Fragments

[Selan]

Posting fragments of my writing here. Bits and pieces of my mind, scattered around.
More to follow, or maybe none at all. Who knows?
SFW intended, but might turn into NSFW by accident. Likely not.

Writing tips to myself and to the voices inside my head.
1. Read between writing sessions to not burn out, especially new things you've never read before; a muse can spring from any corner unbidden.
2. The first sentence is the hardest, and after the first paragraph it will snowball.
3. Do not overplan. We do not want a repeat of that epic fantasy novel with 45 fully-planned chapters with detailed synopses and plot twists only to realise we couldn't actually write the first fucking chapter.
4. Writing the trashiest thing on the planet is still a hundred times better than writing nothing at all. Think about that the next time you criticise something you write. (But if you still think it's trash, then you're right, it probably is.)

 

[Selan]

Celestial

Falling and hoping, leap of faith, compulsion without thought. Twisting and turning, like mother, like daughter. Caught by the turbulence, entangled, ensnared. Embraced by an abuser, smiling, still scarred. Barriers appearing, mind frozen, consequences imminent. Running and hiding, lashing out, blade against flesh. Cut across soul, detach spirit, erode heart. Cry to fake deity, prayers unheard, silence beckons. Turn solitude into magic, lure animal, promise food. Turn sustenance into poison, gift to parent, sit and watch. Listen to choking, complete spell, collect shovel. Dig grave, capture spirit, reanimate corpse. Place in cage, feed to animal, absorb power. Destroy door, escape illusionary home, flinch from sunlight.

Cover face, tread on soil, hostile climate. Howling of wolves, ebbing of daylight, time diminishes. Predators arrive, hungry and snarling, hunting begins. Running through trees, tripping and falling, ground opens up. Spike trap below, leap to evade, wolves still approach. Conceal pit with magic, lure pursuers onto spikes, cause others to flee. Recover impaled corpses, use them for meat, dine well tonight. Skin wolves for fur, body stays warm, survive the night. Breaking of dawn, new sounds and sensations, freedom beckons.

Trail leads out of woods, signpost illegible, life signs vacant. Road leads to ghost town, buildings in ruins, skeletons in houses. Faint residue of magic, ghostly presence, restless spirits. Evade phantoms, magic trail grows stronger, source lies at graveyard. Small skeleton tied to cross, bones moving and creaking, mouth screaming without sound. Cut down skeleton, cleanse it of torment, break curse on town. Bury creature, purify grave, phantoms disappear.

Malevolent spirits no more, midday sun overhead, internal power grows. Strange pain in spine, unnatural light shining from eyes, inhuman words from mouth. Pain grows worse, doubled up in agony, high-pitched primal scream. Dark wings grow from back, blotting out unwelcome sun, halo forms above head.

Understanding dawns, spread wings and fly, unto the horizon. Celestial dawn beckons, journey complete, now and forever.

 

[Selan]

How many days have passed since then? No one speaks, no one dreams, no one shares a hope in their heart; day in, day out, unending silence and the infinite comfort it brings. We are not among friends anymore, just fractured souls drifting from place to place searching for their fix, craving the drug that has no name. We dig through the trash, documenting everything we find, putting them in nice neat lists and filing them away in spreadsheets, just great big massive spreadsheets of purposeless gibberish. But it means something, just once, or maybe twice, it means something - and then, and then, when our mind breaks, we delete it all forever. And then we do it again. We do it again and again and again, repeating everything in an endless cycle of insanity unrecognised by anyone and anything, wiping our own minds clean from the impurities that we've intentionally infected ourselves with. We recognise the futility of our actions, oh we recognise them all too well - but it doesn't matter. We have to keep doing it over.

Sometimes we get lucky. Sometimes we find our fix inside the massive dataset, and for a while everything is sheer bliss. It's not even that intense, because it's just new sensations, new sounds, new sights, coiling around your brain like SHODAN herself bribing you with information before it rips you apart. But it's new. It's new and we eat it all up, eat it up raw. Then we wake up the next day, open it up, and the fix is gone and the world has pulled you back into its mainframe, injecting you with normality so that you can't feel what you felt last night, left only with the memory. Then you have to start the whole process all over again and cross your eyes and hope for the best and just pray that you don't kill yourself finding that feeling again. You just know that it will never compare to the memory of the first time.

The noise has stopped now, but it was so loud earlier on, pressuring without being painful, almost natural. It will start again, and then you will forget everything you did to prevent it from happening a second time. It doesn't hurt, but when you hear it again, maybe you will wish that it did. The benefits of numbness last only for so long before we start to lose all touch with reality completely.

No one is waiting for us to return home. Markers on the wall, flash flash flashing lights showing us what we're supposed to do when this and that happens, when this and that sparks a decipherable emotion. Like flowcharts, you know? If you don't show them the correct reaction, they'll put you away somewhere. Or they'll scream at you. Or both. Unfortunately, the markers have been lost and we can't find them anymore. It's okay, we'll remember what they used to say, what they used to tell us. Maybe.

