What An Impossible Thing

Terry Pratchett famously wrote a series of books in which his world was a flat planet that balanced on the backs of four elephants. If that weren’t quite odd enough, those four elephants then stood on the back of a giant turtle as it moved through space. That always seemed rather fitting to me and something that Atlas himself could get behind, because even when all my time was spent wandering the streets and infrequent alleys of Bismarck, North Dakota, it’s impossible not to be swept away by the sheer impossibility of the world. Have you ever laid back in the grass on a blue-skyed day when perfect clouds float so very still as if you’re in a painting and just don’t know it yet? You know the types of clouds I mean. You might not right now but one day you’ll be driving or walking or laying in that bed of grass and you’ll look up and think “Oh. I see it now.”

There’s not a single place I’ve ever been where I haven’t marveled at a beauty so impossible that it’s hard not to laugh at the sheer absurdity. It’s the sort of laugh that comes after seeing Secretariat win the Triple Crown. Or when man first stepped foot on the moon. Or when Gatti and Ward went toe-to-toe without backing down. Or when you see Stonehenge. Or The Colosseum. Or The Acropolis. It’s that little sliver of your brain that realizes exactly what it’s seeing but has no complete way of processing just how incredible that sight happens to be. So you laugh. Or you cry. And then you file it away for a rainy day when you can sit back and wonder if you were really that lucky. Maybe, if the day has been exceptionally long and hard, you might wonder if you ever were.

In those moments, lay down and stare up at the clouds. Imagine that you’re sailing through space on the backs of elephants and a turtle. Tell yourself you live in a snow globe designed by an incredibly bored creator. Maybe you weren’t supposed to be here at all and the whole affair is made so much more hilarious and beautiful because of it. Just sit back and try to tell me that clouds or an open sky aren’t the sort of sights that gods would kill to have.

Do you know the strangest part? So much of the world looks like everywhere else. Now I don’t mean that as a statement of boredom, not at all, and nor am I saying that The Alps looks just like the parking lot that sits in front of a grocery store somewhere in Topeka, Kansas. But what I am saying is that a similar wonder is always there if you know how to look. I just got back from travels abroad, you see. For the first time ever, this agoraphobic American left his home country to see something other than what he’d always seen before, whether it was the culture or the way houses are made. I had to do it. Mostly because I was turning 30 and had to run away from some problems but also because I was terrified that one day I’d look back and say “Ah. How I wish I would’ve gone.”

I don’t want to be the tiger in my story. I don’t want to be the man who sweeps the floors.

So on the sixth of May, I hopped a plan and flew fast and far to worlds I’d only read about. I saw Germany and Belgium, Greece and Italy, England and The Netherlands and Austria and even part of France. I saw Stonehenge, a sight that would’ve caused 11 year old me (who was busy writing a horror novel about monsters that came through the doors) to die of jealousy. I saw birds I’d never seen before and met people I may never see again. And every second of every day was spent wondering how I made it this far and if I’d ever come back to the places that made me happy.

As you can imagine, that doesn’t make me the cheeriest of travel companions and is the reason I usually travel alone. I didn’t this time though. This time I spent what has always been my alone time with a friend who took time out of her life to share her parts of the world with me. That’s ridiculous, right? That’s the sort of thing that marks up a debt that can never be paid off. Even now, the thought that there was someone out there who cared so much about my experience on this impossible little planet that she wandered with me and put up with my oftentimes irritable and morose headspace… that’s hard for me to understand. It’s a blue sky with perfect clouds. It’s Secretariat winning by 31 lengths.

You don’t meet people like that very often and when you do and the time is over, you’re left wondering if you were as good to them as they were to you. You hope so. You hope you weren’t a ship passing in the night and yet you wonder. And you lay back in the grass, you stare up into the sky at those perfect shapes, and you can’t help but wonder, after all the impossible things you’ve seen, if perhaps there’s a chance that the dragons you see in the clouds are real too.