I can't stand this world.
It's hopelessly arrogant, and hopelessly immature, and being aware of that makes me hate how I feel even more, but I can't stand the world I live in one bit.
Ever since I was a child, I was drawn to escapism, drawn to fiction. It wasn't that my circumstances were particularly bad or anything; I was just one of those kids that liked reading. Just an innocent little kid, sitting down and reading fun fantastic out of this world adventures.
It was that which irrecoverably broke me.
How could I love the normal after seeing the abnormal? How could I accept this reality after seeing what it wasn't and never could be? How could I be content with a world revealed as so boring in comparison to others?
Youthful egocentrism at its finest of course, wanting to be special, wanting to believe you're the protagonist of your own story. I couldn't bear it, just being a normal nameless person among many, trapped in a suffocating mass. I wanted to be special. I wanted to be so badly.
But I never got past it as most people do.
As I grew up I delved even deeper, sought even further, turned my eyes away from reality even more. I searched for the magic and the fantasy and the supernatural that had enthralled me so in this world. I was desperate, still am desperate, to believe that there's more to this world than meets my eye. I looked into cryptids, hauntings, the paranormal, conspiracy theories, anything and everything.
Funny isn't it, how virtually all of that has fizzled away in a world where so many people now have a video camera on hand at near all times? No more cryptid pictures, no more grainy pictures of ghosts, no more sightings of anything now that it's easier than ever to find. Conspiracy theories invariably mired in error and bigotry, and any and all rituals or potions doing not a single damn thing.
The world we see is the world we see, and there isn't anything else.
That's what I'm afraid of the most, and that shouldn't matter.
It's a world with unspeakable and profound beauty, stunning sunsets, gorgeous vistas, life dwelling in the depths beyond our imagination, the sheer simple wonder of love and friendship and daily existence. There's always more to see and to learn and to discover.
And yet, I can't stand it one bit.
Magic isn't real. Monsters aren't real. Fantasy isn't real.
I am normal. I will always be normal. An unremarkable person that will live, die, and be forgotten just like so many others.
I can't bear it.
There are those who still believe, even if only because they're afraid. You've got folks like those on Parawatch, sharing stories of the abnormal not with irony but with conviction. I lurked there for a time, reading, wanting to believe. But not a single member has found something substantive.
False hope is even more painful than true despair.
So many painful possibilities exist. That I can't see the supernatural because of the doubts I can't dispel. That it exists in all its glory, but I am condemned to never bear witness to it. That I have seen it, but been made to forget.
And, of course, that it is real, and I will find it, but because I truly am just a pitifully small unremarkable human being, all that will happen is a swift death.
Because that's just how reality is.
I am not a main character, not a hero or a villain. I am not a side character. I'm not so much as someone the protagonists of this world ever see. I live and die off screen, not even appearing in the background.
I want to see it though, even if I die. To know for a single moment that there is more to reality, that we don't all conform to this fucking normalcy, that there is something beyond what man sees, what the laws of physics and nature say, that there are aberrations and abominations and anomalies without a care for how the world is supposed to be. To know there is something more, further, out there.
I want to see it.
I want to see it.
I want to see it.
But more than anything, I fear that there's nothing to see.