flypaper

it seems everyone thinks they know something about misery these days, and it's leaking out all over the world. i was born to people who had hopes for me. i was born into a time when hope was cheap, commonplace. the mercury climbs and the bottom flakes out of the stock market and hope for anything just keeps costing more and more. i do not mean to say ridiculous things, but i have made myself out of dreams of the life i wanted. really all i am is a dream other people are dreaming, something soft and fluffy in appearance, to make people wonder how i could possibly exist in the real world, why i am not crushed, how i can do things and not stain the lace, why i don't do my work in more practical clothing. but i can't live in a practical world. not because i'm not smart enough, but because a practical world is bleak. how many times have you wanted something because of the sheer joy it gave you, or just dreamed of it in order to have the dream to keep you warm at night when your heart felt cold,d only to tell it to someone else and hear "be practical. that's too expensive." or "there's only a million in once chance of that happening"? these are the things i can't stand. telling people they will never have what they want because it's rare or difficult or because most people don't have it.

the truth is that everyone who has one of those lives someone else dreamed of when they were young and were told was impossible for them once was told it wasn't practical and didn't listen. if there is only a one in a million chance that you will become a famous writer or an actress or marry the highly sought after person of your dreams... well, there's still that one. and every person who loses heart and gives up increases your chance. that's always been my idea... that and there are many more ways to make your mark in this world than are on the television, and the number of people who have comfortable lives with their dream job grows every day. the number of people who marry wonderful people who love them and are everything they were dreaming of is higher, too, once you realize it's not really the doctor or ranmaru or whoever you're dreaming of exactly but specific traits you see in them. and maybe there are lots of undiscovered jewel people in the world, and one of them will have all the traits you love best. and all of that is wonderful. but the practical person will always ask "what are you willing to do to get (x)?"

