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littlestarlost · 6 years

Text

This Isn't Mine.

1. Monsters

I’m ten or eleven years old and I’ve just transferred schools, from the small elementary academy where I skipped a grade and was mercilessly bullied to a gifted program where, finally, it seems like the dust is perhaps starting to settle. I’ve been recently diagnosed with ADHD, and the monsters that have tormented me, both real and metaphorical, don’t seem to be breathing down my neck anymore. I have a Macintosh II, handed down from my dad; it has a proprietary word processor on it, and one day, I begin to write about the characters in an anime I love called Digimon. I’ve written stories before, of course; I’ve always been a writer, and a precocious one at that. I’m a gifted child; I often intimidate adults, never mind people my age. But this writing feels different; I don’t get bored of it, or restless when it doesn’t come together as quickly as my original stories. I can go back to the show whenever I start to feel confused, and get re-energized by watching the story unfold. I can keep the characters consistent, because I can literally hear their voices in my mind. But along with the characters of the show, I’ve created my own; her name is Raven, and she’s a new Digidestined, and everyone in the gang wants to be her friend. In the real world, I am lonely, anxious, isolated, insecure. I don’t know how to interact with people my age. I’ve buried myself in books and stories ever since I could read, finding solace in the characters who I imagined could see me for who I really was. On this computer, I make this feeling manifest in real words. My family doesn’t get it; my siblings tease me about it. I have no friends yet, so I can’t get their opinion, but a voice in my mind tells me that this is something I need to hide. Something I shouldn’t be proud of. And yet it’s comforting, nurturing, soothing. It’s good.

I have no idea that Raven’s real name is Mary Sue, nor that she embodies every single trope that we love to hate: she is perfect at everything and yet intensely vulnerable; she can beat every protagonist at their own game but still needs them to rescue her; she is sick and literally healed by the strength of the characters’ love for her. I don’t know that these tropes are universal; all I know is that I imagine these situations, where these characters I love can love me back for exactly who I am, and it makes me happy.

2. Revisions

I’m twelve years old, and I love Escaflowne. I tape the episodes on VHS whenever I can, paranoid that if I miss one I’ll never ever get a chance to see it. I hoard the tapes, watch and rewatch the episodes, and feel the pull of the strongest sensation imaginable—a huge swell of energy that is more exhilarating than any thrill ride, but is easily volatile. I don’t know how to control my emotions; I wield them clumsily, bumping up against this and that, unable to understand why I feel so much and why it hurts when that intensity is shattered by the real world. The emotions easily become overwhelming, leaving me crying over everything and nothing at all.

At school, my friend Leah tells me about a website where people have written stories with the Escaflowne characters—stories where Van and Hitomi end up happily ever after, where all my fantasies and dreams come true. There is one story in particular, a 30-chapter monstrosity called Re-visions, and I fall helplessly under its spell. I had no idea that other people did this, this thing I’ve done in secret for the past few years, this act of writing I thought I invented because I’d never had the chance to connect with anyone before. I had no idea that fan fiction could be like this. That there could be thousands of new island universes, each tethered to the original canon with a simple disclaimer: The characters and original story belong to their original creators. This isn’t mine.

I bond with Leah over this fanfic. I bond with others, too, over Escaflowne and then Gundam Wing. My fanfiction.net pen name is two Japanese words that sounded nice together.

I read fic after fic after fic; I hoard bookmarks, burying myself in shiny treasures, losing them immediately in my trove. I begin to read and write tentative romances, steeped in my own insecurities and repressed anxieties. I take the first steps on the road to sexuality by this gentle proxy, collecting first kiss scenes to read and reread and imagine with vivid passion what my own experiences will be like. My laptop background is of the Gundam pilots, a piece of fan art from a site called LeLoLa. I cover my school notebooks in pictures of Van and Allen and Quatre and Trowa. As I navigate the thicket of middle school and burgeoning adolescence, I imagine that they’re with me, like ghosts standing just over my shoulder.

And they love me; they love every part of me. It is their imagined encouragement that allows me to show up to school dances and take to the middle of the floor and show off what I love to do. It is their silent support that gets me out of bed some days. These characters in my mind only see the person I imagine I am at my best, but they love me no matter what, even when I screw up in social situations and replay humiliating moment after humiliating moment over and over because nothing, nothing, ever seems to go the way I wish it did in my mind. These characters accompany me to summer camp, where my bunkmates are my former elementary school peers, and everyone still remembers my childhood transgressions—but these characters don’t. They would want to hang out with me; they would sit with me at lunch, pick me for the soccer team, cheer me on in the camp musical. Even at my most socially isolated, I am never truly alone.

