(no subject)

[winterdrake.livejournal.com]

This is from a while back, and the bginning of something I never finished (although, god help us all, there is quite a bit more of it than this). All comments etc. gratefully received. Apologies for any unreasonable length.

The urge to confess is deadly. I have this – this thing, burning inside of me, trying to burst out, fighting all the time against the barriers I hem it with. The need for absolution is unbearable at times. The need to throw myself on someone’s mercy and to hear them say that all is forgiven. I can’t forgive myself, you see, that’s not the way it works. It has to come from someone else to mean anything. And it has to come often, repeatedly, again and again for the same sins, because they never lose their power. Because I am always afraid that the benediction is a lie. And, of course, I never can confess, not fully. Hints and half-truths and misdirection are about the limit of it. Because you can’t tell people things like that. You can’t force your own pain into their lives, to make a desert and a wasteland of their happiness. ‘Confession is a search for someone else to take the blame.’ I heard that somewhere – can’t remember where. Confession destroys friendships, wrecks closeness. It can send people screaming into insanity for the sake of a few moments of stolen peace.

I wonder if we all feel like that about ourselves? If everyone needs to be told that they are worthwhile, that they have something to offer. Told on an hourly basis, preferably, to keep the certainty of it from being swallowed by despair. I wonder if it’s a normal part of the human condition, or if it’s something that only comes with untold secrets. That can only be born out of hidden guilt and pain, like some kind of monstrous, miscarried foetus, feeding on darkness. I think sometimes that this is the true definition of damnation. No angels waving blazing swords, no devils with pitchforks at the ready, just the continual, abiding certainty that I have done wrong. That I have strayed so far from the true course of my life that there can be no return. The knowledge that I held my life in my hands and could have chosen any road to walk, yet I chose the one that led me here. I suppose you could say that I think that damnation is having to take responsibility for wrong. Having to carry that responsibility through all the days and years until the final, merciful release into death. Assuming death is a release, of course. I wouldn’t claim to know about that. I’m better at the various kinds of hell produced right here on earth, usually by living, breathing human beings.

The things we do to each other beggar imagination. I listen to the news most days and all there ever seem to be are stories of death and pain. How one species could invent or find so many ways to make its fellows suffer is beyond me. And the worst of it is, it’s not the great crimes that are the worst. The murders, rapes and general evil that gets spread so readily over all the TV networks. For the most part, those are one-off occurrences and at least they’re usually fuelled by some kind of passion, some level of feeling. It’s the little, everyday cruelties that really strip the world of meaning. The ones we don’t even notice for the most part, they’re so much a part of our fabric. Things like the man who goes home every night and barely says a word to his wife, so day by day her soul dries up from lack of love, of contact, until eventually she can’t feel anything because he’s ignored her into nothingness. Like the parents who want so much for their child that they push and push, never letting the kid be itself, until the day when that poor brat fails their expectations because no human could ever reach the standard they’ve come to expect. Like the person who locks themselves so far inside their own pain that no-one can reach them no matter how hard they try, and their friends just have to sit and watch someone they care about die from within, little by little, because they’re too damned proud to drop the walls they’ve put so much work into. Like me, then. Cruel bastards, all of us. Going all out for what we can get, for what we let ourselves believe we need, without giving so much as a thought to the people around us. Driven entirely by the basement desires of our subconscious minds, never daring to let anything higher, or cleaner, or purer have a say.

Well. That didn’t make much sense, now did it. Don’t feel you have to disagree; I’m usually the first to admit I’m talking bollocks. After all, I’ve had a lifetime’s experience of it. I should recognise it by now. I suppose I’ll have to start again, and try to get things into some kind of order this time, rather than spewing random bitterness all over the page and hoping it’ll somehow resolve itself into something that makes sense without my having to concentrate on it. The dream of all authors – to create the perfect work without actually having to do anything at all. To wake up one morning and find it all neatly laid out on a computer screen. Everything you ever wanted to say, expressed in the cleanest, sharpest prose possible, without you having to lift a finger. Well, maybe not the dream of all authors. I don’t know any authors to ask, actually, so I guess I’ll have to be honest. It may not be their dream, but it sure as hell is mine. I’d like to walk away from this now, come back next week and find the whole thing done. Not to have to go through any of the pain of dredging up all this dirt but to enjoy the wonderful feeling of release at the end, when I know it’s finished. And that’s another thing about our rotten society. Instant gratification, preferably for as little work as possible. It’s no good if we can’t have it now, this minute, whatever it may be that we’ve set our hearts on. If you have to wait, it won’t be any fun. An entire nation, an entire world full of supposedly rational adults running around like little kids, screaming ‘I want I want I want’ and throwing their teddies out of the pram when they can’t satisfy their puny little desires in ten seconds flat. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going all superior on you here, I’m as bad as any and worse than most. That’s why I think it’s so damned stupid; I can see myself doing it and see the same acquisitive greed on all the other faces. I wonder sometimes what would happen if we just stopped. You know, just decided not to play the game anymore. Stopped chasing our tails in this furious, spiralling rat-race and went back to spending our time on what we really ought to be doing. Not that I know what that is, of course. I’m all mouth and no action, when it comes down to it. Great if you want someone to tell you how to run the world, hopeless if you’re actually looking for someone who’ll get off their backside and do something about it. Welcome to the human race, the pinnacle of evolution. My god, someone messed up there. If this is as good as it gets, what in the name of heaven happened to the bits that didn’t work? Maybe they blew themselves up; we’ve come close enough to it on occasion. Or maybe they took the sensible choice and decided never to crawl out of that primordial ooze in the first place. God knows, we couldn’t be much worse off living in slime. At least the worst we’d have to look forward to is being wiped off the bottom of someone’s shoe.

