To My Dear Ones:

[Harliven Darkshine]

To my dear ones:

I’ve been ill. Naturally, this isn’t an excuse worthy of long absences, culminating ignorance, or deteriorating disposition. It was not, as is to be expected with me, some petty illness of the heart borne of the love which so strikes at adolescents and robs them of their sensibilities. Knowing me, you should know that my illnesses – the ones which cripple me – are never so silly as to grip at my physical body or touch at my emotional one; I’ve had a sick spirit, a rotting mind. I went from an adamantly aged but naïve child into the mindset of a dying coward very rapidly, as many youths of the day are wont to do.

Enraptured by my own frivolities I cut at my own spirit and, poetically and peacefully, proceeded to destroy every inkling of identity I ever contained. Throughout these years I have saturated conditions, miseries and inadequacies and made them my playmates; I degenerated to the point of feeling disgustingly sorry for my existence, and returned to my paltry childhood impulse to isolate myself and disappear. I recalled, and told my brother this on a lonely, shadow-smothered morning, all about how I hid myself when I felt others concerned, distracted or bothered by my little presence as a child, and how I hid at unused attic doors and in secret niches to erase my presence from happy affairs, listening to others enjoy themselves without worrying for yet another child racing about and causing mayhem. As I got older, however, I lost my niches; I was at a loss as to how to disappear this time.

Don’t mistake me when I say this. It would be silly, you all know, to bask in my dramatics and think, for even the briefest moment, that I was thinking thoughts of death. Immature – how immature, and how troublesome! – it would’ve been for someone with my deliberate vanity to even let the thought pass through my head, and cause such a self-centered commotion! I always wonder, when I begin my letters like this, if my sense of feeling sounds so foolish that I have to console all my so-called friends that my bodily self has nothing to do with ‘vanishing’ from the world. What I do (and did) instead unintentionally causes (and caused) such a profound concern about my friends – and whatever family members could distract themselves from our present disunity long enough – that it defeats (and defeated) the point I try (and was trying) to achieve. I withdrew into myself and, for the passed months – maybe years, I don’t know when this started – I have remained dormant and sleeping through all of my actions, taking in everything of my friends and pouring it back out disguised to keep them consoled.

I was physically ill recently, and it seemed to reflect my state of mind. Every person on the planet has had such a severe fever that they have also had chills. I, however, was suspended for days in the freezing cold, unable to warm myself. I remember having one such fit in class, when I was silly enough to think myself recovered, and recalled a friend who reached over in the heat and wrapped her arms around me, and guided my hand like a puppet’s in writing the notes for the class. I think I stirred a little then, but the cold kept me company for a long time, and I spent more of my time sleeping than pretending to be alert in my waking hours. It suited me, this physical illness that made people afraid of and for me because the doctors, panicking, called it unnatural but didn’t know what was wrong with me. As more concern poured onto me I, self-loathing, selectively shut everyone out and hoped to escape their notice again, like the first two weeks when I had managed to evade everyone and sleep, unquestioned, in my room after classes for long periods of time and changed my clothes several times at school.

It took me a revolution to rid myself of the need to vanish. I have realized that, as time has progressed, I have swallowed all the anger and injustice ever serviced to me and spit back seeming ignorance, dismissal, and unfeeling to those who I thought to have wronged me most. I can endure my spitfire friends in their rages, loving and saying nothing, and watching them crawl back to me humble and adoring; I cannot, however, endure my most precious people flinging their criticism and insults, because I cannot fight with them in tongue lest they loathe me more, and they never ask for the insights of my disposition, thinking they know everything about me but never conversing with me. I basked in it and, reveling in impressing them, I slowly began to prove them right. They told me I didn’t love; I didn’t love. They told me I was cold; I was cold. They told me I didn’t care; I didn’t care.

It took three years culminating into a revelation of my loneliness that I discovered what I was doing: how, in the face of the disunity of my most precious people, I had ceased being a leader and instead spited them all with my childishness. I became everything they despised and, out of obligation, they cruelly held onto each other and forced a dispassionate sort of care. Recently I marveled at how destructive I’d become – how much spirit I had stolen out of them. The present state of mayhem was something I had done to them all more than any person had done to each other and then blamed on each other. Although there was strife amongst my precious ones, I had fully turned my back on the effort. In my private, bitter tears and caustic mockery, my lifeless care and my icy contempt, I had not only destroyed myself but their spirits, too. My name, my given name, means ‘joy’. I had isolated myself and sucked every inspiring aspect out of my veins and ruined their hopes for the unconditional happiness I used to bring because of my own silly hurt. I found myself, however.

