妄想BREAKER:
I have been having these weird dreams lately. The beauty smiling in the mirror was alluring and I entertained this kind deception. The pleasure I wanted to experience of being a recluse again, spinning around their room with frills and polish was tempting, oh so tempting... It appeared as if my masochistic f3t1shes were morphing into something it was not. I threw my ideals out the window and LARPed a bit to give myself something grander to think about. Do you remember writing "Love is Dead" because I sure don't! Girls are my friends!
I dove head-first down the slippery slope of ">tfw no gf" to further give credence to the meme. Why not indulge another meme? Disregard the past and the feelings of yesterday, today is a much better day! Could I retcon my memories in exchange for a more convenient narrative that better fit in with the future I was writing for myself? Fear not, because the past was always that way to begin with. Confirmation bias reached critical mass. My unassuming and exceedingly common self-prescribed social anxiety and lack of confidence morphed itself into a self-affirming cycle of a proposed memory overwrite. But luckily I lost my read-write privileges during this little tumble. I entertained the idea too much and it was starting to become serious. Did I even want this? I half-heartedly mumbled something along the lines of greener pastures. I had found myself at a long stretch of road where everything was understood and there was nothing left to look forward to; the existential dread reared its ugly, hormone-unbalanced head, and it was laughing at me. I mistook my confused fear of complacency, then twisted it into new escapism. It was my new hobby for a month or so, I entertained my impulses with a reasonable amount of restraint. It was nearing the end when I realized I was missing the entire point- this was all a test of character and I nearly forgot myself. A Precure henshin this was not. I don't regret indulging in it, but I'm glad it only cost me a few hundred dollars instead of resulting in a life-altering mistake. I applied clown make-up in reverse; I revealed the person who was there all along, but it was just the me of yesterday.
EVERSINCE ON AN IPOD NANO:
Going to talk with a therapist was probably one of the most useful wastes of money I've had in my life. It was September 2018 and all the lights were off. I was uncomfortably interviewing myself in front of an x220 Thinkpad running Audacity as I recounted the painful history of the one time I drove myself mad over a girl. This conversation was the one I dared not speak of. I called her "the girl who must not be named" in the fear that uttering her name would unearth past trauma. The reason I tip-toed around the topic for well-over three years was because of what I did afterwards. I fell into a self-destructive loop where I had complete disregard for what I did to myself. Yet, I forced myself to confront that memory. During the past few years, I would self-medicate with decompression chambers I recorded at least once a week. I would dig up my old gaming headset, open up Audacity and spill my thoughts for upwards of two hours. I would talk about everything- anything from the anime I was watching or digging up past trauma and coming to terms with my biggest fallacies. I especially liked presenting a difficult topic and forcing myself to reckon with it. Naturally these were painted in a a sheen of bias, but I tried to be impartial. I like myself as much as I love to criticize myself. My therapist told me: "You are really good at explaining your thoughts well." But of course, I had already recounted these traumas in vivid detail to myself many times before. Though I treaded the water carefully, as to not reveal too much. I knew I could be swindled out of more money and kindly asked to stick around for more sessions if I ever went on one of my post-female-cyberpunk-denpa-otoko-Dejiko-maxing type rambles. I knew exactly why I was there and I wanted her to get to the point. But by the time we did, the fantasy had already begun to decay. Talking to my Thinkpad I named after Gokou Ruri from Oreimo was a better use of my time. I think I missed the point of therapy, but I also missed the point of Kami nomi zo Shiru Sekai.
Swiss-cheese on rye & ready to die!:
My idol is no longer who I knew them once to be. I overheard something about playing a character? Something about "always has been"? Truth is, I never knew who they were; I only understood them to be who they wanted me to want them to be. They were always a figment of my imagination. I raised them upon a pedestal because they were doing something I wish I was. The grainy camera framed a disheveled face presenting disjoined ideas under the incandescent light of a lonely room. But I also saw a mirror. I could very-well be doing what they were, but I was too busy consuming content about people consuming content about consuming content. She was my idol...
These were the people that once filled the gaps in my swiss-cheese-on-rye-sandwich, making me feel full again. That was before I realized that I liked provolone better. The sobering truth to the matter was revealed: I could reserve my own feelings but I can't do anything about it. No matter how close I thought I was to them, our fates were not intertwined- I had to follow my own path.
The man, or in this case, woman, behind the curtain was always doing their own thing. I knew this painfully well because I made the mistake of stealing glances at Twitter, which can only be likened to the hellscape painted in DOOM: Eternal, developed by ID Software and published by Bethesda in 2020 (a follow-up to 2016's breakthrough DOOM). It was a horrible plot-twist, but I wasn't the one writing their stories anymore. But alas, I hate how easily I traced the currently-transpiring events back to snippets of conversations recorded more than five years ago. I know because I told myself the same things. All my idols have been "she/her"'ed, and I almost lost sight of myself. I might just be a copy of a copy of a copy, but swiss-cheese no longer I am.
BGM: DJ Kuroneko - break free