Hmmm. Again, not an entirely coherent beginning. I can see that this is going to take a while. If, that is, you’re still with me after the last page or so of misplaced, ill-educated, emotion-infested ranting. Maybe if I start with what I’m trying to do, then you can decide right now whether you want to bother, or whether you want to lend this to a friend and then claim you never saw it when they try to give it back. Haven’t we all had stuff like that? Things you’re absolutely desperate to get rid of, but can’t, because you’ll offend the person who gave them to you. Well, if I were you I wouldn’t worry about offending me. Let’s face it, we’ve probably never met and, even if we should chance to bump into each other one day, I’m hardly likely to go after you for not wanting to read a bundle of someone else’s warmed-over emotional leavings. So. I’ll tell you what I’m doing, you decide whether you want to stay or go, and we’ll take it from there.

My life hasn’t been altogether ordinary. Oh, I know everyone thinks that about themselves. Everyone’s got stories to tell and we’re all so damn convinced that ours are the interesting stories that we’ll go to any lengths to convince some other poor bastard to listen to them. Hell, I’m worse than most, I’ve resorted to writing my story down in an attempt to get people to pay attention. But I still maintain that some of the stuff that’s happened to me isn’t exactly run-of-the-mill, and I think some people might find it interesting, or instructive, or a good laugh, or some other such thing that would make it worth them spending their time on it. So I’m going to write it down and then, as we said before, you can make your own mind up. It all comes back to the confession thing, which is, I suppose, why I got hung up on it back there. Writing something down and shoving it at a bunch of total strangers is possibly the only truly faceless confession; it’s the only way to say all the things that can never be said face-to-face, or even over the ‘phone, because they’ll horrify, frighten or revolt the person you’re talking to, so that they’ll refuse to speak to you ever again if you’re lucky and, if you’re not, they’ll punch your face in. Well, anyway. This is my confession. This is the story of what I’ve tried to do and of what I’ve never managed to achieve. All the things that should have been said and done, but never were. It doesn’t actually cover a great deal of time; I seem to have managed to fit more mistakes into twenty six years than most people make in a lifetime. I don’t know if you’re still interested. You may have put this down by now and gone to ring that friend – you know, the one you can give this to in a desperate attempt to get rid of it. On the other hand, you may be strange enough, or bored enough, or just maybe intrigued enough to hang on for a while and see what I’ve got to tell you.

So, if you’re still here, we’ll begin. Are you sitting comfortably? Good. I’m not. This damned computer chair has bits that must have been specifically designed to tie knots in your back muscles. I think there must be a school somewhere for people who design furniture, where they learn to make the stuff just excruciating enough to be fiendishly uncomfortable and just comfortable enough that you won’t bother taking it back to the shop and exchanging it for something decent. I imagine all these little wizards sat somewhere testing chairs and rating them…you know, ‘oh, this one’s good, it’s an uncomfortable rating 8 and a back-twister 7. We’ll have to put this on special offer, so loads of people will be suckered into buying it.’ It’s amazing what advertisements will con us into.

Anyway. This isn’t getting us anywhere and, since I imagine that you at least have far better things to do than to sit there reading about the vagaries of furniture manufacturers, we may as well get going. One more thing, though, before we do. I’ve just looked at the last couple of paragraphs again and I’ve realised that I sound unbearably pompous. If I were you, holding this right now, seeing it for the first time, I’d have decided not to bother. Then again, I’m not you, and you’ll make your own decisions. People usually do. But just so you know, I’m not a pompous git, at least not most of the time. It’s just that sometimes the words I’m typing rearrange themselves after I’ve got them on the page and have assumed they’ll stay decently still. It’s almost like there’s a conspiracy going on somewhere, lots of words sat in a basement room with the lights out and an adverb guarding the door, all putting themselves into different patterns that sound completely daft when I go back and look at them, no matter how much sense they made at the time. It’s the same when you’re looking for a particular word for something. You know damned well that there’s a word somewhere that’s absolutely perfect for what you want to say, and you spend ages chasing the little bastard through your mind, while it hides round corners and blows raspberries at you. Then all the other words in your brain, which are perfectly good and useful but not what you’re looking for right now, gang up on you as well and queue right behind your eyes, clamouring loudly for attention, while the one solitary word you were searching for scampers off scot-free into the distance, waving merrily at its mates. If you’re lucky, it reappears some time the next week, nicely tanned from its holiday and having sent you a rude postcard which it didn’t bother to sign. Words are bastards, all of them. Slippery, treacherous, perfect, impossible little sods.

