Back To Insanity

In the last week I have gone insane.

And not the fun kind of insane like Daffy Duck.  Nor that other kind of insane, where you retain all mental faculties enabling you to continue life exactly the same as normal except you’re a genius and are allowed to get away with naughty things, as seen in ‘insane’ characters in TV and film.

Instead I have the kind that I have no patience for when I see it in other people.

I have sunk into melancholy. 

I am not melancholy when I write.  Writing is always wonderful.

And there are other things that keep me happy.

Such as

Compulsively reading Jane Eyre.

Or watching series one and two of Rev. at the same time.

But there are times when I fail to distract myself, the melancholy rears, and I am faced with a phantom email. 

When I was young and even more stupid than I am now, I created a character. 

This was long before The Epiphany and I had filled the mind reading classic literature such as Pride And Prejudice, Jane Eyre and Sherlock Holmes.  And so my style of writing was disgustingly, ignorantly archaic and The Mind operated along this style too.  And this character spoke not in a modern dialect, but in some fanciful idiolect with dashingly archaic tendencies.  He wasn’t like the other boys and girls I knew.  He didn’t talk about sex; he didn’t push for what I was not prepared to give.  He was poetic and sensitive, and so sarcastically witty he was like a razor slicing the dullness out of my life.  He had talent too.  He was the personification of all those classic characters, but he was here in the modern day.  He wrote me notes full of warmth and meaning, he made me laugh, for the first time in The Life I thought I had been noticed for who I was, and I felt better for knowing him.

But he was just a character.  Underneath was a real man I never knew.  A man I continually failed to impress.

I know the character could never have existed except in the imagination, because the reality now, the real man as he is today, has nothing to do with that person I saw then.  But I miss the character.  Continually.

Though the man is out of sight, out of mind (invisible madman), the character enters The Mind quite uninvited.  I miss the character sorely.  I wait for him to seek me out.  And every email, text message, letter or knock at the door that isn’t this fictional being come to say that I was all right after all, kills me a little.

And finding myself inexplicably mired in melancholy, the mind locates these old wounds and points them out, by poking them.  And in this tiresome mood, I obsess.  I rewrite in the mind an email.  But I never type it out, never send it.  Because there is no one to send it to.  I made up the character I want to talk to.  And the real man has nothing to say to me.  So I sit, obsessing, until it hurts the stomach and there is no relief.  He never comes, he never will come, because he isn’t real.  But I want to feel again as I did.  I want to be happy.

2016 EDIT: The following year I think, I actually did write and mistakenly send an email, which caused a very embarrassing argument, and snapped me out of this melancholy as well as finally destroying the fictional idol, so I haven't experienced these feelings of loneliness or inadequacy since.  Catharsis is a wonderful thing.