#how does this somehow keep getting worse?

[calliecwrites]

Pretending

Sometimes pretending to be a person is easy. Sometimes it isn’t. On the bad days, numbers start crawling on the page, straight lines curl, and I’ve got to remind myself to keep my face on. I want to stretch my other limbs, but the world down here is so thin, and so easy to tear. I have to be careful not to think too hard about anything, or it might start seeping through. You have no idea how much power you have, someone told me once, being able to create with a thought. And the children of my mind look too much like madness to humans.

Cases of madness worldwide are 1.3% higher on days like that.

But I don’t want to drive them mad. I’m here to protect them, not devour them. Not this time. So I have to pretend. Though with some of them practically throwing themselves at me, that isn’t always easy.

Writers are the worst. I let my ‘pretending to be a person is hard’ line slip into the coffee I’m nursing while my head pounds with the effort of keeping it all together, and her only response is, “Yeah, I know.”

“‘A writer is a world pretending to be a person’,” she quotes at me, and then, “That’s a deliberate misquote of something Victor Hugo said: ‘A writer is a world trapped in a person’. But I like my version better. If my soul wasn’t in a human-shaped body, sometimes I think I’d turn into a galaxy or something. Or maybe more than that. A multiverse.”

Humans are famously good at detecting things that don’t quite look human. I’m not doing a particularly good job of staying out of the uncanny valley today, but she doesn’t seem to have noticed. Or, worse, she’s noticed and likes it. Writers are like that sometimes. But I’ve been deliberately staying out of her mind. I can tell it’s twisty and complex, and I’m afraid the slightest touch from me would tip her over into madness. Or, who knows, maybe she’s right, and it would trigger her transformation into some kind of eldritch goddess that would put even me to shame. I don’t want to think about what that would do to the paper-thin world down here.

I’ve been so focused on my coffee, I’ve accidentally created another one. She hasn’t noticed.

“I do wonder what being a person is actually like, though,” she goes on. “You know, actually fitting in with all the weird rules humans have. Actually feeling at home here. And most of them only get to live one life, not all the fragments of all the lives we get to. Imagine that. They’ll never know what it’s like, being able to create with a thought.”

That last part hits too close to home, and I can’t resist taking just one quick peek into her mind.

“Oh, hello,” she says, and looks me in the eye.

I withdraw. No way she should have been able to feel that. And what I saw there – she’s practically a multiverse already, all jammed up there somehow into that tiny human brain.

“I always wondered if telepathy’s real,” she’s saying, “and now you’ve gone and proven it. Do that again, so I can see how you did it.”

No way, I’m not risking that – but she fumbles around and somehow does it anyway.

“There you are!” she says. I twitch back into my defences – why does this have to be happening on a day like this, when I’m barely holding it together anyway? The writing on the menu twists and curls, and customers start walking in circles. This time she notices.

“Ooh, eldritch abomination, is it?” she says. “Here, let me try.”

She squints, and now she’s holding another coffee, too. She takes a sip. “Mmm, just like in my dreams.”

Then she’s looking at me. Not just at my rapidly-slipping human disguise, but really looking at me, all the parts that no human should ever be able to see. But I don’t think she’s human anymore – I think she’s been right at that boundary for a while.

“You know, you really should pay more attention to that,” she says. “I find pretending is much easier if I do something like this—” and she does something, and my own human form snaps back into clarity. “There you go. Get those few things right and most people won’t even notice.”

Meanwhile, her own form is becoming more solid. That’s the only way I can describe it. Soon she’ll be so solid that her slightest movement will tear right through reality like tissue paper.

“Be careful,” I say, “you’re new to this, and this world is fragile—”

But it’s too late. She twitches in just the wrong way, and something tears.

Now everything is inverting. Everything that was packed up tightly inside her brain is becoming outside. The whole world is reforming around us, into one she considers home. I’m unaffected, but the humans are being completely rewritten.

“Hmm,” she muses, observing all the worlds at once. “Looks like I was right about myself.”

And she sees my dismayed expression. Avoiding something like this is exactly why I was being so careful down here. So much for that.

