Or so they say...

I think I need a new lamp this one is ugly (photo by me)

I was a strange kid at school. Always very shy, always that bit different.
My earliest memory of it are from Illinois; lunch time, they serve us carrots and dip. Each bowl of dip is shared between about 8 children. We are eating when I 'double dip' one of my carrots. My American peers start to screech 'he double dipped!!! He double dipped!!!' - at which point the teacher storms over, grabs the bowl of dip and dumps the whole thing in the bin. Apparently it was 'contaminated' and we could not possibly risk those childeren eating my germs. I sat at the table, a confused swiss boy, surrounded by a pack of brash noisy monsters.

I could not stay at any one school in Illinois, although I always was softly spoken and polite, I just could not handle any of my peers. I don't think I made any friends in America. I basically moved schools on a regular basis until I moved back to Switzerland.

I was never lonely though.
My imagination seems somewhat inherently linked to my feet. When I walk, my mind walks with me. It journeys through a landscape of fiction and fantasy. Because of the paranoia of things like stranger-danger, I would not walk out of our properties perimiters. Rather I would walk around, like a caged tiger, in circles in our 'safe' backyard.
I dreamt great stories during my walks, often speaking the dialogue of the characters out loud (which resulted in many embarassing moments when we had visitors).

It sounds really insane, but it was a fantastic and creative way for a feral vegetarian kid who had neither the luxury of television or friends to make some entertainment. I still go for a long walk when I'm feeling uninventive.

I remember that the only thing (apart from art & music) that I was ever really good at in school was when we had creative writing tasks. When they asked for a page-long story, I would give them six. Man, I blitzed those tasks, getting more star stickers on that one assignment than I had for all my other subjects over a year.

Somewhere along the way I forgot my dream.

I am now trying to get back into the art of writing stories. I have been writing stories in secret for a couple years now. Most of these end up being deleted, having never been seen by other people's eyes. My stories are now alot more dark and well, jaded. I am writing a story that I feel really into that I have for the first time, extracted real life people into characters for. I have thusfar refused to give out the plot to anybody really. Though I'm daring to say that I feel this might make it to something resembling a novel.

One of my great dreams when I was young was to become a writer. The say that there is a book inside of us all.

::Listening to - The Pixies | Debaser::