Fiction?

In a fashion similar to Don Quixote's, my brain has been turned to shit by fiction of the cheap kind. The effect it's had on me has been the opposite, though. Instead of injecting passion, courage and dreams into my everyday, i've become unable to see magic or meaning anywhere but in fiction. Life seems so dull in comparison, most of the time. I've turned into a person who very rarely cries, except in the face of fiction. It has me so well trained that even in the cheesiest, most artificial of moments my eyes water. I cried at Titanic, and the condition has been worsening over the years: tonight I felt like crying even while watching The Return of the King. This is truly, truly pathetic. I hate the movie, the theatricals of it, the cheap, cheap manipulation of images and actions and ideas to move the people, too, in such predictable ways! Moving images to move people. An industry!

Relationships on this side of the screen and the page are never so pure and intense, though. They are mined by insecurities and by the absence of omniscient point of views. Moments and meanings can never be pinned down with the same certainty, and there is no sympathetic audience out there.

But most probably i'm being unfair to these things which, in the end, are merely the materialization of someone else's imagination. I do cherish and admire the power they represent, our unbelievable ability to shape reality out of unreality.

The guilt is all mine, for not having made a life for myself. For having been scared of loving, of getting hurt. For having always chosen the easy way, for having escaped and put barriers, for having taken refuge in fantasy and forgotten how to get back.

Melodramatic, yes, but that's what words do. In fact, it doesn't feel half as bad as these words seem to insinuate. It just feels flat, much of the time. Senseless. And then again, some other times it doesn't, and there's beauty impossible to encompass in full.