“Don’t worry,” she says, and gives me a reassuring pat somewhere in the fourth dimension. “There’s more than enough room in me for everyone.”

I really like that quote she uses, and use it myself. This story came from thinking - what if it was literally true, and not just a metaphor?

Tag list (tell me if you want to be added):

@avery-victoria-winterlight @dierotenixe @leahnardo-da-veggie @lunadook @mint-and-authoress

@sandyca5tle @scrubbinn @theriomythic-lesbian @void-botanist @wuwojiti

@zzzestyy

[parachutingkitten]

You know, on some level I get why James Somerton's responses have been so strange. My mind would be scrambled too at this point. I mean, imagine being called out by a helicopter pilot.

[codacheetah]

I keep thinking of how I want to taxonomize Siffrin and Loop bc it feels significant to me that Loop and Siffrin both have inherently diverged from the same Traveler Mold they came from. But because I am like a 7 year old I keep sagely nodding to myself going "ah yes... just like mega mewtwo"

[piplupod]

feels like the isolation is a gushing wound and going to the centre is just a small bandage. i think perhaps i am not really ever going to feel okay unless something miraculous happens. i am retaining some semblance of sanity now that I'm leaving the house and socializing with non-family more than once a week, but i am still hurting more than I can really tolerate and I don't know what to do about it. there doesn't seem to be a fix for this that I can enact.

[softshuji]

Any men out there wanna pretend to be my bf to get my parents off my case about marriage? I am so so serious right now.

[milkstoner]

I don't have an insta 😔

I do have to respect that honestly.

[snekdood]

Some of yall deeply underestimate how much some cis men are threatened by trans men and our masculinity. How theres so many cis dudes out there that want to rape us, thinking that will make us detransition. How many incels out there are mad at us for betraying womanhood and not sucking their dick. How much they want to force us to detransition, how much they want to kill us and force us into hiding which, to me, minus well be killing us since theyre smothering who we are for the sake of a status quo. We shake their fundamental understanding of the world. Its one thing for a GIRL to be a tomboy to them. They think its cute, like a baby pretending to be an adult. Its a whole other thing for someone percieved as a woman to try to actually be a man to them. They think thw fact we have the gal to assume we can escape their grasp, to escape the kitchen or whatever tf, means we're disrespecting them and trying to "destroy" them, rather than what it really is, us trying to be independent. We're the exact thing these types of cis men hate. Sometimes they tolerate (emphasis here bc im not saying they accept yall. Dont twist my words)trans women bc they fetishize them but they want to completely eradicate us becayse we threaten the patriarchy by virtue of deciding we dont need a man to take care of us, we want to be the man that takes care of ourselves.

[b0ngwatertearz]

.

[thecherrygod]

/

[dredshirtroberts]

it is not slacking off to write or create it is not slacking off to do things that are fun i am not slacking off or procrastinating right now i'm allowed to do things i enjoy doing for fun including playing games and writing and such

[snowddeong]

JYP fucking having different choreo for male idols and ya'll expect me to not get angry at the fact that a 50 year old man is dancing like that with employees he's known since they were fucking children.... what stopped him from doing this version with Jihyo and Yeji. Sincerely.

And the fact that he didn't do it with Bam shows that he's fully aware of how provocative the dance is and his homophobic ass doesn't even have the balls to do that with another man. Despite it being absolutely fine in his mind to dance like that with women that he could literally be a father too. Okay.

[algolstare]

I cannot sleep at all ;w;

[blueslight]

👎

[dagasinfilo]

hi how do i convince my brain that my symptoms & odd experiences that seem concerning may actually be concerning and probably not something i’m making up for fame&glory

[masculinerose]

Vent in tags, feel free to keep scrolling.

[fatmaclover]

okay. so. what i was worried about happening happened. all the characters that are attacking me in personal ways did that tenfold. but its okay. im really loving all the characters and the shows funny. i imagine ill have more to say beyond "i wanna fuck that soyboy beta cuck" and "im so so giddy from all this gay pining" and "i wish poppy would stop making me wanna cry" later but for now its just more of the same