My head was feeling surprisingly clear from the second I opened my eyes. Of course my laptop was still on my knees on my bed, however I looked at the clock and by some miracle it was only 9am. Huh. Maybe word vomiting my ideas onto a blog before I went to bed wasn't such a bad idea. I opened up my laptop once more, the screen whirring into life and waking me up abruptly with the bright light suddenly in front of my face. I was yet to actually format my blog, so it probably looked almost as ugly as the bedhead look I was sporting at that moment and even though I was treating a public page on the world wide web like my own private diary, if anyone just so happened to stumble upon it, I wanted it to not look like there was a severe lack of effort put into it. And so I found myself clicking onto the page and looking briefly at it, without reading the words I myself had written - that would just be cringeworthy. I flicked my eyes up to the menu bar at the top of the page and recoiled in horror and disgust when I saw a tiny '1' next to my notifications tab. Oh god.

Shit. Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit.

Somebody had stumbled across my little corner of the internet and left a note of their presence for everybody to see - ok, yes I could just delete it but that would feel like some kind of sacrilege in my mind. I hesitated, allowing myself some time to come to a reasonable decision on what to do next. I hadn't even looked at the notification, as I watched the number '1' switch to a number '2'.

Double shit.

It could be a lot worse. It could be so much worse. For a start, it could be a couple of thousand unread notifications instead of a meagre two, but I suspected that such a small number was still very capable of ruining my already mostly ruined life. They might be two good things, like an automated message from the website telling me about new features, maybe, or something else or some kind of random tips that they probably wouldn't actually send out in the first place. They might be two bad things, and the bad things could be anything from a surface level friendly and maybe genuinely kind comment or a semi-kind comment that had some snarkier and cold undertones. It could be an internet troll coming to deliberately attempt to harass a random stranger without even reading the contents of my page which leads them to making highly insensitive comments. Or it could be a stranger who did actually take time out of their life to read it; however if truth be told, they regretted it and hated it so much that they deliberately left me a comment telling me that I was a horrible person and should probably cease to exist. I have no idea which is worse.

After what was probably close to five minutes of dithering with my finger over my mouse pad, I finally plucked up both the courage and the stupidity to click the button. I could feel myself not breathing as I watched my computer process my request like it was the oldest computer on the planet. Still loading. Still loading. Still loading.

When will it finish loading? Hellooo....

...

Still loading? Really? Come on now....

...

OK I'VE HAD ENOUGH NOW HURRY UP.

I felt anger bubbling up inside of me and in my mind had a vision of myself throwing my laptop across my room. A tempting thought, but not a practical one, seeing as it was my only way of seeing these two cursed notifications and there was no chance in heaven, hell or purgatory that I would get one bought for me by my parents. I also didn't have the money for myself. Therefore it just wasn't at all feasible to damage my laptop from impatience. At long last, the stupid machine finished loading and I immediately shut my eyes. I seemed to be incapable of making a decision. Maybe I didn't want to see them. Surely, if somebody had ended up leaving a horrible comment, it would be better if I just didn't look at what had been said about me because, if I did look, then their nasty and barbed and wounding words would just be floating around in my head for the rest of my life. Things like that never went away.

I wish I was stronger. Then this wouldn't matter. None of it would. I could brush off the comments or whatever they are and get on with my life.

Although, what if I didn't need to be stronger? What if I just looked? I could just let myself face the truth, face the music and move on. Growing up as the nonconformist dropout middle child meant I was used to comments, right? It was alright. Or at least it was going to be one day, so why not now?

Wow, this stupid internet page is really... maybe... sort of starting to... help?

I opened my eyes and they darted around the screen before I let out a sigh of relief as I saw that the top notification was simply a message from the website asking me to confirm my email address and personal details. I opened the message, simply as a way of procrastinating checking the other one. I sent a conformational email to myself to verify it but then was told that I needed to have a username. I'm not entirely sure how it let me post two things on an unverified, usernameless account, but here we are. I felt my palms grow clammy as every username I tried was rejected, the box shaking at me as if it were telling me off. Until finally.

Welcome, Annaliseisalive309

I bit my lip anxiously as I pressed the return button to go back to the inbox of my account. I spam-clicked the space where I thought the notification would appear, but my heart felt like it had been dropped off of the empire state building and was falling through my chest at the high speed of at least a couple of hundred metres per second as I missed and saw the words NEW COMMENT. The room suddenly felt approximately ten times quieter than it had in the seconds before, and I felt like I was in an overdramatic televised drama as the lights flickered above my head and I scowled at them grumpily. Them being the lights. I found myself wishing that either my computer would run out of charge or the internet would go out or ANYTHING. Unfortunately, the universe was not on my side, even after I had written two letters to it. My computer loaded the one thing I very much decidedly did not want to see with a rather disappointing speed. Again, I felt myself shutting my eyes but they opened again of their own accord, nosy and keen to know what the message held in the comment was.

