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Message: [QUOTE="Waffles, post: 237257, member: 703"] This is something I wrote and I honestly don't know what to do with. It's raw -- it has been subjected to very little editing, and may still contain one or two typos. I'm also not sure it makes sense? All I know is that I felt immediate relief after writing it and that I'm treating like a live grenade: [SPOILER="The Summer Of Not"]We all have moments we are afraid to face even as distance gives us the illusion of safety. Moments so raw as to resemble narrowly-avoided icebergs set on a collision course of cosmic scale with the ship we are trying to put to sea, scarring its side with enough force to shake it, keeping it afloat just long enough as to learn from it. I call the year 2008 The Summer Of Not. It was a period when I felt like a bird of clipped wings, bound by jewel-incrusted chains and vanished to a crystal cage by people I had come to see as oppressors — but who had only the best intentions in mind and heart, as I had already begun drifting, silently, off course. I remember how I was stripped of everything they had come to see as dangerous — how I was completely cut off from the internet, how I wasn't allowed anything but the bare minimum time on a phone so ancient as to result more of a tease than a tool; how even that was limited with a laughable data plan that ran out as soon as you sneezed near it. It was a tracking device disguised as freedom. But then, even the most secure of cages allow for a measure of air, and so I began replacing the electronic worlds I had so readily inhabited by something more physical, as if tearing through the walls of my own containment to build something new, brave and powerful. Because, you see, I was sent to my grandma's isolated house to complete my detox, and she was the proud owner of a huge library — a library I had come to see as mere decoration at a younger age, but that now presented itself as the ultimate escape through spines harder than my own, engraved in legendary names that even the critically ignorant me knew by heart: the likes of Agatha Christie, Barbara Wood, Rona Jaffe, Ken Follett and Stephen King giving me wings and song once more. Soon, my routine began changing. What had begun as a tired resignation soon turned into a marathoning effort to keep these new feelings in and lingering. The only real barrier now present was the one imposed physically by my mind, suddenly crushed under the sheer weight of reading that soothed and strained it all at once, in a way completely foreign to it — a machine that had been oiled to crush facts and dates into fine dust until they were no longer needed, now tasked with keeping story beats and plot points burned into its walls. I was also restrained by my eyes as they struggled to adapt — going from bright screens, dark backgrounds and glowing letters to fine print on yellowish pages. But even sick birds seek the sky, and at one point I felt the absolute need to do something — anything — that would give me back some meaning, even if it meant chewing through the chain just to fill my lungs not with smoke like before, but with an air so thin as to make me lighter than everything bounding me to the ground. There was no moment where I could just feel a shift. I just crashed uselessly against the panes of my glass enclosure until it gave — specks of blood and shards of transparent bars flying out as I could begin to feel what being my own person was once more, rejoining a world that had coldly ignored my absence as if I had never even been there. And so began a war of echoes in the dark — of my own boots splashing against cold pavement, trying to drown out the constant buzz of my phone, this personal radar meant to keep me within sight without ever physically fighting me. Of me letting my mind wander through dark forests and quaint little villages that could only exist between the covers of a novel whilst my own story was being drawn up by a leaking pen connected to a shaky hand that was still too afraid of turning the page. But the cold, hard fact is that time runs out. Every line is final, even if we don't mean it to be. And there are just so many corrections we can make to a paper before it rips. My story was imperfect because it was never meant to be otherwise — and I'm fine with that. A story that plays neatly from beginning to end may sound wonderful, but it's hardly ever satisfying — like betting on a rigged race or skipping to the ending, then pretending to be shocked by what happens next. Things can never be simple. Not for me, not for the world at large. Something like a full recovery would have compromised the lesson here, and the lingering, throbbing pain provides just enough of a reminder to guarantee that it won't be forgotten. After all, scars tell stories.[/SPOILER] [/QUOTE]

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