Metafor

Leonidas was a pirate who sailed the seven seas in search of meaning in his life.

When I was young, he was a fictional character I dreamed up and I had a crush on him. So in all my school notebooks, textbooks, and scraps of paper, I liked to draw a viking ship under a moonlight night with some clouds and always a reflection of the glowing celestial orb on the inky black waters, sparkling with stars trapped beneath the other half of the universe. I liked the design of viking ships, but Leonidas wasn’t a viking.

He wasn’t that tall and he had jet black hair in the 70’s wild hair craze, but he had a will to live. What I designed him to be was who I wished I was because I understood that when girls choose their first boyfriend, they always choose who they want to be more like. And I wanted to be a crazy, daring adventurer who was not afraid of death.

Nidas ran a crew of mutineers, exiled princes, and demons. They were not allowed to dock at any harbour because the ship was cursed. The ship ran its own course and the crew fished for food while collecting rain water to drink. That’s why he often stayed up during the night watch to observe the phases of the moon, reflected in the sparkling waters where in the deepest ocean, there are stars hiding beneath the waves. It was usually during these melancholic and philosophical moments that I appeared on the ship to talk to him.

He missed walking on land, picking apples from the tree, and whistling to the girls he liked when he strolled by their balconies. But he would never reveal what happened to him — how he ended up on a cursed ship and running a crew of degenerates who were just like him.

The last time I saw him, I kept asking him why he ended up like this. His temper flared and he told me to leave. I felt really hurt that he pushed me away. I never saw him again, in the state in which I was half-asleep and nearly dreaming.

In the weeks that followed, I felt abandoned by a fictional character I designed. The betrayal I felt from my own imagination made me wonder obsessively why did I believe my own stories? Afterwards, I could not write or draw for a few years and I completely refused to draw ships sailing under the moonlight in an ocean filled with stars. Because I hated the emotional claustrophobia I felt when I couldn’t escape my own imagination. This was also the reason I stopped listening to music when music has an effect on me that heightens my emotions, allowing my imagination to flare up.

In other words, I started to lie because strange things happen when I tell the truth. I was unhappy for many years because I was afraid that the truth would hurt me again like the way my imagination played tricks with my curiosity and it was painful never knowing the story of Nidas’ downfall.

The betrayal always comes when I’m shut out from finding out the answers I seek from people I actually like.

But after a few years, I forgot about this weird fictional fall out and I started writing non-fiction. I was afraid to write stories. It took me almost ten years to get over it and even now, when I am too emotional, I always write non-fiction because I cannot handle how I mistake fiction for fact. I believe in my own stories. So I am afraid of it.

What happened with Nidas made me fear trusting my own imagination. If I want to write fiction, I have to disengage completely for a few months before I can back into it with critical objectivity so that I don’t feel heartache for my characters when I cannot protect them from their own choices. I will grieve for my characters when they end up like Nidas.

I couldn’t save Nidas. He wouldn’t let me. My imagination prevented me from saving Nidas and shut me out forever.

Maybe my imagination is really a creature who got jealous. So it was a fallout with the abstract that made me unable to write or draw for many years. That is why I’m very careful not to provoke the Imagination anymore. Because things happen when the Imagination deserts you. You become stupid when you lack creativity and along with it, the willingness to take risks.

Fortuna.

The personification of fortune is a ray of sunshine even the dragons that herd the storm are in love with. She brings money and luck to whoever falls in her favour and she destroys whoever offends her. But the most disarming quality of Fortuna is how skilled she is at gambling on the fate of mortals. This is why the dragons and the dark mages like to hire her to handle the affairs of the immortals. Because there is something wrong with mortals who never die. It means that they are monsters that look like us. And she loves to play games with the insane.

The longer monsters live, the more difficult it is for them to die painlessly. This results in an extreme insanity that they disguise by creating chaos and conflict among the mortals who are protected by the gods. Of course, it is incredibly offensive that the monsters dare to torture people without fear of damnation and retribution. So when the people die and the monsters refuse to stop testing her patience, Fortuna avenges them and takes down the monsters by giving them the gift of permanent insanity.

While they are screaming and writhing and running around as if their heads are chopped off though they can see themselves running around unable to control their body which is trying to kill itself and it is extremely painful, Fortuna increases the luck of her friends and they make a lot of money together so that the monsters starve themselves to death because they refuse to die at everyone else’s convenience.

Even worse? They insist on deceiving the gullible and the naive until the very end.

Who will save them when they beg for mercy? Absolutely no one. Because they have the audacity to assume that the gods will pity them for having tortured the humans the gods had vowed to protect. They are already insane, therefore, they are monsters. And the gods know that even monsters will try to deceive them and to kill them.

Nobody trusts monsters who don’t know when to stop torturing people.

But this is exactly what the Goddess of Luck enjoys playing in a game when she is bored that things are always going well for her. Despite her happy-go-lucky demeanour, Fortuna has an extremely dark side when her sisters Liberty and Justice are provoked. So as the eldest sister, she will always work as a shadow to ensure the success of her younger sisters. She frees the oppressed and the speaks for the silenced.

Logic is emotional. Emotions are difficult to prove in verifiable equations. The abstract has too many unsolvable and unknown variables. But the invisible experience and the intangible ideas are very romantic to people who enjoy extremely high concepts that provoke curiosity into a spiralling obsession that can only be quantified with metaphors.

When I was a very young child, I had a very ominous and tragic dream. It was my first encounter into a visual metaphor for the abstract.

Basically, I was the center of gravity in a black hole and I fell into a pure white vacuum with a solid black shape that kept transforming from triangles to squares.

