When I was a little girl, my father often brought home boxes of used paper from work. My sisters and I flipped over the secondhand pages and filled the plain white backs with drawings and carefully printed words.

We lay on the floor writing notes to each other. We dreamed about future careers and made lists of names for the children we might someday have. We designed the houses we would raise those children in — complete with indoor swimming pools and playrooms filled with toys that stretched across entire floors.

I lived in my imagination as a child. When I grew up, I imagined my two beautiful children into being — and lucky me, they came with a kind, loving husband.

I kept drawing and reading. I painted portraits in oils and wrote poetry. I fell in love with photography. I became very sick with ME/CFS and lost myself — and lucky me, I partly found my way back.

More recent diagnoses — Common Variable Immune Deficiency and POTS — may help explain a lifetime of chronic poor health that limited my choices, sometimes leaving me feeling as though I have lived only half a life — and yet —

I keep imagining.

I write and I read. I take photographs of the people and places that touch my life. I dream about my mother and father. I tell my brother and sisters my story, and they tell me theirs, the endings ever-shifting as the years fly by.

But the beginning stays the same: sweet and tender — three little girls on the living room floor, surrounded by a sea of white paper and possibility.