“What If…?”

Author’s Note: This is a Take Ten to Write story and has not been proofread for errors. If I feel inspired or if there’s interest in the story, I’ll post a revised, edited, and extended version at a later date. Happy reading!

Prompt: “The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.” – Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The world is beautiful. Truly, it is.

Have you ever just looked up at the sky and watched the clouds? I know I’ve done it. I’ve stared up, silently, just watching the world spin around me.

And I think about everything above that. Everything that lives above the clouds, outside of space, in all the universes around us.

If you think about it, the universes are endless. The possibilities are endless. I mean, no one really knows what’s out there.

What if, in some other universe, some beings are thinking about the exact same thing? What if they’re staring up at the sky, wondering if other people exist in other universes? What if they’re just like us?

But what if they’re completely different? What if all those sci-fi movies are true and there are extraterrestrial lifeforms in the universes surrounding ours? What if they can read minds and they can build technology way past our wildest dreams? What if they know that we exist and they’ve been watching us, observing us, thinking about how dumb and insignificant our species is?

What if they’re peaceful? What if they’re violent? What if they want to rule over all the universes but one little person who doesn’t know that they’re a hero yet will stand up to them and save the world?

What if they don’t exist at all? What if there’s just empty space beyond what we can see?

Or what if it’s a fantasy world? What if dragons roam the skies and elves rule the kingdoms? Or maybe we have it all backwards and the dragons are like our insects. What if everything we’ve come to assume is true in fairytales and fantasy stories is false? What if we’ve twisted reality?

What if we’ve gotten everything right? Imagine how cool that would be?

Or what if we’ve predicted the future? What if we’ve messed up the world so much that it’s going to push us back to the medieval times?

Or what if even my imagination is too limited by what I’ve read and seen and heard to even begin to imagine the possibilities? Does an infinite imagination equate insanity?

Isn’t it true that stories have to retain a certain amount of truth to be considered good? I think that people are scared of the unknown; I know that I am. So does that mean that we’re scared of our own imaginations? Does that mean that we should stop imagining and stay within the realm of our own world?

But then what about the worlds that are just bursting to be freed? Why do they need to conform to the rules of our own? Why can’t they just be truly free? Why can’t they embody the impossible?

We always say that we want to make the impossible possible. But isn’t that impossible in itself? Isn’t it impossible because we make it impossible? Because we’re afraid of what we’ll find if we dig too deep? Because we need rules and standards and order in our world?

What if we didn’t have order in our world? What if everything was pure chaos? What if some worlds can exist like that? What if some worlds do exist like that? Just pure chaos, I mean.

Now, this was just thoughts from staring up at the clouds for ten minutes. Imagine what would happen if you actually sat down and really thought about it? I’d think that one would either write an amazing book or go completely insane.

Final Comments: I’m honestly not really sure what I just wrote…

Overall Rating: 😳