Days of Despair

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Sentrovasi
Posts: 163
Joined: Sun Aug 29, 2010 12:55 am

Days of Despair

Post by Sentrovasi »

Note: Deciding to try getting into the spirit of NaNo 11 days after it's started. Not actually going to get 50000 words, probably, but at least forcing myself to write something. After a bit of deliberation, I decided to try to base it in the world of LN, at least so I don't have to dive off a springboard into an empty swimming pool or something. It's going to try to be a bit more realistic, though, so it might end up a bit more of a downer. This is what I've written for today, and with any luck I'll be able to keep up a steadier pace when I have nothing on :3 The name is a placeholder, parodying the name of Lamentable Nights itself.

***

From a young age, perhaps even from birth, though I could hardly remember that now, I had been able to see more than others could. Joy, sorrow, fear, and all these other emotions that others could only express in abstract concepts, I saw in ethereal forms, seeming almost alive in the ways they behaved; moving from person to person, subtly influencing and consuming one another, it was at once beautiful and terrifying to watch.

Obviously, the moment I grew coherent enough of the world to realize that I was alone in witnessing this spectacle, I asked my parents about it. They were to me at the time as lorehouses to a scholar. Two years and three psychologists later, I learnt to think better of it. They knew me as their rather precocious six-year-old with an uncanny knack for reading emotions and feelings, but any more than that and they were out of their depth; any further from reality and common sense tended to override the evidence.

But indeed, who was I to say they were wrong? That the strange distortions and ghostly voices I heard were no more than figments of my imagination? The evidence was overwhelming: the rest of the world against my own senses, barely a decade old. Perhaps something was wrong with my brain; something was wrong with the wiring, somehow, even though the three hospitals I had been to could find nothing fundamentally wrong with any of my bodily functions.

That is to say, other than the fact that I was obviously crazy, there was absolutely nothing wrong with me.

Inevitably, one might say, I grew up enjoying stories involving the supernatural. It was a lot more surprising than one might think, though, considering I hardly needed a reminder to tell me why I was certifiably in poor mental health. Yet those stories presented some of the few scenarios where I was right, and everyone else was wrong. Why couldn't they see what I did? Perhaps it was having to grow up like that that made me such a tolerant person with others' quirks: after all, I was fully aware of what it must feel like to be thought of by even your closest loved ones as mentally unstable.

I had to buy the books on my own, because my parents feared that “letting your imagination fly too far” would trigger a relapse of my condition, which I consistently assured them was long past. Fortunately, in elementary school most of my peers were carefree enough to not make a big deal about my past; had that not been the case I might have sunk into depression, or at least developed some aversion towards human society in general. Instead, I found myself being sucked in to the blissful lack of responsibility which most young children with doting parents probably go through, making friends and memories alike.

I didn't make the mistake of telling them of the things I could see again.

It was just as well, since childhood imaginings were already so varied and excitable that anything I said would probably have been taken as nothing more than bluffs upon bluffs. But what I could see was not the kind of thing one would readily show to a child; I had no one to help me explain the various nuances of emotions then, which probably spared me from revelations too harsh or complex for an immature mind; it was hard enough for me to rationalize why my parents refused to believe me. It was easier, instead, to just believe that these were all hallucinations. So I did.

Elementary school was otherwise largely uneventful. As time passed, my parents became less concerned at what they considered to be an overactive imagination. My teenage years thus passed a lot more smoothly. My parents began to be concerned with all the normal things parents are especially wary of, like my grades and whether or not I was mixing with the “wrong crowd”. But that was fine; I was almost happy for it because it meant they were treating me like a normal person instead of shutting me in.
Yet it was also around this time that I began to see more than just phantasms of emotions and desires. I thought it was my imagination at first, picking definite, humanoid shapes out of the nebulous, shifting forms which had become a common sight for me. But as the days passed I began to realize that these were separate identities altogether, and as though in response to my realization, they began to take the forms of recognizable humans. There was a woman, then a man and another young boy. Despite my self-imposed abstinence from these hallucinations, the sight intrigued me. Neither the diffuse emotions nor these defined ghosts were incredibly prevalent, but when I did find one, I found myself compelled to study them in their otherworldly strangeness. In time I took to carrying a small notebook around, recording what I chanced upon. It was not so much for anyone else than myself, keeping me convinced that I was still rational, still cogent, and that none of what I was seeing could be said to be a dream in the conventional sense.

A side effect of this was that I began to be known for being strange, often spacing out or staring vacantly in the middle of a conversation. Not that any of this was necessarily bad; my penchant for the supernatural might have lost me some potential friends, but it gained me many others as well; I found myself almost forcibly inducted into the 'Paranormal Investigation Club' at school, where we spent most of our time watching old zombie shows and eating snacks than doing any real “investigation” at all. But I preferred it that way.
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