Fiction saves?
Fiction weights 86 kilograms and is 1.70 ((1.72)) meters tall on July the 14th, 2020. Fiction is definitely overweight.
Fiction couldn’t donate blood on that day because fiction was dealing with some depressive episodes and taking meds. So fiction had to settle for second best, and that was looking for other donors.
Fiction has some grams of reality. Maybe even kilograms.
Otherwise, where would we get our inspiration?
Or maybe not “we”. I may be generalizing there. There might be some people who can actually dream and think of a complete fiction where none of the aspects of reality play a part. Where reality doesn’t even exist. Can you visualize that? It looks like paradise. It looks like our wildest, yet most comfortable teenage dreams. Those that we don’t dare to own. Those that we pretend have never been there and do not play a part in our expectations for the future.
So we try really hard. We go out of our way to make our reality fiction. To fictionalize the banality of the daily routine. To banalize the common pain. To fictionalize everything so it may reach someone else.
But sometimes, only sometimes, the written pain isn’t for someone else but for the one writing to take it out, to cope, to find another way out of it.
This ain’t it.
Pain is such a subjective emotion, only a delusional person would think to immortalize P A I N in its capital and individual letters in one experience. There are different ways to feel pain and to grieve. Some of them even include not feeling at all, just pushing through it to reach the other side, where pain is nothing but a distant memory. You can name some details and place some vague image, but you don’t remember it fully. Like a story you heard or saw or read a long time ago but you can’t remember it fully. Pain turns into fiction through memory and our very own insistence to turn it into fiction.
My very own insistence.
I am made of fiction. Fiction has kept me alive.
And yet fiction couldn’t escape reality on July 21st. Fiction faced reality and pain and grief and fiction was just standing there, trying to break through, but couldn’t.
Fiction couldn’t even be a coping mechanism.