Chapter 3: The Imagination

I remember, how it was. How we have been and how we were and how we are. We are like a puzzle that gets put together anew over and over again. Like a strange structure, which never actually belonged together, but was against all nature holding together. Our thing hasn't always been there, like it is for some, I can't even say that it has even always been in me. But there's something about you that just doesn't stop changing me. And don't get me wrong, that's not something bad, it's just that I don't understand it. And yet, our thing grew more and more and the more I've changed, the more you've changed and the more we've become us. It's as if this We was an inexorable force, un-brake-ably proceeding and rapid. So rapidly we had something. Grown by its tasks and changed by our dynamic.

Dynamic. First you've been scared of me. And I wanted it like that. I wanted respect and obedience. I've been a dangerous creature in your eyes, one you haven't known. Someone you've known absolutely nothing about, about whom you haven't known what he plans and what he wants and what he does in your life, and not even how you can kill him. This for you almighty being that has entered your life. The most scared you've probably been of not knowing, whether I would attack you or help you. And in the end, uncertainty is what probably scares us the most.

I have been powerful, and much more knowing than you, an entity of heaven, supernatural, super powerful, super ambitious. Forwarded by god to complete a task. Powerful enough to pull you out of hell, back to earth, back into your life. So powerful that my true form burns out people's eyes and my true voice makes your ears bleed and every glass shatter. And then. Then you have appeared and twisted and changed it all. A little human, who has planted something in my head that I haven't known until then: doubt. About the big godly plan, about the order of heaven and earth, and hell even, about my brothers and sisters, about god himself. And not least about myself. Like with a simple click of your fingers you've vitiated everything I have ever believed in, everything I have ever been. And yet, it wasn't horrible and demolishing it all, it was just scary and new.

And suddenly it hasn't been divine revelations, or orders of heaven, or the written word of god, that decides the future and would lead us all. It hasn't taken all these things anymore to make me move and make me do something. No. Suddenly for the decisions I have to make I've only needed one thing: Dean Winchester. My entire millennial old world has been turning around a single human all of a sudden. And everything I have needed to make a decision is the thought of you may think bad of me. Not more. Just that.

And there it was then, our dynamic. Your image of me has become so important to me that I've forgotten everything around me. Everything I have ever known, everything I have experienced, everything I have understood, and everything I have been. We've developed our own language, our own kind of way to treat each other. And I would word it nicer, but there is no nicer word for blackmail. Because that's what it was. Something we both often did to influence each other. Blackmail and threats. You only and alone had to say that you wouldn't talk to me anymore or wouldn't want to have anything to do with me anymore, and instantly I've made a complete turnaround and changed my mind. That easily. That pure.

And someday I've realized that it suddenly isn't about saving the world or the future of humanity anymore. Ultimately it has only and always been about you. It's like I've lost my destination. Exchanged for something more important. As if I had lost my head, by something as simple as the fear of losing you. My thinking mutilated beyond recognition and my task misjudged, because I have found something that is more important to me than obedience and power and respect. I have fallen for you. In every possible and imaginable kind of way.

And I've known from the beginning that this is not friendship. That I haven't given it all up to be your friend. That I haven't gone through all this only for that. It's something else. Because this is not how friends treat each other, this is not the nature of friends, neither the words we've said, nor the way we've said them. Friends discuss, friends find a common denominator, friends agree to disagree. And friends accept that. But we don't. We intervene in our businesses, we intervene everywhere. We don't act after belief and after sense and reason. Here between us there's no space for reason. We are overwhelmed and driven by feelings. Emotions have taken over, and that's not something friends do.

All I've wanted then, only and alone, is to understand you. Who you are, who you want to be, what makes you you and what pushes you. I've never been interested in understanding humanity, or the world itself perhaps. Only you, you I want to understand. I have studied you and observed, intensely thought about you and about what you've said and done. But then again, no matter how hard one tries, one never really manages to, right?

"Imagining isn't perfect. You can't get all the way inside someone else… But imagining being someone else, or the world being something else, is the only way in."

(John Green, "Paper Towns")

I remember. After a several hours drive on the backseat of your Impala, I was so happy to finally arrive. Pent-up behind you and your brother, while I only really heard half of your conversations. The music from the old radio whirred in my ears and the sun glared at me through the stained window. The only ray of hope were your brief looks through the rearview mirror. I couldn't see your face, only the small section the mirror allowed, like a distorted idea of your eyes that failed them completely.

Fox Lake, Wisconsin. We parked on the parking lot in front of a shabby motel, a little outside Fox Lake, in Waupun, with the creative name Inn Town Motel, which was as pale and stale as the motel itself. The beige paneled outside walls almost seemed friendly compared to the roofs, which were as grey as the sky above them. The parking lot was wet and by its scruffy unevenness laced with puddles that held the rain water of the passed shower. We went through a small white glass door next to a soft drink machine into the ugly main building, which overshadowed the whole site like a threateningly steep mountain, to the reception to check in. The friendly young woman at the counter seemed partly happy, but unbelievably out of place.

The room, which, like every other, contained two beds, a sporadic kitchen, an ugly but serviceable bathroom, and a round table with two chairs, was admittedly not as horrible as the outside view would have suggested. The creme-colored walls were a sharp contrast to the dark carpet, but the friendly beds with their dark wooden, high rising head pieces seemed comfortable and inviting. But I wasn't here to judge the interior design of some motel. And not even a 4-stars-hotel would have made this better for me. The bad feeling in my human stomach grew more and more and every single cell of my being wanted to run away and take you with me away from here.

"Cas? You okay?" you asked, when I let myself down on one of the chairs and probably looked like the proverbial kicked dog. I looked up at you and it was as if I just now remembered again, how good you are for me. Your sheer presence seemed to make me forget about all my doubts and all my jealousy. Which is paradox and ironic, when you consider that you were their cause. The cause and the solution for all my problems.

"Yes, I…," I stammered still brain-clouded, as if I was high, high from all the thoughts and feelings that made clear thinking impossible for me, "… just feel a little sick from the long drive"

You did a step towards me and you looked worried. I almost felt bad about lying to you, but then again it wasn't really a lie, because I actually felt sick. And I imagined you coming to me and putting your hand on my face and you finger moving over my rough skin, you looking into my eyes and feeling what I feel, and knowing what I know. That we belong together and need to protect our thing and that there's nothing that could change anything about that. That we've gone this entire painful, disastrous way together and are now here, where we were, and it needs no threat, no blackmail and no decisions anymore to share the same world through the same eyes. And then instead, back in reality, you put your hand on not-my-face-my-shoulder and looked into my eyes, without seeing and feeling what I saw and felt, with a smile that couldn't have been any more friendship-y. And again I lost my head.

"If you don't imagine, nothing ever happens at all."

(John Green, "Paper Towns")