Ok. Time out for a little shameless self-reward!
Ok. I got my other essay done today! Admittedly I should have gotten it done ages ago, and then I wouldn't have still had it hanging over me or been late for class because I was scrambling to get the citations put in. But still, it's done! So, in honour of the occasion, here's the first of that writing I told you guys I'd start posting way back when. I've been saving posting it for when I got my schoolwork done. I've still got two more essays to complete, but at least they're not overdue yet, and I can kind of take a (legitimate) pause for tonight to post stuff. So here it is!
Now, this short story requires a little bit of explaination. It was part of a critical thinking and writing portfolio that I had to do this past year for one of my Humanities courses, and which I very much enjoyed composing! It's a response to one of the short stories we read for that class, "The Disappearance of Elaine Colman" by Millhauser. More specifically, it's a response to the comments of one of my classmates who suggested that the main character of the story's isolation and subsequent fading into nothing are her own fault for not trying hard enough to be social and make friends, comments which shocked and angered me a lot at the time, especially since this classmate is a Phantom Phan. I suppose I reacted so strongly because the Millhauser story resonated so strongly with my own experience, and to hear it dismissed as not trying felt like an insult. Of course, as you'll find reflected in my story, it didn't help either that my Mom, with all the best intentions in the world, also has a rather Pollianna-ish habbit of suggesting that if I just tried harder I could break through the social exclusion. All I can say is, try it! Nor did it help that I was still recovering from the summary rejection, not in so many words but in his actions, of a guy whom, a while back, I had had a huge crush on - a rejection which actually made Phantom of the Opera hit so far too close to home that for a time I almost couldn't listen to it, especially that damned R/C inflected 2004 movie, and especially that damned song "Learn to Be Lonely"! *ahem* excuse anti-Gerik rant. Anyway, the result of all that was the following short story, which unfortunately will probably never be published anywhere but here as it uses copyrighted material. Anyway, I hope you guys like.
Most people think that you have to die in order to become a ghost. Well, I didn’t. At least, it certainly didn’t feel like dying, or maybe that was because by then I was so accustomed to the sensation of fading that it simply did not feel strange to me. All I know is that I wasn’t ill in any of the usual ways, no deteriorating heart, or lungs, or brain, or any other vital organ, none of the things which would usually cause one to die and become a ghost. Besides. In such cases, the spirit, the ghost, usually leaves the body behind, lifeless, to go and float around it’s dwelling place. But I just faded, disappeared one day, body and all. Or rather, one day my body finally completed the process of disappearing which had been going on for years until I finally became nothing but a spirit. Perhaps the anger that had been building for all those years, but which I had kept under wraps for all those years, finally just devoured my body, leaving only my spirit, my very pissed off spirit.
I couldn’t tell you precisely when it was that my body began to fade, because it actually took me many years to notice the phenomenon myself. I’m fairly certain though that it was already under way by my senior year of highschool. It wasn’t until I had completed college and been through a few meaningless jobs however that I began to notice the process. By then I had already begun to notice them, the phantoms, the spirits of others like me, people whom no one had noticed. They noticed me, more than anyone living ever had. They looked at me. They even spoke to me. So I came to learn not to fear my own fading. I came to know that I would no longer be alone, that I would have friends among them. The fact that, as far as the world of the living was concerned, I was a nobody, a human non-entity with mousy brown hair and plain features, completely unworthy of the notice of those with glossy hair, remarkable faces, more charisma and a fashion sense, did not matter at all to them.
“You need to be more assertive Elaine.” My Mother had said one day near the end of my junior year of highschool, when I had explained to her why no one from school ever came over or had me over to their house, and why I always returned from parties miserable. “Don’t be so shy. Stop waiting for people to befriend you and approach them.”
My Mother had, during her own school days, been quite popular. Granted that she had never been queen of the school or anything. But still, she had certainly never lacked for friends and, like most people who had always found friend-making easy, she simply did not comprehend how anyone could have that much difficulty at it. She, like the woman at my college’s counselling centre, had simply assumed that it must somehow be my own fault, it must be that I simply wasn’t trying hard enough.