I still have no idea what made me cry at the end of the dream because it was strangely moving and tragic.

I woke up with the feeling that someone I loved had just died. But there was only an abstract representation of the cycle of life represented with solid black shapes in a pure white vacuum. This is why I hate anything pure white. Because it’s just scary how it amplifies death and grief and pain and suffering and torture. It’s also why I don’t enjoy the ritual of weddings. It is very disturbing for me to see the bride wear pure white and the groom to typically wear solid black.

Tim Burton’s film The Corpse Bride was terrifying for me to endure watching even if it was cinematically beautiful and even romantic.

Pure white has always represented death, embodied by the corpse who needs a covering even in the grave.

Black has always been the colour to hide the fact that the living mingle with death.

And the wine has always symbolically been represented with poison, while the bread is well known for being the flesh of the murdered.

The theme of the film is that you need to die to live again.

How can this stop motion animated film be suitable for children?

I watched this as a child and was extremely terrified to the extent that I was afraid of the night — and of winter — for many years. I even developed seasonal depression because I felt suffocated in darkness, which was a kind of emotional claustrophobia. That’s when I developed anxiety because I was easily paranoid. I didn’t know if I was living or dead. And I hated that my imagination was playing tricks on me.

I turned to religion to cope with emotional disturbances because I wanted to believe that even if I died, I’d be okay. But even religion is a lie that someone made up to cover up an even worse deception. So what is real and what is not real?

More specifically, how can the abstract be so moving that I cry from emotions I don’t even understand from a level of logic I simply cannot decode?

Logic and emotions are both crypts. The heart and the mind are at war and they don’t want me to know how to help them solve their conflicts. So they keep confusing me with many interpretations of logic and with many overlapping emotions that mix together into a tempestuous ocean that runs through my veins — and I have a mental breakdown. I simply cannot handle hypocrisy and relativity.

When there are too many options, the abstract will always torture me.

It is romantic to be allowed into non-existence to learn how to empathise with the unknown. But it is terrifying when you don’t know how to get out of the abstract and to live in the real world. Because the real world requires you to feel those emotions that you buried and your logic also gets hurt because it doesn’t like to be misunderstood. Living requires the courage to face the fear of the unknown without escaping into the abstract to dull the pain and the confusion.

I ran away from reality for many years because I couldn’t prove the logic was emotional. So when everyone said I was mentally ill, I suddenly got angry and decided to take revenge. That’s romantic, isn’t it? To take revenge on the entire world for treating you like you are an idiot? By proving with both emotions and logic that they deserve to be locked up in an asylum?

Let the insane battle over who is not insane.

What is the ideal writing set-up?

Of course, it varies from writer to writer, but I like having different writing spots for different stories. For me, the place in which I write is heavily magicked by the emotional connection to the imagination. So if I want to really write — to be immersed in the world I am trying to paint with words — I’ve got to go back to the same place. And it is only here that I can return to where I left off. If this is the case, of course, I must be comfortable right?

The most comfortable place to sit is on the floor. Lately, I’ve liked putting the silver MacBook Pro on the edge of my bed and sitting in the corner of the room next to the window. It keeps me grounded. It doesn’t elevate my arrogance or makes me feel like I must create great things. The more down to earth I am, the more my imagination can do its job without any vices creating obstacles in the heart.

This is why I sometimes feel that imagination is a creature that is friends with Time and Space. Maybe Imagination is a sibling of the Conscience. Maybe all the invisible elements like to be known mysteriously as the Abstract. When I am falling into the abyss of the abstract, of the intangible and of the invisible ideas, it is very important for me to be as close to the ground as possible. And that is why I need to have hardwood floors. It is the Mori concept of life and death. The imagination wanders in the parallel between the worlds to bring back minute quantities of the abstract — which to the human mind — is already genius material.

In Latin, Mori means death and in Japanese, Mori means forest.

It is the cycle of reincarnation which the imagination remembers as it brings back ghosts to guard a sleeping world for the writers to secretly, quietly, bring back the old world. The world is a reincarnation of a former memory. Everything that is happening now has already happened before. But we are not supposed to remember the trauma and the suffering. That is why we are allowed to sleep as imagination works in the minds of tortured and angry writers to resurrect the fallen cities of ancient empires.

Only foolish kings and queens choose to reign from the throne. Everyone else hides among the people to learn how to protect their way of life and to increase the quality of their experience of life. So why would a writer write from a throne? A chair is a metaphor for a throne. It is the “proper” thing to do. But who invented what is “proper” and what is not? It is easy for a writer to become hypnotised as they gaze into their own reflection and fall in love with their writing. This is the effect the creation of a throne is supposed to have on the person who chooses to guard their position on a pedestal. It requires the need for self-worship, which is the catalyst for the buying and selling of slaves to act as worshippers to a mortal who is playing a game of supremacy.

How can a writer claim supremacy by writing from a throne and expect to be respected for letting people die because they refuse to bow down to inferior manuscripts?

It doesn’t work this way in a democracy. Yet so many writers in the literary circle are trying to create dynasties by forcing their fans to worship them as royalty.

Staying grounded is important for a writer not to offend the element known as the Imagination. It is from the earth that ideas grow. And that is why the ideal set-up for a writer is to stay as close to the ground as possible, to avoid creating an impossible situation in which a monster lives in the heart that constantly feeds the ego.

A desk and a chair is a symbol of oppression to punish students for not being able to earn a living while being a liability because education is privilege only for the elite. How can a writer mistake oppression for a throne? How can a writer fight to protect their throne from everyone else? How can a writer choose oppression over creative freedom, having mistaken “success” with “oppression”?

