Dreaming the life

Dear Suze,

Turin Brakes on, time pressure (it’s already Sunday evening): I am ready to write. But what will I write about? No exciting things have happened to me this week, and I can’t write about my main activity because I wrote about that last time :P. Sometimes my life seems so boring and reality seems to be so unsatisfying. Of course that’s when I escape into stories, as I suspect you have been doing with adventure time. Books, series and my own imagination, they helped me through quite some boring days.

Last year I had a period of boredom too and then I decided to take escapism one step further. I decided to fictionalize my life. I have a diary entry in which I explain every detail of it. The idea is this: I take all the elements of my life, and think of an exciting alternative for them. Maybe this is hard to understand, but I’ll tell you what I did. At that time, I was living in a room in the house of my landlord. It was an old, boring man, and it was a boring house in a boring neighborhood. But in my fictionalized life, the neighborhood was full of magic: elves and dragons lived there, and of course there was a mafia-like organization present. Coincidentally, my landlord happened to be the leader of this organization and when he was gone (he was often away to Brasil) I had to take care of his business. In this way, I took every element in my life and translated it into something else. My addiction to anime became a real addiction to a weird kind of drugs called Anma, the friend that had introduced me to anime became my dealer and my lessons Japanese became magic lessons.

I know it sounds crazy, but believe me, I know it was silly and I never mistook it for something real. I just wanted to turn my life into a story, to create a dream I could live in. I thought that it could become more than just a dream, because it could act as a filter to reality. I could look at something in reality and think about the alternative version. Because reality is so boring.

Don’t deny it. It’s a fact that in reality  not everything is as exciting, fantastical or as perfect as it could be, and the people aren’t as nice, witty and/or attractive. If a writer wrote my life down just as it happened, critics would probably complain about the lack of coherence (as a lot of characters and situations just don’t have any effect later on), the huge amount of unnecessary detail and the overall lack of plot. And the overall dullness of course.

Still, it didn’t work out, my fictionalized life. I guess real life got into the way of my little project. It’s funny that way, isn’t it? Despite all its dullness, there are a lot of times when it just grabs your attention and won’t let it go. Because, well, it has one advantage: it’s real. And it’s really about me.

Lots of love,

Marly

Ps. Don’t worry, I’m not unhappy about my life. I’m just bored sometimes. And I love stories.