Loop-di-Joop

I’ve always thought that the most beautiful words in the English language are the ones that I’ve contributed. That sounds about as narcissistic as you can get, but it’s true. There’s no logic to what makes a word sound nice, it’s all illogical intuition, and who knows my intuition better than me, after all? My all-time favorite word is Loop-Di-Joop, which was the name of my imaginary friend from Venus back when I was three. I don’t remember Loop-Di-Joop at all (I only know of the name because my parents told me later) but there’s something undeniably pleasing to me about the sound of it. That’s what baby babble is, after all, making noise for pleasure. To anyone else it’s nonsense, but to me, nothing will ever match the elegance and glory of those three syllables.

That’s what’s so wonderful about childhood, isn’t it? You don’t care what your words mean, you just say them because you want to. It doesn’t matter if anyone else can see the strange and wonderful world inside your imagination, it’s enough fun that you don’t need any company. I get discouraged pretty often when I’m sitting at the keyboard, trying to transpose the story in my head into a language that I didn’t create. If only I was content to close my eyes, lean back in my chair, and just live in the illusion.

Only I can’t, because I can’t think like a child anymore. It’s a fun fantasy to believe that there’s a secret world of monsters under the sewer grates, but I can’t jettison the fact that there’s nothing down there but sewage. Somewhere along the line I traded imagination more powerful than anything I’ve felt in the real world for some self-sufficiency and communication skills and about two feet of height. It’s a trade that I never agreed to and, for years, it was one that I wished I could take back. Starting in middle school, I got a feeling I couldn’t shake that I was losing a vibrant imagination that I’d never be able to get back.

It took me a long time to realize, but now I think that maybe losing it isn’t all bad. Looking at the very short, very confusing novel I wrote at age six, it’s pretty clear that I had an active world living inside my head, full of slime monsters and clocks that can stop time and an odd amount of emphasis on keeping your shoes dry, but none of it translated into the real world very well. And, even though I have to admit that it sucks not to be able to conjure worlds from nothing the way I did back when I was a kid, at the same time that I lost that, I learned how to let other people into my head a little with my writing; first with an underground satirical newspaper, then with sharing short stories and novels I’d written, and finally with this blog. Best of all, with writing groups like the Iowa Young Writer’s Studio or the New York State Summer Writer’s Workshop or tabletop RPG groups, I can see that I’m not the only one with an imagination, and that living in someone else’s imaginative world for a little while can be pretty great too. Growing up is a compromise, in the end I’ll never know Loop-di-Joop as well as I used to. But now maybe someone else can know him too.