Overlap

Chapter 6: Rouge Emotions

<09/07/2009 - 10:30 | Saffrin Middle School (Gym), Austell, GA, USA>

As the weeks of school and weekends passed by, that around me which I found strange only grew stronger, so gradually that I never immediately noticed. I could never fully understand why I was so convinced that something important was out there, but some deep part of me knew. It was as if I could sense some kind of cosmic disturbance or change, all without the detail or evidence to feel that way. At the same time, my fascination to the stars became a whole part of my mind every single day and night.

Obsession was a close way to describe how stuck my mind was to the cosmos of space, but it wasn't an exact descriptor. At the time, I had nothing else to call this feeling by. Minute in and minute out, about 80% of all my parallel thought processes were infatuated by the concept of outer space. All of my subconscious driven daydreams soon became all about distant worlds and what other aliens would live like. I could control those daydreams at will, but I didn't want to.

In a way, it began to feel like these thoughts were not entirely my own, yet I did not dislike them either. This powerful obsession didn't feel bad or scary. Something inside me wanted to embrace them instead, to embrace these feelings and let them control me entirely. Though I still knew the difference between fantasy and reality, I favored fantasy, wishing it to be reality the longer this dragged on.

Every time I got a chance to go outside, especially at nighttime with clear weather, all those thoughts quickly accelerated, enforcing that obsession tenfold. The twinkling stars of the universe were too beautiful to look away from. Often they would capture and stun me, forcing me to appraise their elegant beauty and infinite wonder of possibility. Seconds of staring into the stars could turn to minutes without me becoming aware. My focus would shift up there whether I was ready for it or not, whether I wanted to or not, though I always wanted it to.

The new music I've been collecting has been making those feelings even more powerful. Though I used to listen to ordinary music genres, I now favor instrumental and emotional music (the kind without any lyrics), as well as orchestral music focused on female choirs. Playing it at all seemed to excite my thoughts back to the same subject and intensify my wonder, and if I should ever play any of these songs through my earphones while staring into the stars, it would take some external distraction to snap me from the trance I would fall into; I would become incapable of snapping out of the trance myself.

It wasn't just music that amplified this feeling; the cold temperature of the fall would cause this too. Without any control over this new sensation, I suddenly enjoyed the cold weather more than I ever had before. I worshiped and prayed for the outdoors to become even colder no matter how uncomfortable it made my physical body. I loved the cold, and at the same time I was certain that I had no say in coming to that recent conclusion; for I never felt one way or the other before now. It wasn't an emotional state I could resist in the first place, so I never tried to.

But since I more often craved this dual-factor sensation, I began taking night walks more often too, despite how much my overprotective parents tried to stop me from doing so. I cared not about safety or virtue, only the obsessions my overactive mind was addicted to.

It was not just my mental obsessions that became stronger over time either. Since my sixth grade started, I've begun to notice that I've purposely been putting myself at distance both physically, emotionally, and socially from every single male in this school, be it a student, teacher, or stranger. Lately I've been doing everything I can to avoid them, but I've only become aware of it today. It took some time to realize that I've been indirectly fighting every way that I can to exclude myself from any particular situation that got me near a dude, even if it was just sitting next to one in class. The more I tried to think about it, the angrier I became.