I’ve lost the thread again, haven’t I? I can tell by that glazed expression you’re wearing. It’s all right, I’m not completely mad. Just a little unhinged occasionally. But really, you try to write anything longer than your average essay and see where it gets you. They wait until it’s something important, you know. They’re good as gold when it doesn’t matter, then, when it’s really vital, like a resignation letter to your boss or something, the little wretches all get up and do some kind of country dance, so your perfectly constructed sentences turn into a senseless mess. And all this after you’ve sealed the envelope, of course, when you can’t do anything about it and won’t even find out about it until one of your colleagues is rude about your English in work the next week.

So. Where were we? About to start, if I recall correctly. ‘Begin at the beginning’, they say, which seems like good advice, so we’ll go for that.

This is amazingly difficult, actually. I thought I’d finally found a medium for expressing all this with which even my meagre allocation of courage could cope. But apparently not. The harder I try to start, the more I end up diving head-first into every diversion that comes along, then I sit on the bottom and sift through bits of it until the whole thing evaporates around me from overuse. Not that I need to tell you I’m prevaricating, I suppose. You’re the one who’s stuck with reading it. But you know what they say, ‘that which does not kill us…’ and other such platitudes. Then again, if we follow that to its logical conclusion, there’s a fair chance that I’ll be dead within the next thousand words. Either that or strong enough to lift the Albert Hall single-handedly, which would at least be a good party trick and possibly useful if they ever needed to relocate the thing. You, of course, might find the sudden cessation of words due to my imminent expiry to be something of a relief.

OK. Courage. Not the Dutch variety, just the stuff you have to dig out of your very bones. This all began when I was just a kid. I was tiny, really, barely at the point where I could hold a sensible conversation. Actually, I suppose that from anyone else’s perspective I couldn’t hold a sensible conversation. You know what kids are like; you need some kind of specialised translator until they’re at least three. Anyway, I used to have these dreams. They’re the earliest thing I remember and by far the most vivid. You know how most kids fight against being put to bed? Well, I loved it. Longed for it. The pictures in my head were so real and so amazing that I couldn’t think of anything I’d rather do than watch them. I’d have slept all day if anyone had let me, just to stay with the people I met there, most of whom meant far more to me than my family or friends here, in my so-called real life. They were so much more interesting, somehow. They all seemed to live these charmed, bright lives. They did important things, not boring stuff like watching TV and going to the shops. But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself here. Because the dreams didn’t just start up one night, in the middle of the film, so to speak. There was a definite pattern to them and, although I’ve been told by a lot of very qualified people that this isn’t possible, I can remember every minute of every one of them, right from the start. I’ve tried to think of a way of describing them to you, these dreams, but I can’t. There’s no way to make the magic and beauty of them leap off the page the way it leapt into my mind. There’s no way to get you to feel the sheer warmth of them, the absolute knowledge of being cared for and valued that came with them. So, in the absence of any way to describe things properly, (it’s those words again, the little bastards are threatening to go on strike), I’m going to write the dreams down pretty much as they happened. With any luck, if I can get this right, you’ll experience them as I did myself, except that you’ll have me popping in now and again to explain bits or add things or, more likely, get in the way. So, anyway. The first dream. I don’t know exactly how old I was when this one appeared, but I’m pretty certain I was somewhere between five and six. It’s odd…the dreams themselves are as sharp as they were the day they first appeared, but everything else has blurred with time, lost its sharp edges and in some cases disappeared altogether. Oh, one more thing I have to explain. In the dreams, I was never a child. That is, I had a child’s body, but never a child’s mind or feelings. I could understand, think and feel as well as I can now. Although, thinking about it, that isn’t saying a great deal, but you get my drift. There was never a point when I was too young to know what was happening, what was being said, even if when I woke up I couldn’t have repeated it to save my life. Don’t get me wrong, I was no great prodigy in real life, it’s just that while I was asleep, while I was dreaming, I had access to some way of understanding what I needed to understand. It wasn’t until I was quite a bit older that I realised how odd that was; it seemed perfectly normal at the time. Anyway, this is what happened that first time, as close to how it felt as I can make it.

Comments

[nyarbaggytep.livejournal.com]

It's a good start - works up slowly.
I want to read the rest - this means you have to finish it!

[winterdrake.livejournal.com]

LOL - oh god, no! :). The slow start was intentional, and ties in with my horror at the thought of finishing; this was originally intended to be novel length, and ended up getting stuck at around 11,000 words....are you sure you want the rest? :p

[caddyman.livejournal.com]

11,000 words? Bloody Hell. We'll have to open you your own pocket community at that rate! ;-)

[winterdrake.livejournal.com]

lol. Odd as it sounds, I'd be happoer if it were longer. That might mean I'd actually managed to finish a writing project for once in my life :).