FML

Sometimes I take a step back, and wonder if I am sane. Then the voices tell me that asking the question proves I'm not insane.

I guess it comes from playing roleplaying games, and how I create my characters. I never simply run through the book and put together a character with some interesting stats. That would work for a simple hack and slash game, but I'm looking for more in a RPG. I dive down, getting inside the character's head, and getting a feel for the complexities of their way of thinking.

But the simple truth is that you can't get into someone's head without them getting into yours.

At times, I'm simply going along with my day, and I find that, without warning, I've slipped into thinking like one of my characters, seeing the world through their eyes, approaching problems as they would, even though there is no such thing as magic in the world, and I definitely don't have a sword at my side. And then I catch myself, and shake away the thoughts, and return to being me.

It is times like that which make me think, why not? Why couldn't I be more than the shy guy in the corner, too oblivious and too scared to make any kind of move on someone he likes without a computer screen in between? Why couldn't I let go the man I was, and become the dashing rogue, the cunning warrior, the witty poet? Why not just burst into song, and sing for a time that existed only in a fantasy game?

And yet, I am trapped in this flabby form, prisoner of my own insecurities. I long to set aside that form, and become the legend I created, a man who has no fear, a man who can act in the face of adversity, and flirt with the lady even as he trades blows and banter with the villain.

But I cannot do that. I cling to sanity, and refuse to offer myself to the blessed oblivion of the imagined. I am a prisoner in a high tower, the windows all unbarred. I could escape if I just slipped out the window, but I know I cannot, because the fall would destroy me. And so I sit at the window, and lust for those things that I know I will never see, the things I could never be, the things that I may never know. I sit there, and it brings me both pleasure and pain, for though looking through the window brings an ache to my heart, if it was shut, I would go mad, trapped with not even a glimmer of hope to sustain me.

The world is a wonderful place, if you're the attractive, the popular, the wealthy, the fearless. But I am just an overweight man, shy, broke, and all too aware of my own failings to be fearless. There are things I would like from this world, but they are closed to me. Soon I'll be twenty-seven, working at a desk, and never even been on a date, to say nothing of anything else. Hell, the only time a girl pays any attention to me is when I go to a strip club. This world is not meant for people like me.

Or maybe I am not meant for this world? Maybe these characters I create are all simply echoes of past lives, rattling down the hallways of time, and my malcontent festers for the fact that I compare my life to theirs, and see myself wanting.

I wonder if simply ending it all will release me from this cycle of hell, and return me to that cavalcade of voices so that I might begin again, in a form more suited, and be who I was meant to be.

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.

Hamlet, Act III, Scene 1

And yet, I find myself restrained, fearing that undiscovered country. And I cling desperately to my window, not daring to cast myself out it, but unable to turn away from it. And the pain continues. And I see the entirety of my existence boiling down to a single phrase: FML.