From an early age I knew that all I ever wanted was to draw, to paint, to find faces in blank canvases and images forming beneath my fingers.

My characters, my "people" formed so easily that I often wondered how I could ever want to do anything else. Hours spent lying on the floor, in corridors, on my bed, my desk, just drawing, over and over until pencil reached the edges of my pages; I would draw. And then I'd start anew. Countless series of characters who rose to every occasion as I shook their character sheets at each other and acted out their conversations, battles and history.

So absorbed was I in these worlds I had created that sometimes I think time and family and friends took a lower priority to me.

Though sometimes I did indeed take them along for the ride.

One of my most intriguing memories of this occurred in primary school. At the time I was completely obsessed with the Chronicles of Narnia (this being years before we studied "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" in class), so obsessed that whereveer I went I took an extra backpack with me, filled with at least two of the books (whichever I was re-reading at the time) and food (a plum from memory that was inevitably masticated within two minutes of lunch starting) and tissues and a toothbrush; just so I'd be prepared for the glorious day when Aslan called me to where I truly belonged. And so one day, I managed to pull my friends all over the school, behind hedges and bushes, around corridors and trooping through empty classrooms and halls. Running all over the school in the hopes of finding that magical portal that would take me home.

So strongly did I connect with these novels that scare anything else mattered to me, and on that day I remember looking up at the sky and seeing this glorious patch of gold in the sky, everywhere we ran it was there and oh, the glory, that I was not the only one to see it. I was utterly convinced that this was it, that I had seen Aslan and that the gold was a sign, a portal that would suck me through to the realm of magic, where anything could and invariably DID end up happening.

On that day, obviously, I did not cross through to Narnia (if I had I assure you, I would have remained there til I died), but in my mind's eye I could SEE it. It was so tangible to me, so real that I could smell the salt of the sea on my tongue and hear the trees rustle as Dryads swept through them laughing. The caves and mountain that I would climb to battle ogres with my wit. The sprawling plains of a grassy sea where thousands of horses ran freely for years on end. The friends I would surely make.

Friends that would understand me. And I would have a Tower, that looked over all the lands of Narnia so that I might gaze at mountains, plains, seas or stars whenever I wished. And that I might fill that tower with my art, the people I had met and the places I had been.

So if at times I seem away from this place, this earth, perhaps that is why. Because that day I came home, so excited, I believed I had seen Aslan and for me Aslan for the culmination of Babylon, the perfect home. So I climbed to the top of an outcropping of rock that rings my backyard. And I sat and watched the sun set, secure in the knowledge as I ate my last forbidden fruit (though the plum was long gone, a peach remained) that while I might never see Narnia through the same eyes as Edmund and Lucy and Susan and Peter, I was in fact, already there.

And I have never left.

Though the friends I draw now are more technically accomplished for sure, my people, my series, my characters from so long ago (or so it seems) still fill my head with places and friends that I do not have in reality.

I can say with absolute certainty that I have never had an invisible friend. But a world, a universe that has expanded beyond my mind's limits is another matter, it engulfs me day by day, the books I read become another country, another aspect, they add new dimensions to my imagination as I write and think beyond their original creator's dreams.

If you made it through all that I commend you. This is just a prolonged statement of my world, a small explanation in part of the world I exist in day by day.

Please, if you wish, where are you at? And where have you been?

Magic