Daydream Your Life Away
A/N I love Nation. I wanted to write about Nation. I wasn't in a very good mood for rather personal reasons. This is what happened. Short, depressing, and NOT related to "Insanity for Today". And no editor, as usual. ;)
Nation's POV
It feels as if I'm asleep more often than I'm awake nowadays. And I go to bed at nine thirty and wake up at five thirty. It's not physical sleeping that has overcome me. It feels as if someone has pulled a huge, dark veil over my head and refuses to take it off. That same someone seems to be taunting me with each waking moment (but, is it really a waking moment if I'm asleep?). The others have it too. I see people that I used to think of as friends – Ansalong, Ricky, even Ralph or Kirk – with a blank expression, a hollowness that no conscious being should have. They're heads have been covered as well. The worst part is that even though I am aware of this, there is nothing I can do to stop it. Because that's the way life works. You can't prevent things like this. The veil seems like a pretty garment at first, weightless and stunning, but turns into a burden that is too heavy to take off.
Each day goes the exact same way. I wake up, do whatever has to be done, and go to bed. That's it. Nothing interesting ever happens. No one expects anything interesting to ever happen. The closest thing to excitement I get is a conversation that isn't about popularity, and that happens about once a week or so. Popularity is the most important part of all of this. The more popular you are, the more you stand out. And the more you stand out, the more popular you are. Not many of us stand out anymore. We're all just a herd of zebras. You can't tell where one ends and the other starts. I've had people call me Cosmo before. Not because they think I'm Cosmo, or I look like Cosmo, or even really resemble Cosmo at all… just because we have the same job and general popularity rank.
The only zebra with a slightly different pattern was Janet. She actually gave us at least a small amount of hope. Or rather, she gave me a small amount of hope. For a moment I actually thought we could change what DTV had become. Maybe, I had thought, we could end the time warp we had gotten ourselves into. However, the others had blown it. Popularity had gotten in the way, and the unique little zebra ran away from us. And when she ran, she took with her all of the optimism left in Denton. She left us with nothing. We were just a group of identical zebras again. But the difference this time was that we had become even more huddled together, fearful that we would lose yet another. We become nothing but a mass of black and white.
And I think that's when the veils first started to appear. We first used them as a shield. Nobody wanted to face the world. Nobody wanted to admit that we had definite issues. That the way we lived our lives was problematic. But the veils turned on us, like so many other things had. And we running Dentonvale became more insane than the patients we treated. We're the ones wearing the straightjackets and being forced to take drugs. We're the ones that need shock treatment.