Who doesn’t become a writer because they want to write themselves in their own stories as the damsel in distress?

My favourite childhood game was to be a princess who was in a castle trying to find a boyfriend. And I romanticised the idea of how lovely it would be to be saved by a hot guy who showed up from nowhere with a guitar ready to sing about how great I am. I’ve always needed to be adored because that’s how my parents taught me to survive in this world. But the prince never showed up and then the guitar went out of fashion as something only sensitive guys with long hair still wept as they practiced their chords.

As I got older, the Self-Sufficient and Highly Independent Woman became a popular rhetoric to pressure girls into feeling ashamed of romanticising the Ideal Relationship into an oversimplified equation, that is: if you love a man too much, he will hate you for it. But nobody added an annotation that explains the misused mantra, that is: if you love a man who doesn’t love you too much, he will hate you for it.

I still had dreams of living in a high fantasy world in which I was a roaming maverick with a way to survive in this world by working for people and I chanced upon a prince who had been exiled, promising me that if I won back his kingdom, I would be empress. That’s when I started to be interested in a lot of hobbies like constructing dress patterns, sewing clothes, ink painting, charcoal drawings, digital art, animation, jewelry design, customer service, styling fashion, selling fragrances, and… how can I forget about writing?

I was so obsessed with escaping reality that I decided to role play as who I wished I was in a high fantasy romance in which the female protagonist (me) is secretly capable in fighting for an empire just to save an exiled prince by using him to get into the highest seat of power in the civilised world. So I grew up to romanticise fighting war, death, corruption, and injustice — simply because it is very romantic to become a warrior with nefarious intentions only to be transformed by the power of love, into trying to keep the only person you cannot live without, alive.

The exiled prince was already ill by the time the roaming maverick ultra woman fell in love with his heart. Time was running out and they still had a long way to go before they arrived in the empire that was stolen from him. She no longer cared if she was the one who ruled by his side. All she wanted was for him to live, even if she would have to keep living with heartache. She knew he didn’t love her, and so, she never revealed her heart. And when he was too weak to go any further, she carried him on his back until he drew his last breath. By then, they were on the other side of the river. He never even saw his home for the last time.

This was the evolution of my ideals in a romance. It started as a fairytale and it ended as a tragedy. Because tragedies are romantic.

You know what is the central ideal that remained constant?

When you love someone truly, you will walk with them till the end of the world, even if they cannot give you their heart. And then you must keep living to keep their memory alive. Even if it is painful to live so closely with the death that separated you from him, your heart always empty and hollow.

It’s not true that if you love a man or a woman too much, that they will hate you. They will only hate you if you stop them from loving anyone else but you. And that means you are the villain and not the princess, right?

I liked the idea of being a roaming maverick who gets hired by everyone and succeeds at everything only to fail at love, simply because the man she loved was already dying by the time she fell in love with him. It is very romantic to fight a war to save the lives of people you love. So that was what I wanted to live through so that I could write myself into high fantasy romances I wished someone would write about me.

Which little girl who loves to read doesn’t wish to be written as the ideal lover in literature?

It is the 21st Century, so I will write my own ideal romance about myself as the ideal lover because nobody else adores me more than myself. I don’t need a man who is already dying by the time I’ve fallen in love with him. I just need someone to write about so that I look even better.

Besides wanting to be a mermaid, I’ve always wanted to be a witch.

But I’ve been told that witches are born and not taught. It is from a heart of darkness that magic thrives. And the reason I’ve acquired some form of darkness is because I was raised by people familiar with death.

When dealing with madness, you must deceive insanity into believing that there is no difference between the both of you. So you also become mad and acquainted with horror that madness mistakes for normalcy. Even perverts think they are good people. How do the insane feel when they escaped from the asylum? They will never make the same mistake twice — the mistake of being honest. So they learn how to act “normal” and they infiltrate society by bringing along their friends and stealing power.

The asylum escapees are obsessed with success and ambition because they cannot achieve this without cheating the system. But the only way they know how to acquire what they want is to corrupt, to steal, and to slander. They create a perfect image of themselves which they use as a shield to accuse others of being mentally ill. It is some act of revenge for having been misunderstood that they must now avenge themselves by locking up the perfectly sound of mind. But they now have so much “influence” that all the idiots believe them and blackmail the authorities into unethical behaviour. Because even the intelligent are afraid of idiots when they go beserk because they believe their leader’s covert manipulation tactics to be the truth. Which proves efficiently that they all belong in the asylum because they cannot function in society without being involved in criminal behaviour.

The only way to survive in a society run by idiots is to lie to them.

And the only way to lie to the insane so perfectly that they leave you alone is to internalise the darkness that scares you and haunts you and keeps you up at night wondering if they will come and kill you because you are more intelligent than they are.

Idiots are programmed to kill geniuses. This is the intention behind the influencer corruption, the identity theft, and the slander. It is a freaking horror show where all the little Chuckies run around with chainsaws trying to identify who the intelligent people are and ganging up on them to take them down before they get sent back to the asylum.

You’ve got to internalise the horror if you want to survive their games — the games they force you to play, in which suicide is the penalty to forfeit because that is what a sane person would do. They wouldn’t play along until they break the game, and lock the insane in the judicial system to account for their actions and intentions, unless they were raised by people who were acquainted with death… and madness.

You can pretend it’s fun. You can make people laugh and think it’s funny. But it’s not when you are living it.

Once you start to play a game with madness, you have no idea how much time you have to beat an illogical system and get out of it before the madness consumes you. It’s illogical — that’s why nobody could defeat them.

