Tragedy

"Have you ever heard of IFS?" 

There's something about realizing that I am so profoundly broken that it can be quantified through fractured parts of the psyche. I swallowed thickly, my face mottled with embarrassing splotches of red. 

"Um...I'm not sure if it's what I'm thinking of" 

I considered reintegrating these personified parts of me. Suddenly I felt more haunted than before, as though I were not the only one occupying the structure of my being. Nothing had changed, yet I was thrown into a different, more acute state, dowsed in the etheric substance of awareness like cold water upon the realization that the world I had always lived in, the world I had always called my own was more than a reprieve but a separate place unto itself. I had never been so much more aware of the lack of cohesiveness within my being, broken parts unaware of their divorce from completion like some psychic Frankenstein in the shape of a young woman. 

"It's gonna be hard. You'll likely...regress into a childlike state at times." 

If I were to induct someone into my world it would be through the VHS tapes of retro horror and sci-fi movies I look for fractals of myself in. My personal writings from the past months all click into place as part of some horrid puzzle machination, time travel as a metaphor for lost time spent in unknown places within my own psychology like time lost in an alien abduction. 

There's a morbid sense of comfort that accompanies this knowledge; that I had broken apart to console myself in some poor imitation of what I never received. In a way, it meant I was not alone, I never really was. 

"You created these people inside of you because you didn't have anyone to fulfill your emotional needs." 

The words weigh heavily on me two days later. Somehow knowing the lines between reality and imagination do not make it less disorientating to know I make no emotional distinction. That this intangible limbo I exist in has never been enough, yet it is farther away from present awareness than I realized, that I've been dreaming my whole life. How does one unlearn the fabric of their existence? 

Billy Idol's Flesh for Fantasy plays dimly on an old tape recorder I procured a while back. The cassette itself is new; there's a darker sense of irony I hadn't been aware of when I'd initially picked it up a few days ago from the shelf under the vinyls at a used bookstore. I regard the foreshadowing sardonically. I think of the fantasies I'd clung to and befriended over the years. The trickster character from an old horror movie, the misanthrope hacker I pretended wrote to me in a composite book,Who’s voice I could hear when falling asleep. A number of strange, lonely characters I'd projected this daemon, this animus onto for lack of being understood. I had to split myself in two to avoid loneliness. I'd always known I haunted myself, but not to such a pathological level. It made sense when I found the faux-worn composite book why I kept circling back to symbols lost to a half remembered past. It was more than the pangs of young adulthood, I was looking for parts of myself that have been misplaced, safely stowed away within recollections sweetened by my daemonic projections. I don’t want to leave this beautiful surreal place within me despite its friction with adulthood. I still don't have the courage to finish the notebook, even as I've returned to this friend of mine for the first time as an adult, now equipped with the context of time to grasp the irony of being the imaginary friend of an imaginary friend.