I am so earnest and curious

Sometimes I sit on the bus and wonder where people are going. I am so earnest and curious. I wonder what they will do next. I think about how we all run in closed loops, encircling the five people we hold closer than family. The rest of the world has its own momentum and were living this one conscious lifetime but yet we’ve built invisible tunnels around ourselves where our thoughts spiral endlessly. There’s a man walking in front of me dressed in a black pinstripe suit and a navy tie. He has deep green eyes and a clean dark beard. I want to know why his eyes smile from behind thick rimmed glasses. I want to know why he moves like no one is watching. I pass by a park and I watch as a mother and her son cloudspot together. She is lying on the grass and her baby points up at the cloud elephants and the ocean in between. I fill in the whispers of conversation between them. My imagination revels in the lost world in between. I watch as a little girl dips her hands in sand and water, shaping together her mud pies. She ices them delicately, a hint of pink tongue peeking out from the corner of her mouth. Her parents whisper to each other between clenched teeth. I wonder who will hold her when she has a nightmare. I wonder when her feet were tickled last. I wonder when it was that she found sleep between the happy warm bodies of her parents. Reality is the space that we share with every living thing. Imagination is every color and every secret. Imagination takes life from the things we don’t say to each other. It is in the people we want to be. It is in that anticipating smile, in the zoo of the sky, in the taste of those mud pies. It is the pulse of the nightmare and the darkness of that little frail heart. It is what lives under your bed. It is what you find when you go far enough into space. It is the space between your fingers and it is the reason we dream.