EDIT: Apr 01

>examine mirror
Dante is lost. He has a collection of belongings, a place to live, a job, even a retirement plan. But he's never tasted hardship -- the real kind, that leaves scars -- and never really tasted happiness either -- the real kind, that lasts forever.

He wants to have a story. So badly. He tries not to think of himself as a princess trapped in a tower, though he surely is trapped. Maybe he can be a pilgrim lost in the dark, or an antihero waiting for the right moment to stage his return. These are all fictions -- not stories. They are comfortable.

He reads so many books now. He watches so many people.


A girl stands looking into space, a lantern in her right hand.

>examine girl
Alicia is good at waiting. This is a joke she tells herself and no one else; she works as a waitress in an Italian restaurant she would call "nice enough." So much of her life is nice enough. She went to a decent college -- not a state school, but not really prestigious, either. She tried to get into grad school, but she wasn't accepted anywhere.

The funny thing is it didn't feel bad to get all those rejection letters. She just moved on to what was possible. A small apartment and a small job. Not small -- nice enough. She doesn't feel bad. When she knows what she wants to be, she'll know.

It just takes time. She believes this without question. Does that count as faith?

--Blue Chairs, Chris Klimas

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This is a personal journal entry. I trust you will read it or not read it accordingly. There are also a few spoilers for FLCL. Even if you don't read it, I recommend that you check
out Photopia by Adam Cadre. [link]

---

[link]

Today I played-- off to a bad start, that's the wrong word. I -experienced- Adam Cadre's Photopia. It's a work of interactive fiction. For those not familiar with the genre, IF is effectively a story in which the reader takes control of the central character. You could call it a role-playing game, except that IF does not necessarily lend itself to the term "game", as is the case with Photopia: a series of short vignettes, comprising a plot. It's like a mildly experimental short story with a text parser.

I think that the most memorable works of fiction to me are those that tear a piece of my heart out, leaving me bleeding, sprawled across my desk with a facial expression of mixed shock and grief. When I think back to these works, I feel like that part of me is still missing. I think that when I experience them, they fill me with themselves, replacing my consciousness with them. But they end, withdrawing with a tearing wrench, like pulling a barbed arrow out of flesh. Photopia, FLCL, Elfen Lied, The Master and Margarita, King Lear; they have destroyed me.

Many times, I have described myself as a hopeless romantic. It's thoroughly accurate: I am in love with too many fictional characters, they are too deeply etched into my person. In fiction, every element of a character is specifically defined. Through examination one can get to know characters; through speculation and extrapolation, one can make them feel real, whole.

When I watch FLCL I feel like I could be Naota; when, at the climax of the final episode, he tells Haruko that he loves her, it is an expression of my emotion as well as his; when she leaves him behind, a barbed arrow tears out of me. I have constructed elaborate metaphorical explanations for the plot, trying to prove to myself that Haruko and Naota are actually in love and will stay together forever. I don't believe in sad endings- I don't want to, anyway.

Frankly, my life has been excessively boring since the day it began, with three notable exceptions of differing spans. Of course, by "boring" I obviously mean devoid of romance. It's why I can't stop living vicariously. Fiction is an escape from nothingness into, well, anything. When you get into that mode where everything outside of the work is blocked out, when you really empathize with the characters, that's when your life is replaced by theirs. Replacing my life with any good story--that sounds like a good trade-off to me.

Except for that I don't exist anymore.

As I said, fiction is destroying me. Or it's making me realize that I never existed in the first place. In conversation I have little to say, and few opinions to offer. All I have to talk about is fiction- have you seen this or this movie, anime, read this book? Because that's all I am, it's all I'm comprised of. There's nothing else in my life. I may have friends, but that's all I talk about with them, when it comes down to it. Sometimes I have to wonder, what do other people talk about? People that aren't into video games, people that aren't into books. Is there anyone that doesn't care for fiction? Is there anything else out there, anyway?