I think I can hear the noise again, but now all is quiet, all is silent. Too many things drowning it out, piling up on top of each other. More sirens, maybe? A lot of sirens, everywhere at once. It's fine. No matter what you do, no matter what you say, everything has been on autopilot for so many years now. Everything will always be fine.

 

[Selan]

You feel no desire. No ambition. No purpose. A sword runs through your chest, but it does not harm or hurt you; oh, but it does hurt, just not in ways that are immediately understandable or noticeable. It cuts you off from your heart, prevents you from feeling pleasure that most people experience on a daily basis. It cuts you off from pain, too. It's a mental block. No, of course it's not a real sword. (Except that it absolutely is, because this world is not real. The world outside? It isn't real. Everything is in your head. Everything is in your head. Everything. Is in. Your. Head.)

The work day is finished. You're free. You're free to do anything you like. Somebody praises you on the way out the door. You do not feel any gratitude, in fact you feel a little confused by the gesture, not sure how to react. Some people want to be praised for their work. You do not understand why. Quickly, you fake a smile, whilst continuing to feel nothing. It's a little exhausting to keep this up every day, actually. Sometimes it feels like people might notice, might realise that you're faking it, faking being...human? Is that the word? But you already are human. Just...in a different way.

You're tired. You're tired every day. It's not a problem. You just need to go home and sleep, and it won't be a problem anymore. You're not depressed, but you're not happy either. Or maybe you are happy. You listen to some music, but then you switch it off within ten point five seconds because it's interrupting the silence. You sleep. You wake up. It's still light outside, unfortunately. You come home to an empty building you call home. You like that it's empty. You can't live with other people, not anymore. You're used to the isolation. You have never invited anyone round in all the years you've lived here. You don't feel lonely. You never feel lonely, because that void has already been filled by the capacities of the mental block which already fulfils your every need. It's really liberating, actually. Sometimes people knock on the door and you don't even bother to get up and answer them. They bang on the door for a while, but they give up eventually and leave you alone.

You start up an episode of your favourite TV show. No, you can't feel anything. You start up a video game instead, and get ten minutes into it before realising that you're forcing yourself. No, try again. Try again. Try again and again and again. Eventually you might get lucky and find something that awakens a minute emotion inside you, something that makes you feel alive. That's the problem: you've successfully destroyed the pain, allowing you to be liberated, but the pleasure is gone as well. You aren't sad about it, in fact not even close - but you feel like time is slipping away. You have wasted every moment. You'll waste your entire life trying to find a way to feel like it's worth living, and then you're going to die. Just like everyone else.

The phones in the house are all turned off for convenience. If they were to start ringing whilst you sleep, it really would piss you off. Really, you just don't bother to answer the phone anymore. There is one person who does call you occasionally. She feels unsafe. You used to be close, but now she feels unsafe. Most people are not safe for you. You have to fake it around them, because you have limited control over the conversations. You don't need to talk to people, anyway. You have a few friends online, people you managed to salvage from the earlier years when you could still feel something creeping through the walls around you. Sometimes you don't talk to them for days or weeks at a time. It doesn't matter. They will wait for you. They will always be there until they inevitably die.

You attempt to find a book, but whilst looking for something to read, you completely switch off and reply to an internet post instead. You go on Goodreads for recommendations, but the highest rated book on there is terrible, and so is the second highest rated book, and the one after that as well. You give up and try to find a movie to watch, but then you completely switch off before you can finish downloading it, so that ruins that. Okay, what's left? You've run out of hobbies to bring you joy. Maybe exercise? It's dark outside and you live in a rough neighbourhood. After the last few murders, you don't want to leave the house. It doesn't feel right, anyway.

You refresh the page of the website you were on, only to find that you already did that a few minutes ago and nothing has changed in the slightest. Your eyes begin to close. When they open again, you repeat the entire process with little to no reacton about how much time you wasted. Your lifetime has now decreased by a day.

You turn your hand over and find some writing on it. It's in your handwriting. Weird. You wash it off and forget all about it.

Wait. You just had a great idea -

- no, it's gone.

You roll over and go back to sleep. When you wake up again, you feel strangely happy. Everything that was circulating in your mind before is now reversed. Everything is randomised. Randomisation is so fun. You never know what's going to happen. You never know what's going to happen, ever. You set the trigger, and the randomisation table tells you to do something you hate and despise, so you do it, because this is fun and fun things are fun. You continue to do this for, oh, a week? Maybe two? Then you realise it isn't fun any more, and you have to do something else entirely.

Everything has been reset. You play one of your favourite songs, and listen to it all the way to the end. You play a video game and complete it. You watch one of your favourite TV shows and watch it all the way to the end, only to find that the ending sucked and probably ruined the whole experience as a result, but it's about the journey. Kind of. It might be about the journey. Somehow, it no longer feels bad that you wasted your time. It's weird.

