I am sitting on the edge of my bed. Today is just another day, but for some reason my mind seems to be racing. Laptop screen blank looking for another clichรฉ drinking story to share or another quick, dirty, and simple blog so the world can smile, pass by, and society can keep its nose out of my life. Sadly, with two weeks in between blogs the time crunch has forced something a little more meaningful out of me.
I have been wondering for weeks now if this is all a dream. Not the trip to Hungary, or at least not just this yearlong mathematical voyage but most of my life past 15. It doesn’t make any sense. I feel like I am living some giant fabricated tale. For those of you who don’t know I was a rather serious criminal in my youth. The kind of delinquent society doesn’t try to rehabilitate. The kind society relegates to a specific corner where it learns life long lessons for previous mistakes. These lessons generally come in the form of employability, prison sentences, and general social isolation. This all being said here I am almost finished with a college degree, waiting patiently to hear from graduate schools if I have been admitted to their math Ph.D. programs.
It still doesn’t add up for me after all these years. I remember how fast technology was advancing while I was a child. From dial up internet and floppy discs, to burning CD’s and then IPhones around the time I was in seventh grade technology has been moving. I keep getting stuck with the thought that this is really what the judge decided for me. To live in some virtually simulated world where I would be successful, yet away from society. To make matters much more interesting outside of some immediate family, I don’t really interact with anyone who knew me before I was 16. Maybe the prison system allows visits into the simulator. Foster care was just a simulated family that existed until my mother could stand to see my face again. Maybe, slowly, by passing enough tests in the simulation reality starts to come back to me.
Let me be clear that I don’t actually think I live in a simulation. Honestly, besides all the other reasons it’s not pragmatic and not really my style. The fact that I entertain this thought has a lot less to do with its permissibility than it does with how it makes me feel. Things like this allow me to ventilate the complex emotions I feel about the person I use to be. They act as devices which let me avoid processing the guilt, and pain. These devices transport that unredeemable side of me to an unredeemable world for awhile. Here I can sit and feel okay with myself, even when back in reality the rest of the world is more or less okay with me. I can take the weights off my shoulders here, hang it on my coat rack, and breathe.
These fabrications are the parts of myself I have always wanted to be able to show other people, but it should be clear that by this point that no one else is allowed. It’s not that they are some exclusive club, and some day someone I love or something will be invited in. These places are for only me as decompression zones. They are like the pillow an adolescent screams into. It may feel ironic then that I am writing a blog about one of these devices I use. I am mostly doing it because it has recently occurred to me I can’t be comfortable weightless in that fantasy world anymore. Hence it has no personal value to me and is a decent blog topic.