I’ve become accustomed to living in a horror film. Yet the darkness hasn’t consumed my heart. I wasn’t born with this darkness. It was taught to me as a way to deal with surviving in a society run by idiots and the insane. That’s why it’s a struggle to deal with trauma and emotional volatility, especially when I haven’t slept well in a very long time.

The only way to beat an illogical system is to lie logically and twist their lack of logic into something similar to the truth which you can wield against them like a gun. But the only way to get close enough to shoot them point blank is to play their game until their system breaks and then you start killing them one by one.

Sometimes, I have to stop myself from writing stories at evil hours because I’m afraid of my own thoughts.

There is madness that lurks in the crevices of my mind; horror that is laced with the experiences of my life; despair that keeps me up at night; doubt that makes me weep; isolation that scares people; and anger targeted at everyone who let me die. It’s not good to write in the dark of the night, especially when there are too many scarred emotions that haunt me. I get scared of my own writing.

In an ideal world, I would actually write pop fiction. You know, the happy ne’er do wells that are trapped in a cycle of failure but people still forgive them for being idiots and for screwing them over? Yeah, my ideal of stories I want to write are all lies. That’s why when I write how I really feel, the ideas terrify me. I didn’t know I was capable of such horror, honestly. But that’s what scares me the most — that I’ve been scared for so long that I know how to scare people so well.

I also know how to make people laugh because I also need to escape from all the things that scare me.

Life is a tragedy. Tragedy becomes normality. We internalise what we are told is “normal” and then the reality of the situation is something we push away because we don’t want to acknowledge that lies comfort us while the truth scars us.

The truth is that there are more things I am afraid of than solutions I have to mitigate those fears. It’s the stories I write that reveal my fears. And I begin to realise that I’m afraid everyone is trying to kill me. Sure, I’ve said many times how angry I am when people are left to die, including me. But I didn’t realise how paranoid I am when I see their intention to kill me despite trying to be my friend — for lack of a better word, trying to “make peace”. This is what made me into such a vengeful person. Once I know someone has the intention to kill me, I make sure that they will never succeed at anything in life. Neither will the people they love. Because they are all in this together.

So I become better, stronger, wiser. I make more friends when I make them laugh.

I am afraid to be left to die.

The worst tragedy is that nobody believes you are telling the truth because they believed the lies and interpret your actions as despicably as your enemies invent them to be. Being alone in the world — and hated by everyone — is a condemnation to take your own life. And if you revolt, they will bully you even more by slandering you and orchestrating the entire school to make sure you never get a job even if you manage to graduate.

And the worst part is that they don’t even understand why you hate them so much until you explicitly tell them what they did wrong.

It’s the idiots who run this world that I’m trying to take down systematically. Because they severely underestimated me and now I am going on a rampage to ruin them.

They let me die and then they let their friends die — by trying to make peace with me.

It’s nearly 3 am and the anthem of the 00’s is playing downstairs. I can hear it from my room on the 7th floor apartment. The song, of course, is Twenty-One Guns by Greenday.

You don’t really hear echoes of memories from the past anymore.

Growing up as a kid in the 00’s, there was a sudden hype over ‘80s disco throwbacks — which I hated because it was a hippie reincarnation and I was brought up punk. Now, in the year 2021, I suddenly understand why kids grow up only to look back at who they used to be. And music is usually what calls back all those little ghosts that invoke emotions that have become unfamiliar as we all grow up to become who we think we ought to be.

I was a kid who was influenced by punk and rock music before there was another hippie reincarnation led by the people who wouldn’t stop yapping about how great disco was. Really? The sequins and the spandex? You think that’s cool? It’s freaking hideous and humiliating. I’m talking about the hypocrisy of pop. When all the stars only know how to sing songs that conceal the truth while promoting an identity that is supposed to be justified as a legitimate career. I don’t understand why perfection is a commodity when it’s really an exploitation of people who are willing to deceive the world into believing their unattainable standards of beauty can be sold as fan merch. It’s basically a corporation of kids who are hooked on fame that are being exploited by corruption into covering up white collar crime. And everyone is okay with it because they get what they want — regardless of ethics.

Celebrities were created to sell products nobody in their right mind will buy. But when I was a kid, people sang to the broken hearted by giving them anthems to find strength in. It is the slandered and the beaten who will revolt and rise again to take down fucking hippies that promote a culture of self-love when it is another lie for self-sabotage.

Of course, I’m talking about the revival of punk and rock. Because in this twisted world where love is hate and anger is truth, people are starting to realise that they cannot rely on anyone to tell them how to think and feel anymore. Being a follower is the same as holding hands and dancing into the grave. You all fall down together when you follow the wrong leader. And it is the people who started the hypocrisy of pop by “reinventing disco” who have led entire generations astray because what they preached was love that justified all those lies.

The very image of perfect pop creates a sensation of unrealistic fantasies that is an uncontrollable pandemic of lust and perversion. This is the very core of hippie culture and pop is the baby of disco. And disco, is unfortunately, the 20th century version of the Cult of Dionysus. All those dancing kings and queens were prancing around looking stupid because love is freedom of expression, no matter the hypocrisy and the off-key tempos. That is why pop needs to die.

Twenty-One Guns is the anthem of the 00’s, already warning everyone that pop is coming to kill punk. But nobody cared and left them to die. Now we cannot control the pandemic of deception that underlies the perversion of perfection. I see all those idiots posing for products that nobody will buy in their right mind and I think to myself that they will never survive without a pretty face because that’s all they are. And in the worse case scenario, when they get dropped for being too damn old, everyone is going to let them die for having lied to perverts — all for some petty commission they spent on drugs and sex.

When I was younger, I wanted to be an artist.

