guff

Nonsense Prose - Chapter One

I was, or rather was and still am, a work of pure fictional creation, a chimerical-like character dropped into a made-up universe, and once upon a time I knew no better, and was better off for the lack of knowledge. After I learned the truth I tried for a long time to deny it, but on a road to recovery, a road desired for or not, one eventually comes to a point of acceptance. It was a very long road for me, and I wish I was not compelled to retell my travels and travails upon it. But as I noted, I am not my own self, and never have been. I do what I must do.

First, let me throw a request into the featureless void that if the opportunity comes for someone to speak of me—and hopefully it will not be often as I was never one to enjoy the gossip; a deliberate part of the artifice behind my makeup, no doubt—they speak of me with some small amount of kindness. I never intended any bad to come from my actions, a fact my wife and family would fully attest. Then again, how else might they respond to questions on my intentions? They loved and trusted me, right to the end. Such have I been assured. Friends and acquaintances are another matter. I rarely tried to divine the acts and motives of others, as they often fail the psychics’ test of being predictably potentially likely. I may have been looked upon in the same fashion. I cannot say. Or perhaps it’s that I will not. Thankfully, though now the least of my concerns these days, none of them can be forced to testify against me in a court of law. Such concerns are no longer justified, what with there being no courts any more. Or the law. Or my family and friends.

Perhaps it’s only for me. I can only hope. I can still do that, though through no choice of my own.

The problem, if I’m allowed to refer to it as just a problem, had not yet begun to make itself apparent when I had the first inklings that things were off kilter, and not what we all had been lead to believe. And in context, it was the barest of inklings that set it off, so my life (and by calling it a life, I stretch the definition of that word past the breaking point) validates the maxim that great change can come from the smallest of incidents. World wars have no doubt been triggered by less. I can’t say that for sure, because there is no way for me to look up things like that now. The world wars I thought I knew are past-tense in the most absolute sense, having left no proofs, no studious tomes, no tracks in their wake of any kind. Everything is an absolutist’s past-tense and sporting a serious lack of concrete evidence.

Almost everything.

To answer what I myself might wonder at this point if I knew nothing of the particulars in my own story: yes, I reached near stratospheric levels of madness, insanity, psychotic dementia, or whatever the so called American Psychological Association’s term for it must be. I had more than a few screws loose. I was a several slices short of a loaf. I was most certainly chocked full of nuts. Choose a label. Any one should do; it’s possible they all applied, and perhaps still do. Was it the dawning realization about that reality gone which caused me to lose my sanity, or did losing it thereby provide the acumen to see through to the false nature of things? Or did it all emerge from my mind somehow, and I am responsible for creating the blankness now standing in for reality? I don’t have the objectiveness to decide. But none of that matters now. I went crazy, and either before the insight or after, but definitely somewhere along the way to here, was totally helpless to stop it as I lost everything, and everything lost itself to me. But this wasn’t always the case. I was not born in a dark delirium, living a life of barely suppressed outrage over my own metaphysical impotence right up to the last moment. So let me lose myself in the past. Please.

Voyaging back through the mists of time, or rather the mists of an untrustworthy mind through what may or may not have been time’s existence, floating over uncorroborated world wars and the APA and loose screws and incomplete loaves and nuts and almost everything to a period before an inkling soon turned them to puffs of nullity, one might discover I had a life back there. And that life at the time was what I thought to be…a real life. There was a childhood, with an attentive mother and a close-at-hand father and bullying brothers. There was an extended family, and friends and neighbors and teachers, and strangers. There were broken bones and broken spirits and a broken heart, all of which were mended to a degree, by and by. And there was a vast series of unknowns to be sought out and revealed, in school or through my own impetus. The secrets of so many more remained hidden, often merely by my complete ignorance of them. Being situated for most of ones life on a single, small plot of land on a world of billions, all surrounded by a nearly infinite expanse, surely limits what you can gain some appreciable level of savvy-ness over. There used to be so much out there, waiting to be discovered.

I eventually came to adulthood and soon to a wonderful wife and two glorious children. They had their faults, as did I, yet now I can’t think of them in any way but wonderful and glorious. And beautiful. They were nothing if not beautiful. Their names were Tomas (age 5), Celeste (age 8) and Oria (age 37), and I loved them deeply, or at least I believe I did. It’s a good thing to believe, nonetheless. I had a nice job with a higher than average wage, my coworkers were friendly, my boss more than tolerable. I received Saturdays and Sundays off, and made use of them as best I could. Saturdays in the park with the kids, weather and external influences permitting. Sunday morning in bed with Oria and the crosswords. Some of my finest though now quite possibly meaningless memories show her beside me. I had three weeks vacation in the summer, something Oria, Celeste, Tomas and I had shared access to, with trips to various locations and events that can only turn a natural tourist’s head. There were people and places and things which I knew or visited or owned, all becoming intertwined in a long meandering chain of relationships and connections. I had a dog. He was a beagle, and his name was Fred.

These people, these things and places were real to me. My wife was real, my children were real. My dog, real. I know this. Even as every fiber of the self I now know not to be mine now tells me differently, I know this. They were real. I was real. Or, was and still am.

Honestly, I don’t know what I am now. Perhaps the fragment of a non-reality baked up by God knows what? Perhaps. But whatever reality is, how did serendipity come to smile upon me and allow me to fall into such good fortune? And how could I ever have turned my back on such a wealth of being to forsake it for this? What was I thinking when I left it all behind like a worn out shoe? Even if none of it was real, how could I have been so foolish.

Truth. That is my new enemy. That is what caused me to lose all that was truly good and loving and perfect in my life. It was Truth, and that is something I no longer want. Please, take it away from me.