I start writing more ambitious fics of my own. I dream of getting 100 reviews on something someday. I finish a Gundam Wing story, long and epic and full of first kisses and dramatic rescues, and I’m so proud of myself that I think I might burst. But as I grow, I start to find that my emotions fade over time. The pull of gravity, that tug that spirals me into a fictional world and makes the characters feel like old friends—it starts out so strong that it’s overwhelming. Each press of the button opens the gates, releasing a crush of emotional material that floods my brain with dopamine, and it’s addictive and entrancing and it makes me feel so good. But each time, the sensation fades just a little, and then, inevitably, one day I find that I feel nothing at all. This isn’t mine, and now it’s not there anymore. The act of borrowing implies an inevitable return; that’s what makes it different from theft.

I learn that this beautiful emotional thrill ride has an expiration date. That, at some point, the love for a particular show fades, and then it’s gone, and there’s nothing I can do except to move on, find the next thing, fall in love all over again. This tradeoff is too painful to examine, so I don’t; I just keep moving, to X-Men and Smallville and Newsies and Harry Potter and a hundred little stops in between. These years will later be some of the most consistently bright memories of my adolescence, in a life filled with more downs than ups. Through it all, the disclaimers persist: I’m just borrowing it. This isn’t mine.

3. Endings and Beginnings

I’m fifteen years old, and while I’ve watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer on and off for a few years, I’ve never followed it religiously. For some reason I see a promo for an episode of its spinoff, Angel, where the lead character is turned into a muppet. I watch the episode; it concludes with two side characters, Wes and Fred, sharing a first kiss. I’m entranced; the swell of emotion rises once again, latching onto this new property, this new couple. I dive into the earlier seasons of the show, to learn everything I can about this new and wonderful gravity source. I write tragic character pieces about Wesley and one-off fluff fics where he and Fred get together earlier. I’m a little bit better at writing kisses now. And in the very next episode, it’s all snatched away, with Fred’s death; half a dozen episodes after that, the series ends forever. I’m shocked; I’m shattered. I’m in mourning, despondent over losing this beautiful thing just as it began. My sister and I bond over this show—a rare moment of agreement for us. I decide to write my own version of the ending, where things turn out better than they did on TV. The disclaimer still holds: I don’t own Angel. It isn’t mine, but if it was, here’s what would have happened. And it’s amazing; it’s got humour, it’s got romance, it’s got a villain, it’s got high stakes and a dramatic climax and a happy ending. It’s a proper story, and it gets more attention than I’ve ever received before.

Shortly after finishing that fanfic, a boy finally, finally asks me out on a date. I’m in high school, and we have our first kiss on a spot on my street where my parents won’t be able to see from the window. The snow falls around us, and everything is perfect. There’s a paradigm shift, and suddenly the real world is where I want to be. I don’t think much about fanfic; the characters who stood at my back begin to fade from existence. For just over a year, I live out every chaste fantasy I had seeded and nurtured through fanfics, until my heart is abruptly broken.

After that, I’m alone for a very long time. I have no joy; I have no energy. There are voices whispering to me how worthless I am, how this hurt will never go away. I live out humiliating moment after humiliating moment as if in slow motion, ruining friendships in my wake, unable to keep my head above the treacherous waters in my heart. My final semester of high school is a cruel hell, and I can’t wait for it to be over. When it is, I sign up for a summer trip overseas, where no one knows me; I cut my hair dramatically short and dye it purple. I’m enrolled in university next year, and I’m determined that no one will ever know about this version of me, this pitiful heartbroken thing, this failed attempt at existing. I can remake myself anew. I can change. During that first year of college, I discover new music and books and movies that I never knew existed. I write a single fanfic for Criminal Minds, aping the writing style of Chuck Palahniuk, because I love how he uses the present tense and repeated motifs to bring poetry to even his most horrifying ideas. My pen name is my first name and a generic nom de plume surname, because part of me wants to stretch plausible deniability and own this work I’ve created, because it’s really fucking good, actually. This is me now; I am new, and my writing is different. More grown-up. Less focused on romance. But the fire isn’t there the way it used to be; I love Criminal Minds, but the characters don’t inhabit me the way the Gundam pilots did. They don’t whisper in my ear or put a reassuring hand on my shoulder. And as my university experience continues, I think that maybe I don’t need it anymore. It was never mine in the first place, after all; I was always only ever borrowing it.

I fall in love again; I get my heart broken again. I move to a whole new city; I dye my hair each time I feel that this current version of myself has failed. I remake my identity over and over, exploring new hobbies and new passions. I write essays instead of stories; I do critical examinations instead of developing headcanons. I think I start to grow up.

