There are places I would love to see, but most of them suffer from the same unfortunate condition.

They exist.

And if I am being offered a vacation somewhere fictional, it seems terribly wasteful to choose a place I could eventually reach with enough money and an airline ticket.

I want somewhere impossible.

So I would step inside a painting.

Not one particular painting. That would be far too restrictive.

I want an entire world made of them.

I would begin in a Monet garden, where the water lilies are no longer trapped beneath glass and I can finally discover what lies beyond the little bridge.

By afternoon, perhaps I would wander into Van Gogh’s night, where the stars don’t merely shine.

They swirl.

I would like to stand beneath that sky for a while.

Then Chagall can take over.

There, gravity becomes optional.

People float above rooftops. Lovers drift through the sky. Animals appear where animals have no sensible reason to be, and nobody seems particularly troubled by any of it.

I think I would like that.

Eventually, of course, I would have to visit Picasso.

I imagine I would enter with my face arranged properly and leave with both eyes on the same side of my head.

It is a vacation, after all. One should expect souvenirs.

There would be no itinerary.

I would simply walk from canvas to canvas, century to century, color to color, until I found somewhere beautiful enough to stay awhile.

And when the vacation was over, I would step back through the frame into the real world.

Although I suspect the real world might look a little different after spending a week inside the imagination of people who refused to paint it exactly as they found it.