DOORS NOT INCLUDED

There’s something strangely generous about being ghosted, at least in theory. With no explanation, you get complete creative control over both sides of the conversation. You can write the rejection yourself, choose the motive, decide what they really meant, and fill in every missing line. The problem is that given that much narrative freedom, the brain rarely writes something kind. It doesn’t invent “they were overwhelmed” or “the timing was bad.” It produces a much more elaborate version in which every insecurity you’ve ever had has somehow been independently verified.

I like base-building games, which I’ve only recently realised says more about me than my Steam library. Some of them don’t even have enemies. No zombies, no raids, no ominous music when the sun goes down, and yet I still find myself building a small sealed room with a big window, so I can sit inside and watch the world carry on without me. Nothing is coming to get me, I just want to be somewhere that it couldn’t if it tried.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it is I actually want, and why I feel the way I do about certain things. I have an Oodie for the winter, which is essentially a duvet cosplaying a jumper, and my favourite thing to do in it is pull my knees up inside so I’m completely covered, pull my arms inside leaving the sleeves to dangle, with only my eyes peeking out from under the hood. It’s a tent with sleeves, and I feel safe in it.

Last year, a therapist asked me to draw something, – I can’t remember the exercise, only the result. I drew myself inside a dome, safe from the world but still able to see it. She asked if I was lonely in there. I said yes, but that I didn’t want anyone coming in either.

She seemed surprised that when she then asked me to draw my wife and child, I put them outside the dome.

Then there’s the dream I had about finding myself as a child. He was sitting in a little shed in the middle of the playground, and somehow I knew he’d put himself there on purpose, to be safe from all the other children.

One of my recurring daydreams is to be immortal, and to go back to the very beginning of humanity. I live in a house invisible to the outside world, completely safe and undetected. From this house I go about my various little projects, occasionally watching out the window to see what the world is up to now.

I want to be able to see the world, and even be close to it, but from somewhere protected where it can’t quite reach me.

I also think about how I never felt like I belong with people, and that by default, I assume no one wants me to be around. I constantly have the feeling that my very existence is an inconvenience to the world. This ingrained anxiety nurtured by a lifetime of feeling left out. Left out of playground games, left out of conversations.

So to not risk being rejected, I just remain distant. If someone did want to be my friend, I’d become suspicious, because why would anyone want to be around me? – I’m the outsider. I’m not one of you, not in a snobbery sense, but that I’m a lesser being, sub-human, disconnected.

Which is perhaps why I have no friends, and I don’t attempt to maintain any relationship with family. I’ve had friends in the past, many have come and gone, and it is usually me that has distanced myself eventually. Not out of boredom, but because the constant self reassurance that someone wants me to speak to me is exhausting.

I attended a special school for the first few years of my life, before being allowed to attend mainstream school, everyone had already made their friendships, so I was always on my own, and I think that feeling stuck with me all my life. I also had speech problems, for which I was mocked, so I quickly learned to not speak to anyone.

Maybe, it is the rejection I fear, but then I feel like there is something else here. Like, I hold some kind of pride in my ability to not be fooled. Because perhaps I’ve spent years congratulating myself for being impossible to fool, without noticing that the price of always being right is that I’m always alone.

The dome isn’t necessarily keeping everybody else out because I don’t want them, but I can see people from there. I can care about them, I can even desperately want them nearby, but I don’t have to completely trust that I’m wanted amongst them. And perhaps that’s why being alone inside the dome can feel both lonely and safe at exactly the same time.

And but then I wonder, what a sad and lonely existence. I’ve constructed a world for myself, entirely of windows, but at no point did I think to include a door.