What they failed to grasp, of course, was that, for the entirety of my freshman, sophomore and junior years, I had tried to do exactly that, to assert myself. I approached people, I initiated conversations, I joined in conversations. I exchanged phone-numbers and joined clubs,… and none of it ever went anywhere. The people with whom I initiated conversations, or in whose conversations I joined, I never saw again. The people with whom I exchanged phone-numbers never called me back or returned my calls, or if they did it was never more than once. Sometimes, when I tried to initiate conversations, or to join in conversations because the topic was one of mutual interest, the people would look at me, turning to me with expressions of surprise as if I had just suddenly appeared there in the middle of their discussion. Then they would turn their faces away, relegating me to the edges of their field of vision, and excluding me from the huddle of eye-contact which indicated membership in their groups. In the halls, in class and at the club meetings, people simply acted as though I were not there unless we were actually engaged in an activity which required them to interact with me. Trying to send better signals by wearing make-up and slightly more fashionable clothes didn’t help either. My place in the universe had been set long ago thank you very much, and who the hell did I think I was trying to change it? The looks I got told me that much. Even in those days, I often felt as though I were invisible.
By my senior year, I had finally gotten the message and resigned myself to my status as a nobody. By the end of that year, and certainly by the time I finished college and began to drift from job to job, I had become so accustomed to my invisibility that, had some one actually taken notice of me, I think it would have shocked me into a premature heart-attack. The feeling of utter transparency was, by then, so familiar to me that, when I noticed it becoming no longer a metaphor but an actual, physical reality, it did not seem weird to me at all. Rather, it seemed the logical outcome of my life.
At first I found it horribly depressing, the fact that I was fading out of life without ever having known it, all thanks to the discrimination of a lot of idiots who couldn’t be bothered to look beyond my shy demeanour and mousy appearance. But then I began to hear, and to see the phantoms. It should have occurred to me that I was not the only one who had ever been thus marginalized, but until then it had not. I suppose one tends to become so absorbed in one’s own problems that one fails to notice those of others. But there they were. We talked, we listened to one another.
All the time as I was fading, no one ever saw the anger. To tell you the truth, I don’t even think that I myself was aware of it. All anyone ever saw was quiet, resigned little Elaine Coleman, moving noiselessly from one task to the next, never speaking to anyone or being spoken to. But as I increasingly embraced my fading, as I increasingly embraced the existence of the phantoms with whom I had become friends, I began to become aware that I hated the solid, life-filled people who had rendered me invisible. The other phantoms never explained to me whether it’s the utter shunning which we receive from people or the deep-seated anger at them for that rejection which so many of us hold which causes us to fade. I don’t think they themselves know. But anyway, does it matter? The result is the same.
Um, yeh. I was very, I think the term would be EMO when I wrote that. I'm much less so now. Oh! and, I copied and pasted this directly from my portfolio in MSWord. I think it preserved the paragraphing, but as I'm listening to it rather than reading it, I'm not %100 sure. So, if it's all one big paragraph, just let me know and I'll fix it with line-breaks.
Ok, hope you guys enjoy!
Now, this short story requires a little bit of explaination. It was part of a critical thinking and writing portfolio that I had to do this past year for one of my Humanities courses, and which I very much enjoyed composing! It's a response to one of the short stories we read for that class, "The Disappearance of Elaine Colman" by Millhauser. More specifically, it's a response to the comments of one of my classmates who suggested that the main character of the story's isolation and subsequent fading into nothing are her own fault for not trying hard enough to be social and make friends, comments which shocked and angered me a lot at the time, especially since this classmate is a Phantom Phan. I suppose I reacted so strongly because the Millhauser story resonated so strongly with my own experience, and to hear it dismissed as not trying felt like an insult. Of course, as you'll find reflected in my story, it didn't help either that my Mom, with all the best intentions in the world, also has a rather Pollianna-ish habbit of suggesting that if I just tried harder I could break through the social exclusion. All I can say is, try it! Nor did it help that I was still recovering from the summary rejection, not in so many words but in his actions, of a guy whom, a while back, I had had a huge crush on - a rejection which actually made Phantom of the Opera hit so far too close to home that for a time I almost couldn't listen to it, especially that damned R/C inflected 2004 movie, and especially that damned song "Learn to Be Lonely"! *ahem* excuse anti-Gerik rant. Anyway, the result of all that was the following short story, which unfortunately will probably never be published anywhere but here as it uses copyrighted material. Anyway, I hope you guys like.
Most people think that you have to die in order to become a ghost. Well, I didn’t. At least, it certainly didn’t feel like dying, or maybe that was because by then I was so accustomed to the sensation of fading that it simply did not feel strange to me. All I know is that I wasn’t ill in any of the usual ways, no deteriorating heart, or lungs, or brain, or any other vital organ, none of the things which would usually cause one to die and become a ghost. Besides. In such cases, the spirit, the ghost, usually leaves the body behind, lifeless, to go and float around it’s dwelling place. But I just faded, disappeared one day, body and all. Or rather, one day my body finally completed the process of disappearing which had been going on for years until I finally became nothing but a spirit. Perhaps the anger that had been building for all those years, but which I had kept under wraps for all those years, finally just devoured my body, leaving only my spirit, my very pissed off spirit.