4. Fog

I’m twenty-four, and I’m exhausted. I’ve been exhausted for nearly a year. I have a good job as a professional writer, and a good apartment and a good life; but I haven’t been able to stay awake. My family and my partner have no help for me, only gently condescending suggestions that maybe I’m being a little bit dramatic. I’ve watched my life shrink slowly, piece by piece: I stop watching movies because I can’t stay awake long enough to focus. I stop visiting friends after 9pm because I’m so tired. I stop knitting, and I can’t even remember why. I can’t pull myself out of this fog in my brain, no matter what I do. And it’s only after my relationship has fallen apart that I finally, desperately, humbly, miserably wonder if I might have depression.

The road back is hard, and it leaves permanent damage. The medication messes with my body and my brain; I learn to celebrate small victories, like making it through one day at work without crying. I slowly start to put myself back together, and I start watching Supernatural because I’ve heard good things about it. I realize I want to write and read again; now I have the benefit of several years of adulthood and a career working with words, and I can write stories with sex and violence in them and start to dig into the craft, the art, the intricacy of language. I start to shyly slide towards slash fiction for the first time in my life, no longer terrified of queer love stories the way I was as a youth. I’ve already put myself back in the closet, convinced that my trying to date women was just as much a phase as my time immersed in Escaflowne or Criminal Minds: that my participation came with a disclaimer, marking my status as a mere tourist. This isn’t mine. I don’t own it.

I slave over 25,000 words of a fanfic that gets less than 500 hits. I creatively bankrupt myself trying and failing to match my own expectations, and I’m still too shy to write gay romance on my own. My pen name is that same generic nom de plume from my last iteration as an author, now with a new first name stolen wholesale from one of my favourite indie songs. The fanfic world has changed in my absence; there’s a whole new site where people publish their stories, and people don’t read WIPs anymore. No one does disclaimers anymore either, because by now it’s understood: this isn’t mine. And yet, somehow, the sense of ownership has grown too. Writing fanfic is no longer something that people seem to be ashamed of. Authors have followings; there are recommendation blogs and fan conventions. Supernatural is my first taste of writing fanfic as an adult, and I love it, but something’s not right. The market is saturated; the show is, honestly, winding down in quality. That overwhelming tide of emotion fades faster than it ever did before, and I find myself at a crossroads: I can either stick around and scramble for the last droplets of joy until the landscape goes barren and dead, or I can close the door and move on, concluding that chapter of my life on my own terms. I choose to do the latter, and I recognize my time in the fandom for what it was: a coping mechanism. A lifeline. A buoy tossed into the water in the nick of time. It wasn’t truly mine; I was too late to the party, and the gravitational pull did not last very long. But it gives me momentum, a slingshot boost, into a new job and a new relationship and new ambitions. I get into graduate school; I move cities again. I’ve never been more adult than I am right now. Maybe, I think. Maybe this is what’s meant to be mine.

5. An Explosion of Colour

I’m twenty-seven, and the world has just cracked apart.

I began my second year of grad school with the news that I was being given three academic awards, only one of which I applied for. The other two were granted to me for having the top grades in my cohort in my first year. I’m literally top of my class, and my first instinct is sheer terror. I’m convinced my classmates will hate me for stealing their thunder; I’m nauseous at the thought of the expectations that now lie on my shoulders as I start this new round of classes. No, I think. This can’t possibly be mine.

I struggle through four brutally difficult courses and a brutally difficult winter. An election in another country shatters everyone’s hearts, and I make use of the accommodations I put in place just in case my depression came back. I write my last essays in coffee shops hushed by this pervasive feeling of abrupt loss and shocked grief, the world already dark by late afternoon. I can’t eat without crying. I can’t do anything without crying. I’ve lived in triage mode for weeks; I’m just trying to survive.

I hand in my final essay of the semester on a cold day in early December, proofreading it by the light of my SAD lamp. I realize that I have time and space and energy now to consume something new, to watch a show I’ve never watched before. I put up a poll on Twitter with four options: a Netflix historical drama, a groundbreaking crime show with POC characters, a goofy musical comedy, and an anime that I know nothing about except that it’s apparently pretty queer, and my friends really love it. The votes favour the final choice. So I sit on my couch, and I put on my headphones, and I press Play.

The world explodes into colour.

I don’t remember the details of every moment of that first time I watched the ten episodes which existed at the time. I don’t remember my exact reaction to the kiss in episode 7, or the proposal in episode 10. I don’t remember how it felt to realize that Yuuri was just like me, a high-achieving impostor, convinced of failure despite being such an obvious talent. I don’t know exactly when it clicked that maybe I was an unreliable narrator too.