I’ve always wanted to be who I could not become without intentional and incremental effort. Just like the way I’d always wanted to be a mermaid, but that is the extreme limit of impossibility. I simply was not born as a mermaid, nor can I ever be. Which proves the point I’m trying to make. Being an artist, to me, is unnatural. Yet, I tried to force myself to be an artist and the only way I could escape from art school was to write. And that’s how I knew I who I am.

There’s something strange about persevering in something you find extremely tedious only to discover what you find is incredibly simple. One of my art lecturers gave me unforgettable advice. He said that what I’m best at is what will come the easiest. So by forcing myself to conform to a system that is unnatural for me is the same as hitting the wall trying to break it down with my bare hands. Despite intentional and incremental effort, there will be no progress unless you step back — give up the fight — and walk around the wall to get to the other side.

Sometimes, you want something really badly but you need to give it up because it’s not working. And for someone like me who hates giving up, I couldn’t accept it. I couldn’t accept that persevering does not amount to progress. That’s why I struggled for many years trying to become an artist when it’s simpler for me to paint with words.

Is struggling, failure?

That’s what I asked myself many times.

Is the clearest definition of success, convenience?

If it is simple and easy for me to excel, does it mean it’s what I should invest my time in? And if it is a persistent struggle, does it mean I am a repeat failure? Because a lot of people seem to believe that if it is difficult, that means it is bad for them. But I don’t think so. I think that if I’m already good at writing, I should learn something that I’m not good at — that doesn’t come naturally to me. However, the path to becoming an artist never did run smoothly. So, of course, I fell out of love with art and ran to words as a form of escapism.

I still wonder about that on sleepless nights when I wake up at an evil hour and cannot fall back to sleep.

How do you know what is worth spending years on? Is it based on conviction? Is it based on a promise? Is it based on principle?

A very long time ago, the world was as it was and the wind, the sky, the orbs, the ocean, and time were the guardians who ruled the space that dragons would fight to preserve their dynasties. Though there were, of course, many more elements that enjoyed hiding in the world by existing quietly where time had forgotten them. The mirage was one of those lesser guardians who was one of the trickiest. She was twins with the oasis and they enjoyed fooling the nomads by driving them mad in the desert. However, there came a day when a travelling dark mage chanced upon her in human form and was instantly bewitched by her exotic beauty. Dark skinned, magenta eyes, fiery red hair with gold and copper strands — she looked every part of a desert princess whose kingdom had been swept away by yet another sandstorm — and she alone, survived.

“What are you doing, wandering around?” He asked curiously.

She looked at him with contempt and waited for him to leave.

“What are you hiding, in the middle of nowhere?” He asked intently.

She rolled her eyes and crossed her arms and waited for him to leave.

He smiled. “Do you want to become empress?”

The mirage should have known better than to play games with a dark mage. But his greed provoked her and she decided to reveal her ability to create the illusion of a citadel in which she had always been empress. The citadel flourished in the middle of nowhere. The dark mage smiled when her back was turned to him, admiring her own handiwork. And he bound her to the citadel with his magic. From that day forth, the mirage became the citadel and the oasis could not recognise what became of her when he passed through the city walls.

This was how the Citadel of Mirages came to be the capitol of dark magic that was protected by the desert storms.

My guide looked grimly at me, “The lunar witch brought us to the most dangerous city in the desert. If you can’t survive here, you can’t survive anywhere. So stay close because if you disappear, I won’t look for you.”

I looked at him and didn’t say a word.

“We need to get out before sundown or we will never leave at all.”

“It’s a city of disguises. That’s what the mirage is.” I muttered.

“Yes, except in here, all the monsters look like us.”

“So what do we do?” I asked without expecting an answer.

He chuckled. “Leave that to me.”

As we approached the walls of the citadel, a cool sensation tingled my skin. It looked like a mud wall caked with sand but as soon as we crossed an invisible barrier, like the semi-permeable membrane that holds water together in a slick surface, everything changed. The walls were high and extremely well guarded with spikes that prevented any gigantic creature from ramming the fortress. There were winged sentinels flying around the exterior of the castle walls, heaving armed with weapons and armour. Of course, they were dragons that lived for battle instead of power. And they were all made of dark steel scales that almost camouflaged them with the fortress walls. The Citadel of Mirages was surrounded by a graveyard of bones. It was more effective than a moat because in more than one instance, I saw that the skeletons were merely sleeping and not dead. They would be the foot soldiers to prevent an uprising in the event the fortress had to go under lockdown. The dark magic was bound in everything behind the invisible barrier. And so, in the middle of a desert nowhere, it was the bleakest winter I had ever encountered.

It was a deathtrap we had to pass through and get out of before sundown or we would never get out at all.

We stood in line to enter the city gates and everyone was dressed in mourning. There were no smiles, there were no words. It was a grim existence that I could not imagine worth guarding so fiercely. But we passed through and I knew that it was easy to get into the deathtrap but getting out of it would take clever engineering. Since I had no idea what to expect, I was extremely afraid to let him out of my sight.

It was autumn in the Citadel. There was colour, there was music. But I didn’t know who the monsters were. I only knew they looked just like me. So we strolled into a shop that sold magical artefacts. Apparently my guide knew the woman who ran the shop and they spoke in a language I had never heard before. After a moment, she emerged from behind the counter and locked the door of the shop. He motioned me to follow and the woman led us to the backroom of the shop which was part of the fortress walls.

