I am going to write this really fast because as soon as I am done I can’t wait to spend time in . . . the made-up world in my head. It’s like an addiction. Actually I think it might be an addiction, for real. Daydreaming is sort of a word for it, but daydreaming is to this . . . compulsion what Kool-Aid is to blood. People who write crazy obsessive fan fiction totally know what I mean, I think.
I don’t know how they write it down, that embarrassing fanfic. Written down, the adventure is pathetic and dead, it is nothing. Laughable. Lines of quality coke not inhaled but mixed with Gold Bond powder and stuck in your sweaty running shoes. But when I am on an intense emotional storyline in my head, going there is honestly like shooting up, and that’s not a metaphor. I think if you had those brain-sensor disks on my head, you would probably get the same reading as someone who is, well, probably not on coke or heroin, but way stoned, at least.
When I am on it, when I have a high, new narrative going (I don’t always have one like that — they spring on me leopard-like when I accidentally read or watch or hear something or someone that trips the emotional obsession switch), my day becomes a pantomime of going through motions until I can be by myself and be in my head again. If I have two minutes, I will go there. Replaying the same adventure in my head, fifty times, a hundred times, with slight tweaks — it makes everything go away, dulls and dims the painfulness of the world. Isn’t this how addicts describe their days?
Obviously it’s not as serious — replaying scripts in one’s head doesn’t destroy your teeth and veins and brain and bank account — but tasks go undone, work is procrastinated, and ultimately quality of life will be compromised, right? No, I am not going to tell you my adventures in my head. They are mine mine mine mine, and if I share them, they dissolve like fog in sunlight. I feel that place pulling my brain right now, arms tugging on my brain. I have to go. The object of my desire — that would be my imaginary self, formidable and endlessly compelling — waits for me, promises me everything I ever wanted.
And I will have everything I ever wanted, over and over, until its color fades and that particular script becomes tired, like when you watched your favorite movie twenty times in a row and finally got sick of it. And then I have a sort of normal life in the real world until there is another trigger. But that’s not now. Now, the high waits for me. I have to go.
The 88th Night 