A gaping ravine in the desert. An underground secret city. A portal into a new galaxy.
I’m flipping through this old binder of pictures I used to draw, each one a different moment in a place I’ve imagined. And rediscovering all of it, I feel this sense of longing and nostalgia and wonder that overwhelms me, one that forces me to keep flipping.
The next drawing is a sprawling station. So busy the page itself has life, it almost moves while static. A crowd, some alien, some human, going every which way underneath signs of a language that no one speaks, the sun beaming through glass into the atrium, with trains shooting through vacuum tubes like bullets in chambers.
As a child, I would constantly experience this “creative high”. It would course in and out my veins, and I was addicted. Whenever I could find an excuse to dream about some far-flung fantasy world, about some plot to a story, about some moment that never happened, I felt this kind of levitation that brought me out of life, into something much bigger.
Another drawing shows an elaborate machine. Conveyors looping in and out of a metal shell filled with steam. Hundreds shovel coal into its furnace, and I can almost hear the roaring of the flames. Feel the burning of the heat.
I did anything and everything to chase this high. I drew, however bad my drawings looked. I wrote, however ungrammatical my writing was. I made embarrassing videos with my friends, however well our Youtube audience of sixteen would receive it. I created music with my brother in Garageband, however hard my dad would wince whenever we put it on the car.
The final page is an earthlike map of continents. Words stretching across borders, lakes, and mountains, and a blank space on edge of the map where I stopped drawing.
I created an elaborate narration game, one where I could describe a world to a friend and they could choose to do anything within it. Build a spaceship and visit advanced civilizations. Wage war with an interplanetary dictatorship, create a new technology — do anything that I could think of on the spot.
I was bottling magic, and the excitement! I made a world so elaborate I can’t even remember half of it. I had to keep going, because a day without creating something was a day without meaning to me.
I remember spending hours with my brother talking, talking, talking within this game until my throat was hoarse. It would be about creating a Dyson Sphere to harvest energy from the Sun. It would be about defending against an alien invasion. It would be a story that we wrote together, and it would go on and on and on forever. Some nights I would talk to him, staring at the ceiling on the top bunk late into the night until we both fell asleep, and I slept dreaming.
I remember spending hours with my friends filming some new script we came up with. They were weird and they were crazy, but we didn’t care. We always found some way to do it. One was about the first Hunger Games, the next would be two billionaires fighting each other with robots.
I remember spending hours alone, thinking about these ideas. They alone kept me happy. I felt like I had this set purpose, that this would be what I did forever, because this was me. Wasn’t it?
After an entire childhood of dreaming, of levitation, of imagination, all of it ended abruptly and forever. I went to a new school, and friends moved away. I never came back to the binder of pictures. I never uploaded another goofy film. I never made another track. Conversations with my brother became sparser, like we had nothing left to say. I started falling.
And now, I’ve been left on the ground, on the cold concrete of reality. It was me who drew all these pictures, so why don’t I feel like me? The me who could do without caring, without the crushing weight of expectation from myself, my parents, my peers burdening me before I even said the next word, before I even began to try. I could draw without being an artist, film without being a filmmaker, write without having to be an author. I didn’t need to think about where it would lead me, about a grade, a career path, another’s opinion. But the world became a lot more real, more tasking, more daunting, and a lot less whimsical, and eventually, I stopped dreaming.
The magic that I once danced in is something I can no longer find. And maybe it was just a matter of time. But I still chase this levitation, every now and then, forgetting it all, to remind myself of how free I could feel. Of how I used to live in a world where everything was new and novel, and anything was possible.
Michael Xu
November 26th, 2024