1 comment:

@lostcqlibre - Dear universe... maybe I've found somebody who actually gets it <3

I scoffed internally. Whoever this "lostcqlibre" person was, they were pulling my leg. Actually, maybe they'd pulled it clean off entirely. Who even writes an imitation letter in the comments? Oh, "dear universe, I'm kind of wishing plagiarism wasn't illegal so that I could write the exact same thing only to actually promote it and become famous without doing any work at all.". Yes, perhaps the first bit was a little bit bizarre and was also copying what I wrote but there was a second side to the sentence that was different. Other than the dear universe. The fact that maybe there was somebody else who was just like me. Of course, it could just be somebody trying to ridicule me, or it could be somebody who was trying to make friends with an internet ghostwriting stranger who was clearly more than a little mentally unstable. It would obviously never lead anywhere, because who starts a friendship through an online blogging website and how? Nobody makes friends with a person on the internet that they have never met. That's just not... normal. People do not make friends with other people on the internet just because they leave comments...

I shook myself out of the deep hole I found myself trapped in. There was nothing deep about this, it was just a comment left by somebody who was severely lacking calibre (inferred from the username and nothing else). I needed to push this out of my mind and get out of bed and my room. I knew the house was going to be quiet, it was five days a week because of school and work and social lives that the rest of my family had. But I liked being alone, so that suited me just fine. I ran down the stairs and into the kitchen, throwing myself into a bar stool, spinning on it before flicking on the radio for some background noise. I often found that the songs on the radio were awful when it wasn't a commuting time, and as those times were the only instances when I had the wretched machine on, my music taste somewhat lacked character. I wasn't even sure I liked the songs but they had suddenly wormed their way into my life and now seemed to define a rather large chunk of the life I've lived. I don't know if anybody else in the world hears a song and thinks of something very specific, and if I'm being honest I do not really care to know, which sounds unbelievably rude and selfish, yes I understand that, but it won't affect me. Why should I know something unless I absolutely have to. Which I don't. Because I'm a layabout who is unemployed. Hurrah.

I could see the cheerios looking at me from their position on the shelf, just calling my name - as they did each morning - and ordering me to pour myself a bowl that I would simply watch and not really do anything with. If my dad was there, he would say that it is a waste of food but he wasn't so I poured it out, albeit a smaller amount than usual, and watched the milk start to take effect. As hard as I tried, I was unable to get the comment that had been left out of my head.

I really must be part of a sad existence if all I can think of is an online intruder... Yes, they might be stumbling across my publicly presented declaration of life but it still feels like a private matter...

The radio crackled and I looked down at my bowl to see the cereal soup I usually end up with. Always end up with. Is cereal a soup? I don't think so. Or at least it probably isn't meant to be. I poured it down the sink (as per usual) and as I stood by the kitchen counter, I had what was possibly a moment of clarity, a recognition.

This is my life. This is all I do every single day. It's either make a delicious cereal soup and be completely and utterly useless for the rest of the day, or find myself imprisoned in a psychiatric hospital because I made mistakes and am apparently a risk to myself and others.

I felt horrified, disgusted as I only saw a future where I sponge off my parents, where I watch every other person in my life become infinitely more successful than I ever could and I become a version of myself who is even less happier than I am.

Who would have thought I would grow up to be a failure? It's an interesting life choice, but also the only career that I could successfully get and retain.

I might be an esteemed blog writer now, but that wouldn't ever get me anything. As of late, it was only getting me in trouble by unblocking a river of thoughts that I had no idea I had been stowing away. It was less of a river and more of a waterfall. It felt dangerous, it was far out of my control and I didn't like it. These new thoughts were trying to take away everything that makes me... me. Annalise with about a hundred percent less Annalise. I didn't want to change, I didn't want to start being civil to my family, and I was not at all up for being civil to myself. I didn't want to know people on the internet, I didn't want to live in such a fucking rich family and I didn't want to change. I threw my now empty bowl onto the floor in a fit of pure rage, watching as the pieces of ceramic flew in their own different directions across the floor, looking like stray pieces of decorative shrapnel. My jaw dropped but I swiftly closed it again, because it would have been a lie if I said that I was shocked by my own actions. I stayed standing still on the spot where I was, tense and silently seething, looking around at the mess I had managed to create without thinking about it and trying to formulate a plan of action in my mind. As far as I was aware, there were two different options. I could either clean up the mess I had made and pretend it never happened, trying to convince myself that I was still the same and not slowly breaking down even further, or I could leave it. Leaving it would let me forget, stop me from taking any responsibility for my actions and I wouldn't have to go through the cleaning up process that left me a worryingly large amount of time to just be left alone with my thoughts. I couldn't face that. I knew I couldn't. Kneeling down, I picked up a piece of the bowl, pressing the cool, smooth surface into my hand, watching as the sharp corner slowly drew a bead of blood from my palm. I closed my fist, the pottery shard fitting neatly in my hand as I ran upstairs and hid away, leaving the scene of my crime mostly untouched but stowing the one fragment safely away in my drawer, a reminder that I was keeping but would hopefully never see again. Or at least, not for a long time.