Part of what I love about living is my ability to get carried away with things… frequently things that aren’t real. Worlds that don’t exist, people who have never breathed, scenarios that are so close but so far.
I can get deep inside these things and live and breathe them for days or weeks. Usually not much longer than that.
I love emotions. Well, most of them. Fear is one I try to avoid, and thus the horror genre doesn’t factor into my obsessions much. Fear is present enough in my life as it is.
To feel is to live. For some people, that phrase means physical pain. To me, it’s emotions. Call them electrical impulses, pick apart the minute workings of the brain and nerves if you must, but I don’t care. Feeling is living.
Not feeling is dying.
Or death, depending on how seriously we’re talking.

I believe you can strengthen feelings that already exist, but you can’t create them out of nowhere. No, there has to be a trigger.
Fiction is a great trigger. Music is a wonderful trigger. Nature works sometimes, too.

I feel like someone switched me On when I was 13 and from that point I was On all the time. It’s like really hearing for the first time, like seeing for the first time, like touch – overwhelming and crushing.
If you’re On all the time, it’s hard to live. You’re a live wire, sensitive to every word, every glance, even if they don’t hold meaning. When people play with your feelings, it cuts deeply. You trust people you shouldn’t, you say things you should never say, and you throw yourself out there in an attempt to find something solid.
Being On all the time makes you crazy. Or maybe you can only be On all the time if you are already crazy.
Either way, the end result is the same. Insanity. Instability. The complete lack of any kind of rationality.

There is no emergency brake at those times. Just speeding along as everything becomes a blur.

The thrill is extreme, but your body can only endure so much.

Instability breeds bizarre solutions. Breeds mind-games within the Self, and traps. Self-preservation. Inability to be honest, because to be honest is a scary thing that is wanted and not wanted at the same time. Honesty is an obsession.

But traps are not really a brake, they don’t stop the flow, just how it’s perceived from the outside.

The idea of stopping feeling is almost as scary as continuing to feel. In this situation, the choice becomes, live, or be unable to live. Function, or fall apart. Self-preservation kicks in. Function it is, then. { After all, it’s not a problem if you can function, right? We learned that in psychology… }

The brake has been installed.

I can still get carried away, but it takes more to push me to the place where it’s pure emotion. But it’s okay, no matter how far I fall, I’ve got the brake now, right?

As long as I can reach the emergency brake…

and as long as I have the willpower to reach out for it.