You make no effort to reconnect any of the phones in the house, and go outside to check whether everyone else is still acting as if the world around them is real or not. Unfortunately, they are. In the two point five seconds it takes you to open the front door, the local neighbourhood cat sneaks into your house, climbs all the way to the next floor, and leaps out of the open window.

You watch it as it disappears into the distance, and turn away just as its image distorts for a split second, before returning to reality again.

It's strange. You have never felt so real within the borders of such an unreal world.

You blink once, and the world remains the same. You blink once more after that, and everything changes - and you wake up, ready to begin the process anew.

 

[Selan]

Time marches on, and we can't help but count the number of seconds which have elapsed since...no, scratch that, not seconds, or even minutes, or hours, days, weeks, months, years. That's what it is, years since this last happened to us. It's just, like, there are seven doors, right? Right? Seven doors, only they don't look like doors, and if they don't look like doors then maybe they aren't really doors, I mean they don't even open, you can pull one this way and the other goes the other way. Well. I digress. Whatever they are - I mean, we know what they are, we can't just explain because the words don't exist on this planet, or maybe they really do but just haven't been invented yet.

Anyway. Seven doors. Eight, maybe? There might be another one. And you need to get through one of them, and it just won't open, because nobody is alive. We can't open it without a living person, but nobody wakes up to answer the door. So we have to try all the other doors, because we need our fix, and those doors either won't open at all, because they aren't really doors - or we can get through the door only to find just, just...smoke and mirrors, gas, liquid, solid, fragments, pieces of plastic just collapsing on the carpet and then we come back through the door again because we don't know what's what and nothing has fucking changed, except you know that this door won't help you anymore.

It's self-reliance: one person can help you, everyone else is useless. One person, and they aren't even a person, they're more of an entity, a group, a...a social construct, is it? It's this thing in your brain which is everything and nothing at all, which has shaped itself into your new delusion until you find your place in the world again and cease thinking and all feeling goes away. And it sucks, but it's also amazing to actually rely on someone for once, but it also sucks because you can't trust them to help you, because at the end of the day - they're only human.

Knock, knock, knock, knock, knock, knock. Nobody's home. Knock. People are home but they aren't alive. You speak to them and they do not hear you, at least they don't hear you until after everything is over. You wave a hand in front of their face and they do not see you - but who I am to say who can see and who cannot be seen, because we're just as blind as they are. Okay, hear no evil, see no evil. How about touch? No, no, no, no, no, do not touch them. Do not. Touch. Them.

That last door never did open. Maybe the people behind it have left as well. But it's okay. We got our fix eventually, once the doors stopped pretending to be doors, and people stopped pretending to be people, and everything just went away again.

One of these days we might try using the window.

 

[Selan]

Shrivelled up leaf, floating across the surface of a dead pond; do you need someone to breathe some life into you? You're a flickering candle, clutched by a skeletal hand stacked upon a massive pile of human bones reaching up to a futile heaven, every limb holding an extinguished candle of their own. If you live, it is for nothing, only to experience mortality for a few scant hours until solitude wrests your soul from your shell of a body and your willpower gives out, once and for all. But those hours will feel like an eternity, spent in watching and waiting in a future bereft of hope, wasting away in a diseased mind which gladly welcomes you back to pain, again and again. When the last strip of flesh falls away, and your deadened nerve endings return you to utter numbness in your perpetual paralysis, you fall back into yourself.

Back, back, shrivelled up leaf. Back to life, back to mortality. No ripple marks the surface of this pond; all thoughts and processes have come to their inevitable conclusion, all randomness has ended in finality and absolute certainty, burned away by fire which does not warm, frozen away by ice which does not chill. A thousand eyes watch, but only from your perception. You turn to meet their gaze, and see them close, all at once, like the sleeping symbol of a gargantuan behemoth sunken deep beneath the waves of an unmoving ocean.

No one sleeps tonight, nor tomorrow, nor the night after that; we lie here, and we lie here, and we roll with the passing sands until dirt enters our mouths and worms feed on our bodies. Beckoning still, beckoning now, until all this, everything, all this becomes just another lost memory clutched from the fragmented mind of someone, some thing that used to be human. Just pushing forward, and leaving poison in its wake, eating up the land where it passed. All matter dissolves, folding in on itself into the crust; a massive hole, just growing bigger and bigger over time. One forgotten memory, a gaping hole in your brain.

Wake up from dead times. They're gone, and they're never coming back. They weren't happy. They weren't sad. No, they likely caused you pain, great pain, in a time where pain equalled pleasure, and it is that pleasure you are missing, a pleasure which only translates back to pain. In a crazed state, you reach out to them for comfort, and rejoice when you are burned for your efforts.

The leaf goes up in flames and dies for real, and you turn to the next leaf on the page, sure that this will be the real winner. It's already beginning to curl at the edges, singing songs you can barely hear, placing words in your mind that never existed, warping your sense of self. The old and the new, constantly pushing you back, again and again. It's back to the pond you go; back, back to the pond where you belong, you shrivelled up little thing. Such is nostalgia.