I have been enjoying making with friends. With all my friends moving away I have been spending more time staring at a cursor on a canvas than engaging in actual human contact. I am working on a game with Carolyn, meditation on abuse, our months inhabiting a chat thread, parsing the rawness of our pain. I am making interactive fiction with Jon about imaginary friends. I am collaborating on a game about boys with Amanda in an attempt to rewrite our sentiment towards men. In every case we are attempting to fill a hole in some area of our lives. When we step into this world of our creation our friendship changes forever.
When I was little my favourite thing to do was to dream of imaginary worlds because I never felt like I fit into this one. I thought myself an alien and believed i would one day return to my home planet. My sister was my fellow architect. In grade 1 we invented a portal in my basement that opened at 4pm sharp. When the clock struck the foam lined corkboard would turn in on itself and swallow anything it touched as we slammed our bodies into the wall. We always seemed to miss that sliver of time. I held shifting concepts of what was on the other side: a medieval kingdom, a land of fairies, an undiscovered space colony. In every iteration the only consistency was my rebirth into something smarter, prettier, funnier. For months I rambled about this edge of the world to anyone who would listen. When my peers discovered my deception I was ruthlessly tormented. Don't be spreading lies, said my teacher. I had not known it wasn't true. So I went searching for this feeling in something I couldn't be misconstrued for and found something like it in the library. I retreated to the worlds of others. The Bronte sisters, Emily of New Moon, Bridge to Teribithia, bonding to each and every character. When you have no friends you will find ways to fill the space. Every time I was met with the back page of a book I found myself pleading for more. When I discovered fanfiction I suddenly wanted for nothing. The purity of such labour, the devotion to extending a world. I have always believed in the death of the author.
My personal theory is that everything you ingest as a child is regurgitated in love as an adult. I am sitting in a trio, and two of us are trying to describe the feeling of romance to a friend who has never been in love. We exchange a knowing glance. We have both grown up on a diet of fandom. The construction of a shared universe, we say. The make believe and roleplay. Love as endurance art, the emotional architecture of care. What it means to stand clean before someone as though there is no one else in the world. A Field Guide to Getting Lost: “For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away [...] Blue is the color of longing for the distances you never arrive in”. My colour blue is a world where you've never been hurt, known nothing but the tensile strength of love without condition. The making of a safe space. If I construct such a world in my mind and will my brain to hold it surely it will become true. We pivot to theory of forms. When it comes to romance there are two things I always seek: fantasy and safety. When I say I like creatives I mean to say I enjoy belief, the faith in your ability to construct worlds. The idea that concept alone is enough. When I say I want safety I realize these qualities are not as contradictory as I have thought. Love is asking you to believe in such a space and hold my hand as we walk there.
What becomes of that vision now? I hold it loosely about me, scared to dive in, because I am unsure who will walk with me. I have never understood what it was like to fear commitment. When I learned about heaven in school my first question was on the loved ones burning in hell from whom you become separated. When I sit with my friends I realize there are so many people with whom I would be content to spend an eternity with, platonic or otherwise. When I am in love my curiosity becomes boundless. With every romantic partner I've had I daydreamed about forever for at least a moment. In my fantasies we are sealed in a cryoship, frozen in whitespace, stranded blue lagoon style on an island, making sense of a strange world together. It is only in such circumstances where we can enmesh without shame. When I come back to reality I am realizing how pragmatism has restrained me. Longing, because desire is full of endless distances. I am full of such gaps, removing myself out of necessity, because autonomy is expected of me. It is bizarre how easily I feign indifference even when I am standing at the edge of a precipice. I have reshaped myself into secure attachment so many times that I have stifled the true weight of my desire.
Nowadays I am playing with this desire and all the fallout that has resulted. I am rereading journal entries from when I was in blackness and scarcely recognizing the feeling behind it. I used to obsess over this grief, curling around an evanescence song and warbling on relational dysfunction and wanting to provide shape to my sorrow. I had not believed I had suffered then, and this lack of faith manifested in laughably histrionic ways. I believe I have suffered now, and the silver lining is an assuredness in my narrative, the way I think I may have something useful to impart. It is only after glimpsing hell that my mind has tired of the romanticization. The purging, the catharsis. My engagement with my pain is strictly productive now.
Madeleine says you learn more about a writer from fiction than memoir. That it is the force of their imagination, not their history, that illuminates. Autofiction, fanfic for your own cast of characters. The interplay between reality and fantasy. I write when I miss the fantasy, slipping into fictitious headspaces and magnifying my dysfunction. When I share my writing with friends they tell me I am so much happier than would be guessed from my essays. I tell them it is like how I am only able to listen to sad music when I am happy, because there is no risk of spiralling. Nonstalgia: the unsettling sensation that you are never be able to fully access the past; that once you are departed from an event, some essential quality of it is lost forever. I am thinking about the transcendental ability of pain and the world that is uncovered when you write about it. In my healing I am closing around the realization that it is only in spaces of such grief that my old fantasy of a safe space becomes obvious in its urgency. I write because I never want to forget the desperation, let it form my north star. They say if there are infinite universes everything is simultaneously true. If I am typing away to infinity surely I will fall into the one where such a space exists. When I write I feel as though I am reading Inkheart for the first time, Meggie scrawling on her arm in desperation, watching her words materialize before her. I am rummaging through bookshelves, sprinting into my basement wall, daydreaming of hypothetical planets. I am still waiting to return home.
Oh, to find safety in making. The fantasy between writer and reader. I write hoping to be read, posturing before you, inviting you as collaborator to such a space. Everything you have read could be fiction, but perhaps for a moment you believed in it, and we met in that world together. You've held my hand all this while.
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