My friends and I like to pretend. We pretend we are different people. Special people. We create a whole universe of imagination to play in. Under the tube slide, that’s our home. The grass with the little white flowers that bees love to hang around, that’s our food. We don’t actually eat it of course. We just pretend. And for once, we have power. For once, we can make a difference. For once, we get to make the rules. And it feels great.
It feels nice to be someone else. It feels nice not to worry about what people think about me, because I am not me, I’m someone else. I’m Amy or Jake or Dewface the cat. It doesn’t matter. The point is, I’m someone else. And so are my friends. We run and jump and dance around the playground, the world changing with every word said. When we are someone else, we can dance. We can fight. We can love. We can escape from school, from home, from reality. We are actors without an audience. The world is our stage. And we thought it always would be. But of course, we were wrong. We were wrong.