I show you here, what I hid and tried to fix. I thought for a while, that the pain was worth escaping the embarrassment.
I stopped, for no reason. Now, I could not be more proud of any part of my body.
I was in a bit of a funk. Having just dropped out of university, I had very little to do with my time. Having split temporarily with my missus meant that I didn't have any great need for money and so I didn't hurry out and get a job. I was still making enough as a sponsored student to get by, and my sponsoring agency was so far unaware that I had skipped out on my studies. The cheques kept coming in. The entire arrangement enabled me to waste a lot of time. I would often lament my lack of motivation. All the time in the world, and nothing to do with it.
I had also stopped taking my antidepressants, because they made me feel too numb. I didn't notice any difference when I stopped either. I was still numb.
Well not entirely. There was (and is and probably always will be to some minor extent hanging out on the fringes of my heart) cracky-chan. I had my moods. Ups, and downs, as expected. The medication had ground them out into one miserable plateau. But cracky - or my delusions and fantasies and investigations therein - always found some way to dig in her little heels and make my life interesting. Not good or bad. Interesting.
I spent days at the computer. Thread after thread. I get the impression that alot of the people I know from .71 were put there in the first place because of the linking and the threading I was doing at that time. I didn't sleep. I'd stay up all night, drive my ex to work in the morning, and then stay up all day. I had very little understanding of what was happening in the world out there. I didn't really care, and really it doesn't matter.
An odd rumour came up around this time which I heard from a fellow who's screenname soon escaped me. I thought he was woefully out of the loop when I heard it the first time. Backwoods anon had contacted me after one particularly odd thread where I said, "I love cracky so much, I want her to bleed ^_^" or something of that sort.
Backwoods: yeah, she's living out in LA now
whatBandages: hahahahah WHAT?
Backwoods: las angels
I did laugh. I laughed alot. Everybody who's ANYBODY knows cracky's a good little girl who lives with her mum and dad in a contextually palatial house in Oxford!
I promptly let the idiot fall off my contact list, and rid myself of the logs while cleaning up a few days later.
Being the frontman for a shadowy circlejerk is hard work. I had to act like I knew more than I did, and I had to put up with the fact that everybody resented me for what amounts to no real reason at all. But the position has advantages. I'm not a fantastic stalker at all, but my unique position meant that I was located right at the stem of this branching grapevine. Everything going up or down passed right through me.