Scene.IV

oo.oo.oo

The warm, gentle tones of Mac DeMarco made me imagine being wrapped in someone else's arms. Maybe a girl I'd known since high school. Maybe some guy I'd just met that night. Maybe an ex. Maybe a friend. For some reason I spent a lot of time imagining that scene, me and someone else just holding each other. Then I opened my eyes and remembered reality.

One of the overarching themes of a literature class that I took my freshman year of high school was constructing fantasy versus embracing reality. This was not written in the syllabus and the professor never mentioned anything of it, but it was what I took from the class, even if no one wanted me to. All of the main characters were living in these weird realities where they were either stuck in someone else's fantasy and wanting reality, or they were unable to escape the reality of the entire world so they ran away into their own self-destructive fantasies. Take Huckleberry Finn. He was trapped in the cruel reality of having an abusive alcoholic as a father, so he ran away on a self-destructive flight of fantasy with his friend Jim. In reality, though, Huck was dragging Jim deeper into the belly of a beast he had wanted to escape his whole life, and he had to lie most if not all of his way through the adventure.

And then we have Edna Pontellier in The Awakening. A 19th-century housewife and mother, married to a rich man, never having to work. For most women of the time period, this was the ultimate fantasy turned reality, but Edna wants nothing to do with it. How else could she respond as the only outlier in her set of data than by killing herself?

Then Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire, driven to madness because she couldn't handle the reality of her husband's suicide. And Maggie in Maggie, Girl of the Streets, who thought a street thug was her knight in shining armor when in reality his suit of armor was just the cleanest one she had ever seen. And the narrator in Bright Lights, Big City, flailing and splashing in a whirlpool of cocaine and apathy that threatened to drown him after his mother died and his wife left him.

All these characters, all the voices reaching out to me across time through organized ink on paper. Holding me while I cried reading their stories and seeing my own life in all of them. Showing me that no matter how hard I tried, reality would eventually catch up with me. I could tell myself all the stories about myself that I wanted, but even if I lived in my own fantasy forever, reality would begin to seep in and wreck it. On the other hand I could outright succumb to reality, avoiding the thorny brambles of fantasy altogether. But how the f**k could anyone possibly survive, living in reality one hundred percent of the time? I certainly couldn't. None of it made any sense to me anymore.

All these monkeys wrapping themselves in different colored cloth, yelling at each other in different voices about different versions of the same thing. Over and over. Round and round. I once thought about how people could just be thought of as points on a grid. Zoom in close enough and you mind find a few unique identifiers, but to me the world mostly just looked like a giant grid going on and on forever into infinity. Then I thought about how even though the points on the grid were self-aware, they still couldn't break the endless pattern that their existences constructed. Then I held my head in my hands for a few minutes, trying to convince myself that even though everything in my life had probably already happened before and would happen again, it was still worth living.

The slippery aural slides that Mac was riding kept part of me in a happy place, but that sad feeling I'd been feeling lately started to creep back into the other parts of me. A worry. An uncertainty. A fear that you will let down everyone you've ever known before you turn thirty. A desire to sleep and a fear of nightmares. I tried to cling to the happy part, but my grip was getting weak, and my mind is changing tenses again.