She perched, hands clasped around a gargoyle’s head as she stared out at the city. Thoughts floated up, sometimes as puffs and others as wisps. Not dense enough, damn, she checked her watch. Rush hour had just begun. Come on, where are those with active imaginations?

Readers, writers, dreamers and wishful thinkers–what were these people doing? Why weren’t they daydreaming? Why weren’t they ensconced in the library whose roof she clung to?

The wind picked at her clothes with chill fingers, and her fingers started to go numb. Skin contact with the cold stone was leeching her warmth away. But she needed to be in a position to act fast once it happened.

Another hour ticked by and she was aware of every second of it, thanks to the clock tower across from her. Its merciless hands pointed out every minute. Ideas and imaginings had risen to form a fog but that billowing mass wasn’t solid enough. What she needed were the dreamers, the real heads-in-the-cloud types to get in on the action. And they did finally.

She watched as the city clouded over with millions of visualizations and conceptualizations. Each one floated up as its own idea-cloud and attracted like visions. Joining together, they ascended, collecting more dreams, prayers, and affirmations.

At last, she thought as she balanced on her precipice and stretched cramped muscles. Then she took that all-important first step. Success–the idea held her weight.

A smile broke out as she walked with her head in other people’s clouds. Her mind was a cup she dipped, filling it with aspirations and dreams of the city below her. And when she’d crossed half the city, rising as the clouds rose, she touched the sky and it rippled. A door opened spilling light and she stepped across its threshold into a land of pure imagination.

Her body plummeted, no longer supported by her unique gift. It splashed down in the river and in its unpiloted state, it drowned. But she was free to roam where ideas where all and her smile rivaled the sun.

That old man she’d met in a bookstore long ago had been right. There was a whole world on the other side of imagination. And she’d found it. Now her head would always be in the clouds. Unless all of this was just the byproduct of wishful thinking…

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Wishful thinking for #BarAThon, day 6.