Monday 24 February 2014

On Being Unwritten...


Do you ever wake up disorientated?  Wondering where you are?  Who you are?  Even, why you are?  Do you wake up and something just doesn't feel right, as if someone rewrote your life and forgot to tell you to turn the page?

 

I had that feeling this morning.

 

I dreamt I was a fictional character, plucked from the odd ramblings of some strange man's musings.  I dreamt I wasn't real and I only existed because he had breathed life into me through the tapping of the keys on his computer.  They were the defibrillator jolting me from nothing into being.  They were the bolt of lightning in the crazed laboratory of an aberrant mind.

 

I mean, he's have to be aberrant, wouldn't he?  Whoever thought me up?  I'm a lunatic, or so I tell people.  I'm responsible for deaths.  I'm responsible for so much despair.

 

Who'd want to create a character like that?

 

But, that was my dream.  I wasn't real.  I was made up.  I was words on a page.

 

Have you ever felt like that?

 

It's a weird feeling, and it's echoed through me as the day has passed.  Every so often, I'll look at my friends, Bender, Mucous and the others, and wonder if they're the same.  I wonder if they ever feel like this or if they are like this.

 

Could I reach out from this imaginary world and rewrite myself?  Could I backspace through all that I've done and erase it?  I could bring back Joy.  I could bring back everyone.  I'd edit my life to make it less painful.  More ordinary.  More mundane.

 

That'd be fine.  I don't want or need to be special.  I've had enough of special.  I want to wake in the morning and go to work.  I want to walk my dog and kiss my wife and play with my children.  I want to live on a river where swans float and geese occasionally get awkward and wander on to the road, just because they're feeling a little daredevil that day.

 

I don't want to feel the pain.  i don't want to hear the screams.  I don't want to cause the deaths.

 

But, it's not like that, is it.  It never is.  I suppose I wish to be fictional, because then, though it all seems so real, it wouldn't be.  Then, whatever I think has happened, it hasn't.  None of it has.  If I was a made up character in the mind of a writer, that'd be fine, because, perhaps, he might take pity.

 

Not on me, I don't deserve anyone's pity.  No.  Maybe he'd pity those that have died.  Maybe he'd feel sorry for those I've killed.  Saying that, if I've killed them, so has he.

 

Maybe I'll wake up in the shower and it will all have been a dream, thanks to him taking a cue from an 80s soap.

 

Still.  I feel... less substantial.

 

Hey, if you're out there, at least get rid of my grey, won't you?