I KNOW that some of you are going to contest that last paragraph. But how many of you have ever met me in person? It's strange, but I play a character online. You have talked to dcschmo, you have talked to smrq, you have talked to Tadjinar. Online communities are like a fiction to me. And I -know- that there are real people behind every word I read, but that doesn't hit home very often. But this character that I play- he is witty, he has some charm, he is sometimes short-tempered but I think not too often, he is generally open with others. He is a great listener, and is pretty wise. He's usually pretty proper, and seems to me extraordinarily tactful.

Why am I not these things?

---

Now hold onto your hats, because this is about as open as I get. When spring break came around a few weeks ago, I went home and was, for all effective purposes, completely alone for five days in a row, from Friday until Tuesday. On Monday, I woke up from a dream.

I had dreamed of a girl- her name started with an A, and that's about all I remember about her. We had pretty much just met; we were at the house of someone unspecified. We talked about unspecified subjects. We sat alone together on a large, L-shaped couch, watching some movie. We fell asleep together. I held her in my arms lightly. The only dialog I specifically remember is my own: I remember telling her, probably with a joyous tear in my eye, "I'm so happy that I found you."

The next morning, she had to be somewhere. I took her there. She found out that she would have to take a trip somewhere-- maybe it would be better described as a "journey", because it was to take a considerable time, primarily in transit. I was to go with her. And we were just about to start on that journey together.

I immediately woke up.

That feeling that I mentioned before, of the barbed arrow being torn out... well, this feeling eclipsed it. It was more like a shotgun blast to the chest, more like my heart crashed into a solid brick wall at 60mph, more like a submarine that went too deep and cracked beneath the immense pressure. I don't really think that metaphor can accurately describe the crushed feeling. During the average day, it's not too hard to forget what you're missing out on. That morning- it was around 3 A.M.- it all came to me in a moment. If you could somehow take a tin can, and in an instant replace its contents with pure vacuum, then it would pop instantaneously in an implosion, right? That is exactly what happened: suddenly I was made aware of that sheer, stark emptiness, and I crumpled.

I cried for probably a half hour or so, before seeking out anyone to talk to. That one line that I remember speaking kept floating back to me, jabbing at me: "I'm so happy that I found you." That was truly the happiest moment of my life, in that dream. And only then did I realize that none of it was real. It was a fiction, the most engrossing and seemingly real fiction I have ever experienced. Living vicariously through myself. In a story where you are the main character, it's impossible not to empathize. And when that character falls in love... you do, unequivocally. And when that story ends, it takes more out of you than you even realized you had in you.

I think that Monday, March 12th, 2007 was unquestionably the worst day of my life. Even after calming down (and here I cannot thank enough Zach and Deb for being there for me- I have been blessed with amazing friends), I felt like there was no energy in my body; I think I may have gotten out of bed once, but I returned quickly enough. I spent half the day crying, and the other half staring at the ceiling. I couldn't bear to do anything. The full extent of my love affair with the unreal was made plain to me, and I felt powerless. Everything suddenly seemed futile. When I finally went to sleep early, it was probably more out of boredom than exhaustion.

The epilogue to this part of my story is that I dreamed about A. again that night. We were playing video games together, and we fell asleep together again. I still remember the exact way that we were intertwined that night, our precise relative positioning. I would draw it if I could do justice to the image. That morning (3 A.M. again), I woke up feeling strangely refreshed and relieved; I'm not sure why to this day.

---

I still haven't wised up, I guess. I'm playing video games just as much as ever- hell, I'm breaking back into a genre (IF) that I haven't looked at in years. I'm replaying Xenogears because at least its story doesn't leave me horribly depressed at the end. I'm playing D&D probably more than ever. But every so often, something comes by and wakes me up a little. That xkcd comic struck a blow when I first read it, and it still has that emptying feeling. "It turns out wanting something doesn't make it real"...

There's something I want desperately, something that my heart is yearning for. It's gradually consuming me. Could it still be real?

---

[So that's what I've been thinking about lately, when I've been thinking. Today I wrote about it, because Photopia struck another blow, and this time I wanted to tell about it. It took probably a little over an hour to write. I guess I'm clicking "Add".]

Listen to this: