I no longer expend the effort to believe that I belong anywhere. Perhaps this is maturity, or perhaps it’s maturity that I am basically okay with this fact and am secure in my loneliness– for now. It has become easier since I began to perceive this with clarity and accept it as a fact of my life: The same way the nature of an ache changes when you remember how you injured yourself to cause it, the nature of this discomfort changes once I acknowledge it, and becomes bearable
I don’t really expect ever again to feel like I really belong in any space I do not create for myself. This is most obviously true in the realm of fiction and art, since it’s obvious to anyone that working to create this space is one of the things that drives me, but it also is true of my life itself. I am trying to shape my life, to carve away at it day by day and shape it into someplace where I am comfortable, someplace where I can live. Thus, I am not just working to construct one world, but two: A real world and a world of imagination, a dual space, one I can straddle, within which I can spread my wings.
Somehow, not everyone seems to feel this way. This is something I have been forced to accept on weight of evidence, though I still find it super unconvincing. Apparently, some people somehow manage to find lives which fit them out their first try or two– or, perhaps, it’s merely that beggars can’t be choosers, and a freezing man will gratefully accept a poorly-fitting coat. Maybe it’s just evidence of the luxurious life I’ve lived that I let something as petty as an ill-fitting and itchy existence bother me.
I suppose it’s up to each of us to find where we deviate, where we don’t fit, and craft a social prosthetic around that to take up the slack. For me, though, it’s beginning to seem that this social prosthetic is likely to end up resembling a full-body cast. It’s not that I have a hard time communicating with people, or that I feel awkward and uncomfortable, it’s just that I don’t care. I like people, I like their wants and quirks and their flaws and ambitions, I just have no interest in meeting them. I wish there was a shortcut to knowing people without meeting them. The internet helps somewhat in that regard, but really only softens the blow.
I’m happy, though, I’m grateful, though, that I never fit into this world. Being a loose rock in reality’s wall let me fall free, down into the rainswept valleys of the uncanny and impossible: Where there are more colors; where the light is too bright; where sorrow and joy touch down more acutely, more distantly, more frequently; where death is but a passing dream instead of the final and irrevocable awakening.
How many people get this opportunity?