There was an old staircase which took us three floors up and at the landing, there was a wall lined with cloaks that were hung with iron hooks of different colours and sizes. Sitting on the floor were matching pairs of boots. She raised her eyebrows and looked me up and down. Then she chose one of the smallest cloaks in a rust-maroon colour and handed it to me. As soon as I put on the cloak, it transformed me into a raven-haired beauty with dull blue eyes that were almost grey. The clasp were a pair of hands that held each other and I felt very safe that the cloak was willing to disguise me. I put on the boots and became taller. And judging by its lightness, I had a feeling that if we needed to run, these boots could help me climb even the slimiest walls.

She studied me with pursed lips, then sighed. “Soach is my brother and he won’t tell me why he is going to Monrovia. If anything happens, all I ask is for you to make sure he doesn’t die." After a moment, she added, “By the way, Soach is Chaos spelled backwards. You should know what that means.” Then she turned her heels and walked away, disappearing into a wall like a ghost.

Soach was waiting for me at another door. He had a charcoal cloak on with a bluish tint and he was now raven-haired with hazel eyes. That meant we were siblings. We stepped out of the door on the third floor and emerged on the East side of the citadel right in the middle of the potion district. Hazy fumes clouded my vision and stung my nostrils. It wasn’t colourful but it made me feel an explosion of emotions that allowed me to experience life in a way that allowed me to believe magic is beautiful.

He smiled and shook his head. “Don’t believe everything you feel.”

“Where are we going now?” I asked, trying not to choke on the potion fumes.

“We need to find the exit that never stays where it’s supposed to be.”

I started to feel sick with impossibility of this quest.

“It’s never where you think it ought to be.”

That’s when I knew that even the exit was a creature who enjoyed fooling around and playing games. So if the fortress guarded the citadel and all the monsters are inside, what happens when nobody is allowed to leave?

Every work of fiction is a death trap the writer willingly steps into, not knowing if they can get out of this world, alive.

The most prolific writers are the ones who developed a personal system for writing novels or short stories that suit their aptitude. And the writers who write for the people are the ones who are finding answers about what they don’t know. Curiosity will never kill anything; instead, it will only create a better world. The imagination is fuelled with curiosity and that is how creativity thrives. The only problem is how long it takes a person to figure out the medium to express their ignorance. Which is why any work of fiction is a death trap that creatives willingly step into because the answer doesn’t exist yet. In fact, the process is the answer which takes years to develop into an algorithm that is simple enough for people to enjoy and to understand.

Writing is not about the money or about a career. Instead, writing is about finding a way to describe emotions that there are no words for. This is the deathtrap. It is a trap of the heart in which there are simply too many emotions that are complex and that overlap creating vices that try to kill you from your mind. Writing is the working for an unsolvable mathematical equation that has too many unknown variables you have to keep substituting to see if your heart can balance with your mind.

Logic is emotional. But it is difficult to prove the logic in emotions.

A writer is supposed to do the thinking for people and to help them regulate their complex emotions by proving the logic through fictional characters and mythical plots. A writer steps into the frame of mind and the emotional state of each of her characters, even the ones she hates to understand, and that is a death trap. So if I can’t finish what I started writing, how will people realise that being complicated is not a bad thing because there is a logic to complication? And if I can’t complete the stories I’m writing, how will anyone out there know that there is someone who can empathise with them, that they are not an isolated case?

When you wield the power of words and when the stories rush to you like a blow to the head, you become the conscience that cannot be silenced. Because if you know people need stories to give them the strength to battle monsters and to fight wars, metaphorically, how can you stay silent if it means they are silencing their conscience just to fit in? It is impossible to live without writing once your conscience is provoked and awakened by injustice.

Words are a sword the writer uses to destroy the darkness and to allow the light to shine through. Of course, you can’t possibly see where you are going or even where you are until you find a way to defeat the abyss and somehow fight your way out of infinity only to end up back where you started except that now the world is a better place. This is what it feels to spend a lot of time working through a story and trying to sift out the truth and to set it free. But you have absolutely no idea how long it will take for you to figure it out and to get yourself out because when you are in that abstract death trap, anyone can sneak from behind you and take you down — especially a friend.

Writers don’t have friends when they are busy working out the algorithm on how to destroy an entire abyss and to get out of the death trap before they get sucked into the black hole altogether with their greatest nemeses.

We sat in silence as the tea cooled.

She pushed the plate of almonds towards me and then took one for herself. I reciprocated by taking an almond for myself and pushing the plate back to her. Then we each looked away and ate the food quietly.

I waited for her to take a sip of the tea first before swallowing the last bit of almond along with the spiced tea. It was sweet like persimmon, spicy like cinnamon, rich like honey, and steeped with the strong aftertaste of leaves from the Orient. The desert was cold and the fire that was lit in the small, ornate portable stove was crackling with heat. But it was really the tea and the almonds that warmed my heart. It made me feel alive and that made me feel sad because I didn’t know I had been living as a ghost for so long. Memories I had pushed away started to haunt me again. Feelings of happiness and love ran through my veins. It was almost as if I was returning to family. I felt as if I had been gone for a very long time. But why I left in the first place — I could not remember. Doubt chilled my fingers again, tingling softly down my spine as if an invisible being had been sitting behind me the entire time whose purpose was to remind me that I am still a stranger and not to mistake kindness for weakness.

“You are from the program.” The lunar witch remarked. Her gleaming eyes suddenly calculated and deadly.

“Yes, that is correct.”

She nodded and sighed. “Why did you leave? We don’t like traitors.”

“I found a book in the city library that was handwritten and dated in a year that does not exist. It was hidden and tucked away in the only alcove that nobody is allowed to access. And the only reason I was there was because they were trying to get me fired from my job.” I paused to let the emotions sink in. “I stole the book. Then I checked the system and found there was never such a book catalogued in the records. So I brought it home and the first page was a warning not to steal the book and to immediately place it back on the shelf. I was scared but I couldn’t go back to the alcove.” At this point, I really didn’t know what to say anymore.