the answer for me, for the things i want, is an awful lot. i know it doesn't seem like it to most people right now. i have no job, likely no prospects for a job due to the crabby gossip "honesty" of certain people. i am writing this because i'm afraid to leave the house right now to find out. for two years i slaved long, hot nights, rude people who didn't understand the first thing about me, becoming filthy and ragged at times, doing so much i was unable to do anything but sleep some days, walking two miles each way to get there, falling asleep in libraries, getting second jobs that left me with lots of money and no time, living in a tiny little room with no air conditioner and no fan, the considerable scorn of others, etc. that was my life, but there were also conventions sometimes, and fashion shows and lovely new clothes and a little fluffy black cat and books aplenty and baguettes and fashion shows and, for the first time, people who understood some of the things i was trying to say. my life was moving forward, and i trusted that star enough to pull me in the right direction that i didn't mind when my shoes wore out or my fingers burned from the rope. but now everything is set aflame by these people who come out of the woodwork to batten down the hatches with their fears that they might have to struggle a bit as i struggled, and so everyone is losing their dreams. people are afraid to make them flesh and those of us who are made on some level of those dreams are suffering the hardest. everything has gone so wrong for me i feel like i can't even see that star i had hold of anymore. that's all i wanted... a star to follow. even if i never arrived at the end destination, i felt alive and strong and beautiful on the journey. i felt brave. if you told me seven months ago i'd be afraid to leave my house because i didn't want people to stare at me, that i'd have so little that i'd be stealing things from others in the emotional sense just to feel alive... i'd be sure that at least something horrible would have happened, that enemies attacked our city and were enslaving it's people, that the dead had filled hell and began to walk, that my home had burned to the ground. that i'd lost my soul in a game of cards or my body had been invaded by alien parasites. i was broke, messy, tired, sometimes i was sad, sometimes i was lonely enough to call my friends in the middle of the day and ask them to tell me stories so i could sleep, but i had hope that at some point something would change. that my work would be rewarded and my life would slowly get better. and every once and awhile i even had evidence of this. but since that time my life has gone down and down and down and i can't stand it anymore. i don't have hope. i don't feel that anything i want is within my reach, not even a haircut and a new dress or going to a movie or having a garden or learning a language or even keeping the things i treasure safe. right now all i want is to check into a hotel room, turn on the air conditioner, take a long bath in the cool water, put on a nightgown, crawl under the sheets, curl into a ball and wait for someone to kill me. i will give keys to my room to all the boys in the bars who look like serial killers. i will give every one of them my body and my words and what's left of my light until one of them gives me a knife or stops my breath or poisons me, and leave a note for the police in the psalms gideon bible that they should burn my body to nothing but ashes. i cannot go to sleep for one hundred years. i can no longer live my life in the dark, dreaming things as a form of escapism. somehow the demon took that, but at the time i didn't mind because he took care of me. he was probably the best of them, trasnforming me for a little while into something filled with light, but now i am dead. completely and utterly dead. i finally got people to call me by my real name just as i stopped being worthy of being called it. i feel so small, so weak, like it's so much effort to even get dressed and leave my house that i can't function. this isn't me and i don't want to be it anymore, but i don't actually see any way out of it. i tried. i go to parties where people take my picture and i look like a rotting corpse and other people get all the attention. i melt in the heat and go to the bakery to see if maybe they can do the decent thing and spend ten seconds talking me up on a piece of paper so i can have a job. i stripped off all my clothes, threw up, and used bleach to clean every surface in my bathroom. within three days it looked as if i hadn't done a thing. i'm not designed for this. i can't take it anymore. i wanted a way out and i prayed for it, but the only thing that came was something that hurt everyone. my mother says to go find some little old person and tell my troubles to them while i curl up in the corner, but i can just see them, telling me to be practical, don't dream of this it's obviously part of the problem, don't like that kind of sex and don't read or write so much about death and don't lie and don't do this and don't think that. if i explain, for example, to the woman in my mind who wears comfortable leather shoes in an ugly shade of brown, tortoise shell glasses and a short haircut that doesn't suit her but doesn't take more than a few minutes to style, that clothing is an important part of my mental health, she will tell me it's a crutch. it never was before i was this miserable. it's a thing that makes me feel beautiful, like myself, like i can do things and dream and speak and i don't have to be afraid. it seems shallow, but so are affirmations and self help books and all kinds of things. people don't use them because they're deep, they use them because they work. and what will this woman of my imaginings say to me when i tell her i feel that my life would be easier if occasionally someone would treat me like a child, or tie me up, or tell me what to wear or how to talk or what to do? she'll somehow turn it into a blocked wish about my father, who i've long since forgiven. i like pain. i know i'm a better follower than a leader. some people are. and i find it releases stress to have someone take care of me and spoil me and hold me once and awhile. to be delighted by small things like a stuffed panda or a coloring book or the way the light hits a tree or the sight of flowers blooming. it's not a crutch, it's how i want to live.

normally, the thing i don't like would happen, and i'd get angry. i'd think of someone who deserved my spite, who needed to pay that i needed to stay alive to get my revenge on. or i'd declare war on those who have stopped dreaming and are trying to get others to do the same. but i have seen that they are just sad little creatures with no hope, that the real villans own everything and live in towers of glass and steel, and that there really is no way for us to go against them without rejecting nearly everything that keeps us alive and living as the amish do. i don't have the skills for that. and i can't hurt people very well. i don't have the mind of a warrior or assasin, i have the mind of a writer of stories. some of them frightening, horrible in detail, but i can't climb into the windows of those towers and make people stop massacring tomorrow to make ten more dollars today, even though they already have many million. i would try to get into their hearts, to beat around like a bat inside the back of their minds and make it uncomfortable for them, but not only have many tried and all failed, but i know they have their magicians, too, who have set all the world into this pattern of dead hearts and empty wallets and anorexic metally ill people in bad films and advertising and branding as religion. nearly all the sacred things i would use against them have been copyrighted. i want what i wanted when i hated myself and nearly everyone else so much that i made a tulpa to have someone to love when i was fourteen. i just want a portal. a way to someplace else where i can start over. maybe things will be better there. it's the only faith i have left today, and i am so afraid of going back there. this is going on and on but i can't find a place to stop even though i kind of want to. i never used to cry before i met this princess who let me and the other one i never got who said he would have held me. i kept my tears inside and wrote or sang or sat very still or read until the pricking of my eyes had passed and i knew what to do. but now, i have taken the advice they give you as a child in therapy... yes, it's okay to cry but it does not fucking help.