Maybe this is why I don't miss people very often...

I've been creating worlds since I was a little boy. I can't really call them "worlds". They were just...situations. Scenarios. Places where magic, or wonder, sadness or joy, and sometimes even horror took place. They were all linked together, able to be traversed in a single thought, all populated by some slightly different incarnation of the people in my life. Or the toys I owned. Or the people I wanted to meet.

You might say it all stemmed from childhood innocence. Those worlds were ways for me to undo the wrongs of the world around me; I could rewrite any story I wished in my own imagination, and all would be well. The truth is that, as a boy, I felt far too much. I was hypersensitive to other people's emotions. Even fictional people. I can recall more than one occasion where a sad story, whether the ending was happy or not, would leave me depressed for hours on end, which in a child's mind is the better part of a lifetime. I even stopped watching Pinwheel, because the creators of that show always seemed to toss in some melancholy short and crush my four-year-old heart in the process. The only way to defend myself was to dive into that story, and tack on a few extra chapters. All wrongs were made right; the downtrodden were uplifted, and evil was vanquished, often by the hand of yours truly.

But it also came from fear. I was plagued by troubling nightmares in my youth; sleep became more perilous than the real world. Many nights I would have to make the long dark walk to my parents' bedroom to seek the solace of my mother's arms, and feel pangs of guilt for waking her so abruptly, and so often. (Many years later I would discover that I had inherited these dreams from my mother--a fact that neither of us can explain.) This fear and terror led me to spend many hours a day imagining heroic figures who, I guessed, could somehow break through the walls of my nightmares and save me from paralyzing terror. Sometimes it worked, usually it didn't. But that just meant I needed to focus on those heroes more. Turn them into permanent residents of my imagination. They needed to be there even when I couldn't concentrate on them. They needed stories, adventures...lives; they needed to be real. Or as real as I could muster.

So, my heroes (often altered versions of myself) were the ones who swooped in to save the day in all those rewrites. And that...was just the beginning.

Even now, as I look at the characters that populate the worlds I'm working on, I can tell that they are simply more mature, thought-out versions of those heroes who protected me from my own fear and sadness. They are fragments of myself and my past that have grown into dear, dear friends. All my worlds remain connected, like a neighborhood of warm, happy houses. I still have the nightmares, but now they seem more like wayward pets who wreak havoc on the house while the owners are away. My neighbors always laugh, and are more than happy to help me put things back together.