But my heart is racing, thudding against my ribs so powerfully I can feel it. There’s this soaring feeling every time I watch the opening credits, and every single frame is the most beautiful fucking thing I’ve ever seen in my life. I stay up until 2am to finish watching, and tossing and turning all night after that, too excited to sleep. I want to laugh and cry and lie down on the floor and melt into a puddle. I want to shatter into a million pieces because the feeling in my heart is so strong, so intense, so overwhelming, that I can’t hold it all in without completely falling apart. I watch the show a second time the next day, and the feeling only gets stronger. I sit on my couch and listen to “History Maker” and stare at the spot on my wall where I want to hang the art I’ve already commissioned, and I feel this part of myself wake up again. I didn’t even know it was still alive.

The next night I write 1900 words, a character sketch of Victor. I love him and Yuuri so much that I want to learn everything about them, to dive into all the intricacies of their personalities; I see so much of myself in both of them. I come up with a new pen name on the fly; I’ve always liked the idea of stars and planets that don’t have a home galaxy and wander through the universe in the dark. I rework my old AO3 profile and change my Tumblr URL. I hit Post. This time, I don’t write a disclaimer; my time in Supernatural cured me of the habit.

I already know, with great and tragic clarity, that this isn’t mine. But this time, I’m twenty-seven, and my emotional regulation capabilities are quite a bit better than they were at thirteen, and I’m starting to think that maybe it’s okay.

I remember all my past loves, how I would wake up to find that the passion had faded and the feeling was gone. I remember how devastated I always was. I look at the state of the world, and the state of myself, and I think: I don’t know how long this feeling is going to last, but I’m going to love every single moment until it’s gone. I hope against hope that this joy, this pull, this gravity, will last even one single year. One year of this untethered, freewheeling happiness and light, after over fifteen years of sitting in the dark. That’s all I can dare to ask. Please, I beg. Please let me have this. Let me pretend. Let it be mine, just for a little while. And then I’ll let it go.

6. Star

I’m twenty-nine. I’ve graduated with my master’s degree; my partner has moved in with me. I’ve got a job in my chosen career, right out of school. And I’m still here.

Yuri on Ice has made the past two years remarkable. It has given me so many good memories to lighten the darkness of the world. I’ve embraced my skills and challenged myself to do new things; to explore the erotic, the horrifying, the experimental, the comedic. I reframe my own neuroses through Yuuri’s intense and unbearably public anxiety, and my own depression through Victor’s quiet subtle sadness. I announce to the world that I love this show so much that I’m writing stories about it; I’m not ashamed anymore. I explore this new facet of myself that now has a name and a friend group and a community. I come to terms with my own sexual orientation by interacting with this undeniable and uncompromising and unapologetically queer romance. I create things that I’m intensely proud of, and I get feedback that carries me through even the darkest of days. The one-year anniversary of my reawakening passes, and I keep writing. I keep writing. I keep writing.

This is the gift of fan fiction. This has been the gift of Yuri on Ice, which debuted two years ago on this day. It’s not mine, but at the same time it is. I get to share in it, because it’s not borrowed; it’s communal.

For years I thought that maybe this feeling, this gravity, was simply a part of childhood that disappeared as you grew older, like baby teeth. All that time I was treading water, dysthymia whispering in my ear that this was just what being an adult was like: that the joy just didn’t happen anymore. Telling me that once you had a job and rent, you could no longer be bowled over by your love for something, and that that was normal. That a piece of media could no longer reach inside you and spark your imagination and fan the flame until it roared, and that was just the way things went. And I believed it, for the longest time. I thought I was alone.

Over my shoulder I can sense my old friends, from my very first fandoms. I look back and I can see them smiling. They are the wisps of a nebula, stellar remnants from previous explosions, now illuminated by a new source of light. They never disappeared; they were just in the dark. They helped me to love myself when I thought such a thing was impossible; they helped me see the best parts of who I was and who I am.

Yuuri and Victor aren’t part of that group of silent guardians; they’re out ahead of me, having adventures, leading me to follow, to chase and document and imagine and write it all down. They’re a present that I get to enjoy again and again; they’re a gift that I can give, over and over. Every word is an act of love; for myself, for the work that Kubo et al created, and for the others who share this joy. Each day I get to be this person, to have this name, to celebrate this piece of myself that’s still wholly me and no one else, and who is loved for exactly who she is. I’m not spiraling into the gravity well anymore; I’m orbiting, running as fast as I’m falling, enjoying sunrise after sunrise.

Yuri on Ice doesn’t belong to me. But this is mine.

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