And So It Began
An ordinary day, not that any of my days have been ordinary. I lived in a world of my own, they all said, though at the time it wasn't strictly true. Close enough, I suppose.
I dreamed of escape. You can understand that, can't you? I was young, I was foolish, I only saw the dirty pavement stretching before my feet. I found escape in reading, for a time, until the pressure in my head grew to unbearable, and my mind shrieked and whimpered in its confinement. Then, the television, flickering in the background as I read. Fast, fast, devouring pages like an alcoholic drinks while my ears drank in the sounds of gunshots and the fuzzy voices of soap opera actors.
Then came my computer, and I would read seated before the monitor, the television going in the background. It pulsed like a kind of ghost, two-dimensional outlines of people projected faintly into my room.
Oh, no, I didn't want real friends. You ought to know that, yes. Mundane, awkward, a world apart from me. A world apart.
I did go to school. It was a way to feed my brain, full of Shakespeare, chemistry and algebra, devouring knowledge to drown the heart and soul.
But the heart is really everything, you know? Of course, I didn't want to know that at the time. Strictly business, life was. Formulas and equations, a heavy brain in a burdened body, no room left over for an empty heart. Emotion like a sickness, shoved deep into the back of an ever-tightened throat.
I found Tolkien about then. It helped that the movies came out a few years later, easier to understand that way. His characters seemed cumbered by their emotions and their needs, and reading the books again and again brought me smug satisfaction that I was the perfect being. No hindering heart to bring down the power of a mind.
Silly, wasn't I? You may laugh, now. I can see your round face, it is sparkling with laughter. What's there to sorrow over, after all? Nothing, that's what. There we are, then. Hush, and listen.
Where was I? Ah, that day. I was walking home from school through the park, tempting the fates, I know. Nothing ever happened, though. Sometimes I wanted to be caught, mugged, cut with a rusty knife. Anything to wring tears out of my dry and withering insides. I didn't cry when the Towers were bombed-- others' suffering, it was. I only cried in the solitude and darkness of my room, and not over anything substantial. A blank nothingness.
Like that hole I found in the park. Hard to recognize unless you were looking down, and I always was.
It opened at my feet, and it was like looking into a dizzying pool, at first. Like a reflection, trees stood sideways and rippled, but they were not the trees behind me. Elm and poplar, these were, not my native oak, and somewhere in the background I heard voices, fragile and high, like a bad radio transmission. A powerful wind was coming off the hole, and I'd like to think it drew me in, but in truth it was nothing but my own folly. My own wish.
And so it began.
Disclaimer: Nothing of Tolkien's creation belongs to me.
