Close Enough To Touch

Authors Note: The Truth

 
     I like to think we all have it in us, or perhaps I don't like to think it but I still do regardless. Especially when concerning the extraordinary circumstances in which this story takes place. Deep down somewhere, there is that other person who you wish you could be, but for whatever reason; moral obligation, personal values, or the façade of an image we try to uphold whilst parading about the general public, we block them out and try to just skim by with what we can manage. Often, we're meager in what we think we can manage. We take on as little as possible, it's just easier that way. For most people anyway, that tends to be the case.
I, however, am a glutton for punishment and take on far more than one person should at any given time in their lives. I know no other way.

The person that this story is about showed me very clearly what we can achieve if we stop blocking that other person out. The negative asshole who's always got some lazy excuse as to why we don't need to do more. The person that this is about made me take risks to be bold, to be fearless. And sometimes to just be completely absurd. He told me that we are all afraid of something, and we are, but most of all we are afraid of the unknown.

Silly creatures of habit we are, and whenever we encounter something out of the ordinary or that we can't explain or understand, we tend to be afraid of it. We do things and make choices centered on what we think the outcome will be, however, if we don't know what the outcome will be, we are far more likely to side-step making a choice that will leave us unaware of the future. We don't take risks, we don't stand up for ourselves, and we don't allow ourselves to believe in the things we truly want to believe in. There are fiends, brutes, and monstrosities, in each and every one of us. But there are also protagonists and conquerors and heroes who fight for a cause. Even if that cause is something that seems appalling in the eyes of others, if it means enough and will be worth a few lost lives, we can still find reasons to weigh the odds. I got tired of weighing the odds, and I let that other person step in and make me see the unknown for what it really is.

Because if you look at it hard enough, and stare it in the face, it will no longer be unknown at all. It might also be terrifying, amazing, and sometimes even life-changing, and as far as I am concerned that is well worth the risk.

I guess it all really started a little over a year ago. I mean I imagine it had been going on forever, and imagining is probably the majority of the problem, but it really became an issue last year. You see I have one of those personalities that is just really big and loud and obnoxious. However, there has always been another side that only certain people really close to me know about. It's shady and fanatical and it has an affinity towards, and thoroughly enjoys, the endless pursuit of obscure knowledge and uncanny things.

See, I'm a writer, (first problem) a ghostwriter as an accidental career choice really.
But in order to be a real ghostwriter, you need to be a real ghost.
That's what some ghostwriters don't seem to get. So, I fashioned an alter-ego for this purpose but he became so much more...

Wolfgang (Second problem.) All the dark thoughts I have ever had, my incomprehensible interest in the occult history of the 13th-18th century, and witchcraft. An abundance of knowledge about my dead alchemist heroes and the lives of the necromancers, all of it, went into him. Making him who he was and manifesting into him everything I wanted so desperately to be. I gave him a heart and emotions (though not very nice ones) and friends, and they all became so real in my mind that not long after his name had magically come to me one day in the car, he started to become a character in a lot of my stories.

Soon he had a face and a body, and body language to go with it. I knew everything about him from his eloquent British accent, and his habitual sophisticated choices in clothing, right down to his Holt Renfrew leather gloves. As well as the delightful detail that he was an insufferable arrogant jerk, but a very respectable-looking one, I must say. He was taller than me, which doesn't really say much considering I'm only 5'2. He must have been about 5'11 with fantastic posture that reduced most other men to appearing much shorter than him by comparison. I'm not sure whether it was his usual nocturnal lifestyle, or that perhaps the sun was simply too afraid to touch him, but he was desperately in need of a little color. But it suited him.

He looked like a vampire, especially since he was usually dressed as though he was either exceptionally miserable but proper about it, or going to a funeral. I was more of a 'dirty jeans full of holes or needing replacement, coupled with offensive T-shirts' with one of my many steampunk-styled jackets kinda chick. Wolf was the very characterization of a man to be intimidated by, with the exception of his hair. It was unruly and no matter what he attempted to do with it there was no hope, so he gave up entirely, which took him down from being extremely chilling to looking like a reembodied, but far more attractive, Tom Waits in a suit. All but the voice and the grammar anyway.

Then there was me, hopelessly glued to my laptop for at least 12 hours a day, usually more than that but in an attempt to give the impression that I had some semblance of a normal life, I'll lie and say 12 hours was typically all. I'm a very bad liar by the way, which only makes this story more unsettling. I had also given up on my hair, aside from dying it some outlandish color every few months when I would stumble away from the screen and pick up a bottle of rum, a box of bleach, and a brilliant yet colorful idea.

In one of my many past professions, before I decided that social interaction was over-rated and to be entirely avoided if, at all possible, I was a tattoo artist. When I first began that career, I did a lot of practicing on myself, which led to more the 70 tattoos I currently have. Every now and then I have another brilliant and colorful idea about what I should tattoo on myself next, yet again often motivated by the procurement of 40% alcoholic beverages. One of the more plucky ones happens to be the alchemical symbol of sulfur on the side of my left eye. I should get rid of my tattoo stuff, but that would just be crazy. I love my ridiculous artistic choices. Though, perhaps not more than the love I created when I created Wolfgang.

He took over my life when I dreamed him up and I don't regret it for a second, though it was a bit peculiar when I couldn't get him out of my head or stop talking about him all day every day. When I wasn't talking about him, I was thinking about him. The people who I had told about him were starting to think I had fallen off the brink of madness which I precariously stood, and plunged into complete insanity when I began saying things like, "Oh, Wolfgang would have something to say about that." Or, "Wolf would rock that jacket." Ridiculous little things that I would spontaneously think of that reminded me of him. Now, so many years later, many of my friends and my son say the same things...I wrote and published this novel over five years ago. Now, I've come back to it to do a proper edit, and publish it again properly now that I know how to.