I couldn’t tell you precisely when it was that my body began to fade, because it actually took me many years to notice the phenomenon myself. I’m fairly certain though that it was already under way by my senior year of highschool. It wasn’t until I had completed college and been through a few meaningless jobs however that I began to notice the process. By then I had already begun to notice them, the phantoms, the spirits of others like me, people whom no one had noticed. They noticed me, more than anyone living ever had. They looked at me. They even spoke to me. So I came to learn not to fear my own fading. I came to know that I would no longer be alone, that I would have friends among them. The fact that, as far as the world of the living was concerned, I was a nobody, a human non-entity with mousy brown hair and plain features, completely unworthy of the notice of those with glossy hair, remarkable faces, more charisma and a fashion sense, did not matter at all to them.
“You need to be more assertive Elaine.” My Mother had said one day near the end of my junior year of highschool, when I had explained to her why no one from school ever came over or had me over to their house, and why I always returned from parties miserable. “Don’t be so shy. Stop waiting for people to befriend you and approach them.”
My Mother had, during her own school days, been quite popular. Granted that she had never been queen of the school or anything. But still, she had certainly never lacked for friends and, like most people who had always found friend-making easy, she simply did not comprehend how anyone could have that much difficulty at it. She, like the woman at my college’s counselling centre, had simply assumed that it must somehow be my own fault, it must be that I simply wasn’t trying hard enough.
What they failed to grasp, of course, was that, for the entirety of my freshman, sophomore and junior years, I had tried to do exactly that, to assert myself. I approached people, I initiated conversations, I joined in conversations. I exchanged phone-numbers and joined clubs,… and none of it ever went anywhere. The people with whom I initiated conversations, or in whose conversations I joined, I never saw again. The people with whom I exchanged phone-numbers never called me back or returned my calls, or if they did it was never more than once. Sometimes, when I tried to initiate conversations, or to join in conversations because the topic was one of mutual interest, the people would look at me, turning to me with expressions of surprise as if I had just suddenly appeared there in the middle of their discussion. Then they would turn their faces away, relegating me to the edges of their field of vision, and excluding me from the huddle of eye-contact which indicated membership in their groups. In the halls, in class and at the club meetings, people simply acted as though I were not there unless we were actually engaged in an activity which required them to interact with me. Trying to send better signals by wearing make-up and slightly more fashionable clothes didn’t help either. My place in the universe had been set long ago thank you very much, and who the hell did I think I was trying to change it? The looks I got told me that much. Even in those days, I often felt as though I were invisible.
By my senior year, I had finally gotten the message and resigned myself to my status as a nobody. By the end of that year, and certainly by the time I finished college and began to drift from job to job, I had become so accustomed to my invisibility that, had some one actually taken notice of me, I think it would have shocked me into a premature heart-attack. The feeling of utter transparency was, by then, so familiar to me that, when I noticed it becoming no longer a metaphor but an actual, physical reality, it did not seem weird to me at all. Rather, it seemed the logical outcome of my life.
At first I found it horribly depressing, the fact that I was fading out of life without ever having known it, all thanks to the discrimination of a lot of idiots who couldn’t be bothered to look beyond my shy demeanour and mousy appearance. But then I began to hear, and to see the phantoms. It should have occurred to me that I was not the only one who had ever been thus marginalized, but until then it had not. I suppose one tends to become so absorbed in one’s own problems that one fails to notice those of others. But there they were. We talked, we listened to one another.
All the time as I was fading, no one ever saw the anger. To tell you the truth, I don’t even think that I myself was aware of it. All anyone ever saw was quiet, resigned little Elaine Coleman, moving noiselessly from one task to the next, never speaking to anyone or being spoken to. But as I increasingly embraced my fading, as I increasingly embraced the existence of the phantoms with whom I had become friends, I began to become aware that I hated the solid, life-filled people who had rendered me invisible. The other phantoms never explained to me whether it’s the utter shunning which we receive from people or the deep-seated anger at them for that rejection which so many of us hold which causes us to fade. I don’t think they themselves know. But anyway, does it matter? The result is the same.
Um, yeh. I was very, I think the term would be EMO when I wrote that. I'm much less so now. Oh! and, I copied and pasted this directly from my portfolio in MSWord. I think it preserved the paragraphing, but as I'm listening to it rather than reading it, I'm not %100 sure. So, if it's all one big paragraph, just let me know and I'll fix it with line-breaks.
Ok, hope you guys enjoy!