Warning: epiphany in process

Well. Without meaning to give more ammo to my lovely borderline shippers, I’ve got to say that the only war cry that springs to mind lately, the only phrase I think I could sincerely apply, is that infamous I love I hate you don’t leave me. But, of course, the fact I notice this rules out the possibility of BPD. Self-awareness is not part of the package.

Anyway, I’m not here to argue that today. I’m here to complain about the close friend of mine who’s recently buggered off to Canada. Things aren’t the same without her around at school. Because I knew she was leaving, she was amazing. She was wonderful. It wasn’t fair she was leaving. She was leaving me. How dare she leave me? She was leaving me and I was going to be on my own? And so I wouldn’t say her name and I hated her and I bitched about her and I spread rumours and now I’m over it a bit and I am so scared everybody else is going to leave me that I am going to leave them first. They’re not going to get a chance. It really seems to be the most logical option. I don’t want to be ditched. People are going to alienate me; they’re going to talk about me; they’re going to hate me how I’ve hated them and if they don’t, I’ll drag them down, and I don’t really think that the girls who are my friends particularly deserve to have to spend time with someone who is going to be looking at them and seeing their organs and bones and the blood in their veins, or involuntarily imagining how they would scream if that pen went into that eyeball at that angle – because I can’t help that, it’s a reflexive action – an immensely troubling one and one that is worsened whenever I read something like The Silence of the Lambs or The Regulators, which maybe I should avoid but seeing as those are two of my favourite books, I don’t and don’t even want to – I don’t mind feeling that way, which scares me -

Deep breath. New sentence.

Pretension, imagination: hopefully I’ve just got the one of those

I wish I could live inside my imagination. I think I would give up anything if I could just spend a day inside my head with everything and everyone else who lives there, get to know them, get to meet them, take my camera and come back with proof. Actually, I wouldn’t care about the proof. I could just take the photos for me, so that every time I looked at them I’d know.  And I could live without the photos full stop. I just want to live in my imagination.

 

I like writing, see. And when I was typing up my mother’s famous line ‘Well, I’m sorry I’m not a character in one of your books’ it just made me remember how much I wish I was. She was talking about fiction in general, as in she’s sorry she’s not Frannie from The Stand, or Mrs Iii from The Martian Chronicles, or, I don’t know, maybe Trillian from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I’m talking about my own stories, though. I just want to live with my characters, who’ve sometimes seemed far more real to me than anyone I know in the other world, the ‘real’ world. I feel like I come across as a real freaky type every time I say to anyone ‘yeah, I write stuff’, because it sounds like I’m trying to act grown up or something; it makes me sound like I really fancy myself. But I’m not. I just prefer being in my imagination than with the real world.

 

There was a girl started my school two years ago who told me fairly recently that soon after she’d started, she’d overheard me talking to Danny about a story Danny’d written, and she’d assumed that because I like writing I considered myself a ‘writer’ and the only reason she’d ended up being friends with me was because the girl who’d been assigned to stop her getting lost was friends with me, so there was no way of avoiding that conceited ‘writer’ twat. I was so embarrassed when she told me that. I’m not a writer, I’m a kid. I’m a kid who doesn’t like reality. I’m not special. I’m never going to be special. I’m not trying to make myself special, either, by poncing around and telling people that yah, I’m an authorial presence in the making, darling. I avoid talking about it. And I would never, ever call myself a ‘writer’, even if one day something I wrote got published in something that isn’t a crappy teenage writing magazine full of existential angst about the futility of our pathetic lives (because that’s what seems to fill them all; no wonder I’m down as a pretentious twat if there are so many kids out there who reckon they are ‘writers’ but only ever produce that kind of crap. I’m sorry to put it like that – but I really don’t like it).

 

When I’m forced to explain to people that I have been known to occasionally put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard for non-academic reasons and fictional ends – it gets that convoluted – I avoid saying ‘I write’. Because people who write are writers. Then there are the kids who walk around saying ‘yeah, I like writing books’. No you don’t. You like writing stories. Are they published in book form? No, they’re not. There are so many of those kids that when my own little obsession is discovered, I’m invariably asked ‘oh, so you write novels?’ No! I don’t! I tell stories!

 

Reality scares me. I don’t know how to cope with it; if I could be in my imagination I’d know the people who live there so well I’d just slide into their story seamlessly; someone else would take over the writing and maybe one day they’d get overwhelmed too, and they’d come join us inside their imagination, which’d make me one of the figments they’d have longed to join for so long.

 

No… that’s weird.

 

Oh God, I just want to get out of here.