The lunar witch took a sip of the tea and stared pointedly at me.

“I read it by candlelight and read the warning out loud. That’s when everything changed. The blank pages came to life.

“The words became whispers that flickered through my ears and played with my mind. I started to see how cold and dead my world was, nothing more than a machine that created life only to kill it slowly. And I saw myself as a replaceable and unwanted piece in this puzzle. There was nothing more I could do but to find the answers for a way out of the Algorithm.”

She had held her breath while I explained why I abandoned a world that created me for its own purpose, regardless of how I felt which was not even secondary — my feelings were simply left to die so that I could be useful in my society. This was the truth I had always lied about because it was just too painful to be aware of how the heart needs to die for the machine to live. And I hated it so much but I had no choice at all. So I stopped being happy and I stopped trying to live. But they still kept trying to kill me by forcing me to play a game I already wanted to fail at.

I wanted to die. But the system would not let me die that easily. So I became a traitor instead and now I will always have to explain to others the most painful part about fighting to live.

At the end, I just sobbed because I had no words to explain the pain in my heart because it was finally beating after a lifetime of being strangled. And it hurt so much knowing what I did to myself because I was told it was the right thing to do.

The lunar witch nodded slowly, gracefully, while weighing the words I had just spoken and the thoughts I never revealed. “You believed a lie.”

I sat there with tears streaming down my face because I was too ashamed to admit that I believed a lie because people told me that it was the right thing to do. It was the right thing to kill my heart because that meant I wouldn’t kill them.

She pursed her lips and looked at me with an intelligent ferocity, her eyes suddenly alight with life. “Did you not realise that the word ‘live’ has a very strange word connected to the opposite spelling? Can you spell it for me?”

“E-v-i-l. Oh!”

“Exactly. To live is to fight evil. But when you believe a lie, it is not made up of anything substantial. So why does your heart ache for something that is made up, not made of anything, but simply intangible that will never evolve into the monsters you fear?”

I was very quiet because I understood what she was insinuating. She was telling me that it is okay to be evil and that the word ‘evil’ is yet another lie that monsters made up to stop me from living.

“The truth is something you inherently believe as you observe the planetary orbits and know that the world will keep spinning regardless of what people want you to believe. It’s when you believe their lies that you create a distortion of reality that oppresses the people around you while they react and oppress you in return. The only thing fear creates from a lie is a distortion of reality that kills the heart quietly so that nobody knows who exactly is the murderer hiding among you. It could be a friend. It could be a parent. It could be someone you respect, a hero. But if your heart fights back and gives you the courage to break the rules, to steal a book, and to read when the custodians are trying to stop you from learning — that’s evil, right? Yet, you found us and you fought to live.”

The lunar witch nodded approvingly.

“Can you,” she asked slowly, “tell who is lying in Monrovia?”

I shook my head, no.

She leaned closely towards me. “Are the counsel of witches who guard the entrance to my midnight desert conspiring against me?”

“I don’t know.”

She held my gaze and I could not turn away. “If I let you cross my desert, will you find out the truth for me?”

With teary eyes, I nodded.

Frowning, she returned by nodding too because she was calculating the odds of my success. “I will send messengers to you. You better be ready to give me the information I asked for because if you don’t, you will not live past sunset. And if you do, it is because you have become a monster everyone wants to kill for pleasure.” Her eyes were suddenly wide and alarming, her irises slit like a dragon’s. There was smoke rising from the ground and her hair was wild with the atmosphere of thunder and lightning.

I blinked, and was at the edge of the desert. The moon was behind us and the rose-gold dawn was pushing the darkness away. My guide looked at me without saying anything, but he was checking to see if I was okay. I was still sniffling from fright because I was now frightened by the severity of my promise. It was an impossible task. But it was the only way I could redeem myself from having walked the path of a traitor. By seeking the truth, the stars guided me across a desert I would have kept walking in circles and then collapsed under the heavy abyss of space — because the illusion of beauty was gone. I now knew that I was at the bottom of the abyss and if I told one more lie, it would swallow me up.

Barley tea — warmed — is for old ladies only.

Welcome to the industry because when you only want to exist in the old world, you’ll find yourself in the old people club.

Depending on the time of day, I have different levels of maturity. And depending on the level of provocation, how I deal with conflict has different levels of maturity. So as a victim of an innate paradox, either chocolate ice-cream or warm barley tea immediately disarms me and puts me into a state of complete relaxation.

The antidote to anxiety requires chocolate ice-cream, while the antidote to wrath is warmed barley tea. Why does anxiety and wrath, which ought to be so similar, complete opposites in the medication required by temperature and taste? I think the reason is very simple. Both anxiety and wrath create complex emotions that if not resolved properly can evolve into complex vices. So when I feel intense fear, what I need most is a childhood favourite, chocolate ice-cream, because it brings me back to a happier, simpler time before I became complicated due to the sudden awareness that if you don’t sabo people first, they will destroy you with no remorse whatsoever. It is a very difficult emotional conflict because of the books I read about my enemies and their vulnerabilities. They became complex vices because they did not stop when they should have and the lack of self-control resulted in their internalised cycle of failure. So when they see me succeeding while they have not, they only know how to react by retaliating and trying to strangle me first. Metaphorically, of course.

The world made me complicated because of all the freaks that are running around claiming to be heroes when they are really dragging all their friends into hell with them. And after I completely lost faith in humanity, there was a few years when I could not read and I could not write. It was self-torture because I knew the only way to get out of my own failures was to systematically deal with my opponents and all their friends. I don’t enjoy it making people fail because I don’t tell them what they are doing wrong. And that’s when I had to develop a sense of humour to deal with the darkness I was pushing towards them.

