Lovesick Girl
Chapter 1: Bye Bye Baldur's Gate
Saturday, August 24, 2013 AF

Hi my name is Madeline Myers and I'm a weird kid. Like it's an objective truth and I personally admit it. The thing that I can objectively observe that is wrong is that other people place a lot of emphasis on feelings and emotions and relationships and bonds and meanwhile I'm out there caring about concrete results and even as a kid somehow I managed to say "Actions speak louder than words, and words speak louder than smiles." and obviously a child's perception of the world is inaccurate and their sentence-creation skills are awkward but that sentence still defines my behavior.

Ever since I enrolled in school I was known for one thing and one thing only: whatever assignment you throw towards my side, I will complete with flying colors (except not really because I don't get access to colorful ribbons most of the time, and frankly all of the time since starting middle school). Such a single-track mind kept freaking teachers out and when I only said "Yeah, I completed the assignment as you told me to, nothing more, nothing less." they were freaked out even more. And they knew I had a younger brother Norman Myers and they expected the same from him and were kind of disappointed to find just a normal kid.

As for my parents they're a happily married couple but they have vastly differing opinions on this and those opinions so far have led to an absolute disaster which is why the thing that is currently happening is happening. It's quite funny how their tug of war has made me into the person that I am (although the main defining thing of me has been with me since birth as I said) but let's explain it first.

So first of all we have my mother Vivian Myers and to be honest she's an even bigger weirdo than myself. Her room is always full of crystal balls and tarot cards and incense and she says it helps her with seeing the future. Of course I know from science lessons that you can't see the future you have to work it out using math but she tries anyway. And she even claims success! Like, how? How does it even remotely work? I'm not supposed to know. I'm only supposed to believe it, because divination led Vivian to discover her husband's precise traits, and he has those traits, therefore it works, so it's going to work for me and Norman as well.

And of course, seeing the future being a thing that totally exists and doesn't contradict reality, Vivian already knows what sort of boy will fall for me. But you see that sort of statement, heard throughout your life, makes you believe that only a certain type of boy could ever fall for you, and if the boy you're talking to doesn't fit that description? Stop talking to him. And as such many guy-friends that could have been in my life were erased by a stupid prophecy which might or might not even be accurate.

And then there's the husband in question (in other words, my father) Matthew Myers who was really concerned in getting at this scientifically and I can totally see why he would. From a young age I was constantly subjected to doctors and psychologists and occasionally even medicine but again nothing substantially changed me and I continued to embrace the logical side of things and not the emotional and I continued being the very best like no one ever was at school but the very worst like no one ever was at, like, interacting with people and it was even an inside joke like if you were stuck in a closed room together with Madeline Myers, how long would it take until you were desperate for anything resembling an exit?

And Matthew, stuck with me since I was born, was desperate for an exit of the most unorthodox kind: changing me so I could feel emotions, because I totally needed to feel emotions. And so he contacted some sort of shady scientists and took me to them while I was sleeping and they did all sorts of injections and even surgeries and originally nothing happened but some months later I started changing.

And you know what? He totally got his wish. After everything settled and I "changed" I became way too sensitive and even the smallest achievement would make me smile like an idiot and even the smallest tragedy would make me cry a river. And on one fateful day I got just normal colors, not flying colors, on an assignment and I suddenly started believing I have no future and that ruined absolutely everything and suddenly I was no longer at the top of my game I was just an average student and an average human being and that made me despise gaining an emotional side forever.

But the worst thing about this isn't actually how my family deals with me, it's how the staff and students of Baldur's Gate High (and the middle school before that, and the elementary school before that) dealt with me. The staff did literally nothing - as long as I've got good grades (and yes even after the incident I'm not, like, the 50th percentile, but something like the 90th), nothing is actually institutionally wrong with me - and the students made me into a literal icon.

Essentially, everyone believed that I was faking my emotions all the time (even though I was desperately trying my best to not feel emotions) and thought that I would start talking to a student or something, gain their trust by feeling everything they feel, get them to a secluded room and do horrible things. Exactly what sort of horrible things depends on the person telling the story, but no one trusts me and even if I did meet the boy matching Vivian's description, he wouldn't trust me neither.

That is why I have packed up all of my stuff and fetched a train to someplace far away where Vivian and Matthew and Norman and Baldur's Gate will not be a concern. I just want to be someplace where people will not be concerned and will not even be aware that Madeline Myers could once do the homework of a hundred students and now she won't even do her own assignments sometimes because the characters inside the math problem made her cry.

Anyway I guess this is the place to leave some last remarks to those I hastily mentioned between a string of "and"s and I'm obviously not a cold, unfeeling monster (anymore) so I actually left them notes before I departed from home and here are their photocopies.

Dear Vivian, you can take every single prediction you have about the future and try to predict how your and Matthew's relationship will fare after I've run away. It's an objective truth that both of you are at fault for ruining everything that I could have been, but I'd love to see the sorts of arguments in which you try to assign "fault" to a single person.

Dear Matthew, you can gather every single shady scientist that you have ever come across and get all of them to do research on whether it's even ethical to do experiments like that with a child. Oh wait I forgot you don't even know the word "ethics" so maybe you can gather every single non-shady scientist that you have ever come across and they can tell you.

Dear Norman, actually I think you're pretty cool and you don't deserve whatever Vivian and Matthew might throw your way now that I'm gone. However, it is my decision to run away and never return to this horrible household ever again and I urge you to please never run away like I have, let alone in a misguided search for me. I trust you on this one.

But anyway the train is about to arrive at its destination and then I will do something. I will find myself an environment and a new school and there will be new people that I will actually engage with without needing to consider stupid divinations that never work and never will. And even though being happy is an anathema that I sincerely hope I won't ever have to endure, at least there won't be a stupid tug of war to try and fix me or whatever - and especially no one will be talking about how I'm a terrifying human being and if I ever find a kid terrified that I might be lurking under their bed and it's not anyone connected to my old place, I will just have to move again.

But anyway that's it and I will keep this updated.

Yours truly, Madeline Myers.