Natural Trade-Offs
— a rude awakening
Classic school recess: my classmates playing hopscotch and tag, fighting over the rules of Four Square and kickball, while I am at the sidelines, making every attempt to quiet my barking invisible pet dog. It was the first grade. On this particular day, a girl approached me while I was taking my dog on a walk while simultaneously balancing on the wooden beam outlining the playset.
“What’s its name?” the girl confidently asked.
“His name is oreo,” I looked down and saw that she was making a tight fist beside her right thigh. She had an invisible pet dog, too.
Her name was Grace, but from then on, rarely would her name be mentioned without mine following after. We were the bestest of friends; the typical two peas in a pod. Every recess, we would meet at the same spot where we met on that first day and take our invisible pets on walks around the playground. As time passed, our predictable animals began to bore us, and so we imagined different animals; ones we knew we couldn’t have in real life. We would imagine burnt orange giraffes with their massive necks and elephants that would take up all the space on the playset. We gave our animals their own shelters and even imagined up a few massive zoos. We became obsessed with the idea of pushing our own imagination and thoughts into each other’s reality and were confident that we could come up with a world much grander than our own.
Grace created bizarre, colorful skyscrapers, while I created restaurants that only sold our favorite foods and drinks. We were always hard at work, casually defying physics and society’s limitations, building houses on sand and giving cats ten lives as opposed to just nine. As our imagination grew, the natural, untouched space in the schoolyard felt as if it was shrinking.
“I wish the builders of the school had left us more space,” I would often say.
Grace seemed especially frustrated with the fact that we were limited to such little room to materialize all of our ideas and decided that we needed a new place to play; a place with unlimited space; a clean slate. I knew the perfect place.
“Do you think your mom would let you spend the night at my house this weekend?”
Grace smirked back at me deviously, giving me a look that let me know she was prepared to do whatever it takes to make it happen. And sure enough, she brought only good news the next day.
“Took some extra tears, but the deed is done.”
We celebrated by splitting a slice of invisible cake and wrote out a countdown to the weekend. Our excitement caused the school week to feel like a century, and made us completely unable to enjoy the schoolyard we had been accustomed to for so long. Instead, we spent the majority of the week discussing designs, infrastructure, and potential issues that could arise in the midst of our future construction. We took our work seriously.
As soon as she made it to my doorstep, I grabbed her hand and pulled her through my house and out the back door. Now I had been running, her straggling behind, yelling for me to slow down. I was too excited to slow down. A few yards later, I stopped suddenly, smiled with all teeth showing at the endless stretch of green ahead of me, and turned around to see Grace catching up. She stopped yelling and her face began to glow. Growing up in West Virginia, it’s not uncommon to have an entire forest in your own backyard. We spent the entire day, running through the grass, climbing trees, and yelling into existence everything that came to our minds. The sweeping open space had a way of inspiring us. We each built our own personal homes, equipped with elevators that have trampoline flooring and swimming pools with dolphins and seahorses. By the end of the day, we felt our world was finally deserving of a name: InvisaWorld.
We played this way for several months. Each school week spent setting out plans for the weekend, each weekend spent fulfilling the plans. We genuinely felt busy, and even at times a bit stressed, setting unreasonable, corporate-style deadlines for ourselves, complaining about the insufficient 24 hours that make up a day. We had reached a peak, and from there, as time passed, so did our amusement with the invisible. Then one day, Grace finally said the forbidden words.
“What if all of this was actually here?”
“What do you mean actually?” I fired back defensively, despite knowing exactly what she meant.
“You know… what if it was all real?” she paused, looking out at all the green, seeing the emptiness for the first time. Up till then, it all seemed so full, almost overflowing. My stomach suddenly sank. Reality struck. It felt as if I had been given a new pair of eyes, ones that were boring and dull. We were both sitting on an abandoned log, glancing solemnly at the earth. After some time, I looked up at her and spoke.
“Well… maybe we can make it all real.”
And that’s all it took. Grace’s loud smile was back. From that day forward, our goals were transformed. Our imaginary designs were now outlined on paper and kept safe in a binder labeled “Real plans”. The same girls who were known to be obsessed with the nonexistent were now completely captivated by the obvious concept of reality. We began constructing forts and miniature homes with real wood and real tools. At first, it was hard to come to terms with the difficulty in really creating everything that we envisioned. We quickly realized that much of what we had imagined could not be materialized, at least not with the limited resources we had during that time. However, despite the simplicity of our completed projects, this time it was there, in front of our eyes, for both of us to see. We were now able to show our family and friends what we would spend so much time describing before.
We continued crafting from the “Real Plans” binder, sacrificing more of our original vision with each design. We were exchanging our unrealistic, imperceptible dreams for the touchable, compressed versions of our dreams. The natural world was merely collateral damage. We were becoming the builders we had once despised, claiming our piece of the earth and filling it with the tangible. I don’t think we ever acknowledged the obvious irony of it all. But neither did anybody else.
