise, and the dog is staring down the hallway because he heard a mouse three counties away. But sometimes something happens that makes me stop, and I’ve decided that’s enough. I don’t have to name it, prove it or turn it into anything. I can stand there for a second and wonder.

The other night, after I saw that little movement and found absolutely nothing there, I eventually went back to what I was doing. A few minutes later I passed the same room again and, naturally, looked inside.

Still nothing.

I laughed at myself and kept walking. But this time I noticed something.

I didn’t say, “Just my imagination.”

I left off the first word.

Because maybe it was my imagination.

And I’m beginning to think we’ve been seriously underestimating that thing.