Ever since I was a child, I’ve had a very rich imagination. I was a troubled child, so imagination was how I escaped the world I felt rejected by. I learned early on to build worlds, willy-nilly, for my own experimentation. I invented backstories for myself, and I birthed a cast of characters, both main and supporting. I practiced endless dialogues between numerous fictional personalities to understand how they ticked. The richness of their thinking surprised me. They talked back at me!
When I was barely an adult, I was fascinated by the idea of self-suggestion. I told my friends I believed that if someone had enormous willpower, they could turn their fictional worlds into reality. All they needed was to want really, really hard.
I think I really, really, almost believed it then.
I really, really, might believe it even more today.
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I have been creating stories in my head for as long as I’ve been forming permanent memories.
In my first memory, I’m 14 months old and sitting on grass. One moment my mom is in front of me, the next she’s nowhere to be found (I’m told she stepped behind a tree). I knew with absolute certainty that she was forever gone, that I was forever alone in this big, scary world. In reality, I was alone for the few seconds it took my dad to take a photo of me in my pretty summer dress, holding my mom’s pretty flower bouquet. They couldn’t figure out what got me so worked up; in that photo, I’m bawling my eyes out and my throat sore.
In another early memory at age four, we’ve just parked our car outside our house. It’s past bedtime on a winter evening, with a white, snowy ground and a black, starry sky. I’m too sleepy to walk, so I just gaze at the stars while my dad carries me in. In that moment, I believed that the stars were my true home; I believed that my life down here was a misunderstanding and that I would one day return to the stars.
Ever since I was a teenager, I have been capturing my stories on paper and canvas, both in text and pictures. These physical manifestations are pale distortions of the worlds in my head, but spitting out these shadows helps release the pressure.
These pale distortions help solidify the real worlds in my head. The distortions are love letters, they are cries for help, and they are the iconography of endless religions that could have been but never were. I make them little offerings when nobody’s looking.
As an adult, I’ve had respectable ways of making a living and burning the daylight. I have a deep love for the outside world, and I no longer feel rejected by it. Yet I haven’t abandoned my own worlds; or maybe they haven’t released me. Not that I’d want them to, even if I had the choice. Once you’ve been a god, you don’t give it up easily.
I have, however, had seasons when my worlds were waiting behind a curtain, sleeping under deep ice, tucked away in the attic. I got cancer. The doctors sliced and blasted it out, and for years they soaked me in antihormones to keep it out. I was safe, taken care of, in a good place in my life. Some people might consider it happiness; I guess I do, too. Contentment, peace, quiet.
But there was a god-shaped hole in me. A me-shaped hole.
Happiness is overrated.
When I was finally done with my treatments, it still took a long time for my body to uncoil back to its natural shape. After two years, I realized that the hole was getting full again. I am here again, in my me-shaped hole. It took forever, but it felt sudden.
Suddenly I am no longer content, peaceful, quiet; suddenly I am a scream in the wind again. Suddenly I am a god again.
Happiness is overrated.
What matters is the ability to imagine what doesn’t exist, and to want it into existence. What matters is the serrated edge of constructing new worlds from nothing; seeing them, living in them, and then seeing them waft away, back into nothing.
What matters is the utter loneliness of being a god. Being limited by nothing but yourself; being chained by yourself. Seeing worlds emerge and die, witnessed by nobody but you.
What matters is knowing all the stories that have never, ever been told.
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I have told many stories in many ways; each of them rips my flesh on its way out, and each makes me cry tears of pride and tears of regret at seeing them manifested in these lackluster forms.
But for every true story I’ve told, I’ve not touched an endless amount of equally true stories. I haven’t had the time or skills to tell them even poorly, or I’ve deemed them too shameful to be allowed to see the light of day.
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The story, where he breaks her every day, because that’s the only attention she will accept from him. Every night when she sleeps he mends her, and he tries and fails to heal his own broken heart. And then he does it all over again the next day like a lovelorn Sisyphus.
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The story, where he gets punished for another man’s pride and jealousy, for being too loveable and not his. And then having an entire religion being built from his dried blood and their false assumptions.
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The story, where old wounds slowly heal and old friends learn to trust each other again in a strange world; and all they needed to do was abolish the concepts of good and evil.
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The story, where she digs through the dirt to solve ancient mysteries and rolls her eyes a lot. She is confident and beautiful in an acquired-taste way, and an elusive and much-needed role model for the not-that-much-younger woman.
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Let’s be honest here: just because a story exists in my head doesn’t mean I can accept its truth. Most of my stories don’t paint a pretty picture of me; most of them don’t support my personal brand or even respect my values.
Most of my stories are petty, filthy, wanton, or unrealistic. Most of my stories are not good, viewed through my professional storyteller alter ego’s eyes. Others might consider some of my stories evil, but I would never.
No-one can quite love me and fuck me over the way my stories can.
My heart is full of these worlds, and I feel like it might explode. The exhilaration, the sorrow, the longing, the regret, the shame, and the love.
That matters more than anything.
Angina | On the Side of the Angels 