Lost Worlds

When I was 10, 11, 12, I sat down and wrote a full-length fantasy novel called “Up Above.” Cheesy YA (Young Adult) shit: filled with magical creatures of my invention who lived in a cloud kingdom. The protagonist: a pre-teen girl who is transported to the cloud kingdom one day during school and becomes immersed in fighting in their battle for good. I remember sitting for hours at the family computer in the basement. Pages. Then, when not writing, I’d puzzle over the characters, wanting them to be multi-dimensional. Why did so and so seem ‘off?’

I don’t think I told anyone. Then, our computer crashed. The novel was lost. It floated up above me like the cloud kingdom itself, half-formed and now removed, the characters looking down at me. I forgot about it for 20 years. I remember it now, a dreamy fragment from a solid childhood. A lost world. I gnash my teeth over its loss, for all the boring, expected reasons: an 11 year-old writing a cheesy fantasy novel! If I’d published it, just imagine what I’d have written by now!

But, the other reason I think about it—that incomplete book is a real vision of who I am and what I can do. That inside of me is an 11 year-old who sits down and calmly spills out new worlds. Almost out of necessity. Who is called to a dinner of spaghetti with red sauce before other sauces exist, and eats at a wooden table with a quiet satisfaction, dropping noodles on her shoe. Who forgets the story to run around outside like a bipedal loon in the evening. Hello, you. Your sweet trust in the gigantic box in the basement where your words curled up every day. Your trust in the story and that it was worth writing.

Here is how the novel opened:

“Up above in the blue sky yonder

is there such a place of wonder,

is there such a place of love,

high in the blue sky up above?”

Photo by Taylor Van Riper on Unsplash