After three days of subconscious behavior – returning to command of the house, making summer feasts and spending long nights massaging my father’s legs as he slept – and my elder sister’s own hysterical snap, I looked at my brother’s face. He was enjoying himself at that precise moment, but the edges of misery were lined into everything and, though that had stirred my conscious more than once, I had never been able to arouse him from his stupor, and remembered a quiet confidence in the middle of the night: that I had been the only person in the world to ever make him happy. I found feeling and heat; I worked to reconcile everyone; I laughed and sang and pleased and realized myself again – my unbridled potential, my singing bones. I had not done everything here, but I had done a lot of the damage, and I had to recover the distrust planted between myself and everyone else. The most amazing thing, however, is that unrest cultivated between people – people precious only to one another – is always destroyed by the slightest hint of sincere reconciliation. I learned this. I reached out and decided what love meant, and fought to adequately represent it.

As a child of western civilization, I realized that many of the concepts I clung to were useless wastes; my real values, so engrained in my sense of self, hadn’t been acknowledge since I was small. I have recognized, in the last month, all the things about myself which I used to adore: my sense of collectivism and my manipulation of individualism, religion practiced on a grounds of fulfillment instead of contempt, and an alien concept of love which transcended all dramatics and had nothing to do with the single adjective ‘true’. I realized my unconscious deceptions – how easily I knew how to lie, or to make myself impressive, or to comfort the ignorant! Unfocused and uncontrolled, my self-loathing had been misplaced; now, with my curious rebirth, I feel as though I have reached up through the sands that buried me with this hatred conformed to calculation, and slowly those raging imperfections of my being are being challenged, conquered, and smothered. I no longer cage them or let them run rampant, but I feel am beating everything in my blood, assimilating everything into a glorious sense of being alive, and I have told the world this and found all my old dear ones enraptured again. I am enraptured again. Presently, it occurs to me that I am alive for the first time since the innocence of my childhood – somehow purer than the self-destructive beast I was before.

I am filled with love for everything, and I find myself able to once again scrawl eloquent words across the pages of the world and be pleased with myself. I have lit up my father’s voice and my sister’s face and have taken command of my duties again. I am the conscience of my lovely ones, a shaper of people again, and I have an uproariously amusing sense of arrogance which has replaced all the fear and self-consciousness of before. I feel strong, as though I have shed every burden strapped to my shoulders only to willingly embrace them in my arms.

This affair was one of great joy, intrigue, and hurt to me. It took a tragedy in all aspects of my person – the mind, body and soul – to shake it all. I suppose, to some of you, it is like glimpsing a hint of the face of God, but to me that seems a minor and vague explanation, and incorrect because my awakening has nothing to do with religion or faith or belief, even if it involved the rediscovery of all those things (do you understand?) and because I always believed in everything, and not a single God could stir me in the wretched era we live in. It was everything, pushing against me, that pressured me open and rushed the world back into my fingertips – made me feel. I do not know how to express it to any of you, but I think that you all have felt it or will feel it soon, because it seems to be an unspoken right of passage (and rebirth) that all participants of life in this age go through. I feel like one who dreams of wisdom all her life and then awakens with the dream in her heart, knowing something of the world.

I have decided I adore everything. I adore mortality and fatality and poverty and greed. I am in awe by cruelty and kindness and love and manipulation. I love guidance and learning and fear and scorn. I remember all my old songs: I like it in the city when the air is so thick and opaque. I love it to see everybody in short skirts, shorts and shades. I am walking now everywhere, and everything fascinates me again. I am a found child of a lost tale, and have absorbed everything into myself and reached exultation, peace, and pleasure.

The last thing I must say is that I am not new. I have not been recreated. I have not been changed. I have been reinvented, however. Let me clarify this: I have discovered myself and a sort of light which doesn’t blind me, and I am in complete fixation of it. Maybe sometime I will tell you my discoveries about love and truth and fear and happiness, which will sound naïve and ignorant and immature, because I am only seventeen this November and ‘waking’ does not constitute becoming wise at such an age as this, but I am finished with being dead. I am finished with being vanished. I am finished with my old self, I have shed my skin, and I have conquered the simple maze of my mind in which I pretended to be lost for so long.

To my dear ones: I am back, and it’s strange that I write this here and only give it to you, my Dustanovans. Who has been more uninvolved from this misery than I have – though I have thought on you always, and wondered at how I crashed completely when I stopped writing with you? But I am expressing myself, I don’t care, and I am being reckless and letting you all judge this strange composition before I sit and deliberately write again, trying to fit into all the worlds I abandoned, and making amends to those friends – in my world and outside it – who have watched, terrified, as I ceased being a leader and instead a figurehead empress in their lives.

How arrogant I sound! Like a madwoman, maybe. Perhaps, because this is Dustanova, I have allowed every one of my miserable characters to interfere with everything I’ve said – to sharpen the edges, to season it with their own passions. I am alive again, however, and this is what matters. I hope that you never knew that I was ill in the first place.

I hope to see you all soon.

Yours truly…

[Meleth Darkshine]

How did I miss this..

[Harliven Darkshine]

Ah, well, I was sneaky. xD; I think I wanted to post it as much as I figured it should be disregarded. Anyway, it's pretty trivial now; just something I had to write and just... get off my chest and close up. x3