distant dreams

rounding it up (finale)

I like rounding decimals up. Neat numbers without pesky negligible(s). Weird kink, but there it is. (Joking. Poor sense of humour.)

My French GSCE scraped an A* because the exam board rounded into the whole number. My first year in law school was salvaged because my average score rounded up clung onto the edge of "acceptable". My parents rounded up their experiences (frustrations, joys, caution) and fed it to me like a hospital drip, so that it became all I am made of and set the scope of my abilities. I am a round little ball. Bounce, bounce, bouncing along.

If I successfully end this weird little series it will be my first successful ending to something longer than a chapter. I will treat myself to a small swell of pride that squeezes the heart. It will sustain me (I want to believe) to keep writing. To keep pouring these stuffs and things with words and form in hopes of getting better at it somehow. It will mean I have a thing to show. Although that thing remains confined to my own paltriness, because this series is only my recollection. Momentary at best. A flimsy, innocent, easily disposable thing. Even then - all that would be left of me is this indestructible glimmer of pride. Try as I might, it cannot be broken. Merely displaced in a foreseeable but uncontrolled continuity.

I am not made up of only the things I have shown you here. There is so much more, but they fit into other stories that are not my own. Stories that will be delivered from the mouths, hands, eyes, feet, hearts, lungs, stomachs, shadows and tears of other characters and people I conjure. An avid observer might spot them but most will be concealed well. That is my hope.

One last leap into my ocean of memories is an appropriate finish - off we go.

The curtains rise, and my arms raise high before swooping down into a deep bow. Applause thundering in my ears. People are whooping. They are happy with the performance, the song, the delivery, the comical amateur quality of a good school play.

I feel accomplished through this applause. This is a sense of accomplishment I have become addicted to - an opiate consisting of verbal praise, approving eyes, and recognition. Ears that pick up the slightest of rustles and coughs. Ears that can discern between an awkward silence and a deep, captivated silence. 

When all the lights are trained on you (the entertainment) your other senses sharpen to compensate for the black mass before you. The dry nervousness that grips your throat, the shiver that momentarily overtakes all control from your limbs, the breathlessness as you ascend into a space detached from normality to present somebody else's art with your own existence. I have converted these things into happiness, fulfilment. A conceited and wonderful deception. It fed my the pride that lived in my gut, my lungs, my brain. It fed everything, for what it was worth.

Performance became important to me. Every act became overly deliberate and planned. Every exam was a stage, and every stage became an exam. Life mixed with fantasy. I floated, my ears plugged to all else so long as I got what I wanted to get. So long as I remained above the average in everything I attempted. So long as I was labeled exceptional, and worthy of jealousy. I breathed through a mask made of bubble material, accustomed to the air within this slippery slope of complacency and ignorance. My parents looked happy with me - what else did I need to care about?

Turns out, there was so much I ended up neglecting. In my characteristic impatience and hunger for this theatrical opiate I had cast aside thoughts of normal friendship, of self-development and emotional growth. I had labelled crushes as silly, and my own crushes as damning so that I was no longer able to differentiate between genuine acts and artificial smiles. I ignored whatever made me uncomfortable, and lost my temper at whatever made me unsteady. This mask, this bubble, this additional drug in my blood vessels - must remain. What might have stopped me, might have given me reason to pause and consider these things all ended up buried and pushed aside. For a good part of my secondary school years, I nailed my version of "acceptable" forcefully into place, knocking the lid over the coffin of any true meaning to my actions.