Just My Imagination

I was halfway through typing a completely different post, when I saw something walk past my window. I am in the study of my parents house, overlooking their fenced in back garden and it is… 5.39am (yes, I am insane) so seeing something rather large wander into the rose garden is a bit disconcerting. I have no idea what it was, literally saw a vague shape move out of the corner of my eye, but just on the off chance of it being something exciting and scary, my heart is thumping and I have the kind of chills that make my scalp itchy. In reality, it is more than likely the Labrador from across the road who wanders around annoying our dogs from time to time or possibly a fox. But where is the fun in that?

I have always had something of an active imagination. Every Monday morning at primary school, we had to write a diary entry about what we’d done over the weekend. Every Monday morning without fail, I’d write lurid tales of the lion who’d followed me home from the zoo, my (fictional) trip to India to visit my (non existent) best friend’s family, or the ongoing search for my (again, non existent) twin sister who’d been tragically kidnapped. It’s not even as though that was all I had to write about – I remember distinctly my teacher exclaiming in exasperation, “you are moving to PARIS in a couple of weeks! Why can’t you write about that?” it was just that my version of things was so much more interesting. It did get me in trouble once or twice: my mum wasn’t thrilled with me when my (non existent) Indian best friend didn’t show up to my birthday party, despite having a piece of cake and a loot bag prepared for her, and when I (out of sheer boredom) decided to announce to my Primary 1 class that my little brother had been born the night before, my teacher was perturbed to say the least when my very pregnant mum showed up to pick me up that afternoon.

A few months ago, I was getting ready for bed in my flat in Vancouver. I lived alone in a studio in an old-ish (by Vancouver standards) building in the West End, one of the main advantages of which was that the walls were fairly thick so I rarely, if ever, heard anything of my neighbours. So it was a little disconcerting to suddenly become aware of the fact that I could hear a man speaking. Figuring that it must be someone outside, or a neighbour’s television particularly loud, I dismissed it, climbed into bed and shut out the light. Lying alone in the dark, I couldn’t help but notice that the man was still speaking. Not shouting, nor was there any canned laughter around him, just speaking naturally. To be fair, he wasn’t saying “wooohhooo” or anything else that might naturally lead me to believe that he was in fact a ghost, but, as I crossed out anything else the voice might be (phone off the hook? Nope. TV? Nope. Voice from outside? Nope.) I seemed to be left with no alternative explanation. And I was rather pleased at the idea that I had some other worldly company in my flat. I figured that a Canadian ghost would be quite friendly and unlikely to do anything mean or scary like steal my soul or suck me into another dimension or anything else rotten that ghosts are generally apt to do (I think.) He sounded quite young, and I was busily construing a tragic scenario leading to this cute (definitely, cute) young man’s untimely ending when I suddenly realized that his voice was coming from my bag. Try as I might, I couldn’t come up with a reason that my bag might be haunted, so I opened it up for a peek and found, to my utter dismay… my Dictaphone playing back the interview I had done that afternoon with a (I was at least right about the cute part!) former Canadian soldier for a project I was researching at the time. Bum.

I am quite sure that there are deep seated psychological reasons for my pathological need to constantly seek out an alternative to the humdrum of reality. In fact, it might be that there is a tapeworm in my brain that snuck in through my ears as a child and has short circuited the normal functions that…

Anyway, there has been no second sighting of the Creature in the Garden. It was a bit big for a fox, but I will go with that as the most likely option. Until I can think of a better one.