My wrath comes when stupid people never learn from their mistakes and the emotions are so complex that eating chocolate ice-cream amplifies the complexity. It reminds me of the same idyllic childhood in which I knew a lot of bad things were happening to the kids I knew from different social circles but they never asked for help. While I, on the other hand, was smart enough to evade dangerous situations and I wanted them to learn from me but they didn’t. They clung on to their abusers and I hated that.

Warm barley tea reminds me of a later part in childhood when I found a lost pride in my Asian heritage. So barley tea always brings me back to my center and I remember that acting upon wrath never improves a problem — it only escalates it. What do Asians do when they have no control over a situation? They go back to the books to find answers from the past. And this ritual of seeking wisdom and knowledge in paper and ink is something that grounds my volatile emotions.

Barley is grown from the earth. Paper is created from the earth. Ink is sourced from the earth.

It is something I can rise from and walk upon — away from provocation and away from stupidity.

Chocolate ice-cream is a reward to soothe the anxiety, while barley tea calms the heart by giving it a choice to not internalise complexity.

The earth is simple and healthy. That’s where books come from.

So the benefit of joining the old people club is that they’ve seen enough provocation from this world to know when to slow down and to step away from conflict while enjoying a cup of warmed barley tea. And depending on my current level of maturity, I’m either harassing people on Instagram or I’m brooding over a cup of tea, trying to understand that I don’t need to have control over people who have no control. But it is often easier to throw the provocation back to anonymous usernames by mocking and joking about things I am angry about.

We emerged from an alley in the spice market, where mystical poofs of shimmery smoke exploded in colour and light. I followed my guide as he led me through the crowd and I quickly realised that it was the underbelly of magic, where the traders and the merchants were witches who drew travellers from distant lands across oceans and deserts to buy their herbs, their dragons, and their spells. It was simply fascinating and I stopped to gawk at the limestone entrance, dusted with sand, of an emporium where mages archived their scrolls of dark magic behind a complex web of curses. The front desk was guarded by a pretty succubus but she had no effect on the mages who had already armed themselves against her love potions. I had to leave when a dark smoke started to materialise before me, blocking the emporium, and my guide took my wrist and quickly dragged me away. The cloud of smoke followed me until a certain point and then watched as we disappeared further into the Magic Spice Market.

“This is like Persia.” I observed, looking around at the dragons flying above. Their coloured wings soaking the alley with fleeting rainbows as the sunlight shone through their thin membranes.

“No, Persia is where the gods went to hunt for monsters. This is not Persia.”

“Why?” I challenged. This was my habit once curiosity overcame an inborn shyness.

“Because Persia had nothing!” He looked down at me with a ferocity I couldn’t place. “I hated Persia because it was an oasis in the desert that came and left with a tyrant king by the name of—”

“Ozymandias.”

He looked at me with a dark and brooding skepticism.

“I read the poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley.”

He refused to respond and we continued in silence. What had been the colourful spice market filled with life and magic now transformed into something more dangerous, deadly even. It was somber and quiet. The witches sat on either side of the alley with the limestone walls towering them like the walls of a castle fortress. There were no doors at ground zero, instead, the doors were around 20 feet high. It was impossible to know what was behind those doors and why we were walking through a maze.

The old women gossiped quietly, their eyeballs rolling around their sockets, greyed hair twisted in psycho curls, wearing a uniform of dark hoods that shielded their frail and skeletal forms. Several of their familiars sat on their shoulders and watched us as we strolled deeper into the murky world of dark magic.

The world suddenly seemed to walk towards the night as the dragons went to sleep and the stars came out to play. A wicked wind swept through the alley sending chills down my arms and prickling my cheeks with a sudden fear that I was going to die painfully in a world where I had no friends. Eventually, the moon shone overhead and cast a spectral light into the alley, making ghosts of us all. There was no more sound as the witches just watched and waited.

We finally came to the end of the alley and it appeared to me that it took one day and one night to cross from one end of the alley to the other, which was magic in some way because the alley was created for both the creatures of light and the creatures of the night.

There was an open desert that was forever laying as the wind brushed across the sand, gazing into the eternal abyss of the beauty of the universe. This was where the lunar witch was hiding. She was out in the open, but the night sky was guarding her. And apparently, so was the desert storm.

“I can’t go with you.” He said quietly. “It’s not me the lunar witch has invited. So if you want her permission to cross the desert to get to Monrovia, don’t die.”

“Will you wait for me?”

He nodded. “I have business in Monrovia. If you want to come with me, then I will wait.”

“Can I ask you a question?”

He nodded.

“How many gatekeepers are there in the Algorithm?”

“Just me.”

“Then what happens when you are here with me?”

“Nothing has changed.”

I was starting to understand what he was trying to say. But I couldn’t find the words to describe the feeling I was starting to see as a picture in my mind.

We stood there in companionable silence for a few more moments. Then I let out a sigh and asked him, “Does this mean that time runs differently depending on how we experience reality?”

He smiled. “Time has siblings.”

If Time had siblings, that meant that no time would pass once I stepped into the lunar witch’s desert. If my hypothesis was correct, then I would have been here the whole time — but he would know if the lunar witch liked me.

Time seemed to be an invisible creature that could slow down the experience of reality or speed up a series of catastrophes to protect who they loved. And if Time loved the lunar witch, how bad could she be?

Even if deceiving meant the justification of my death.

I stepped into the desert and closed my eyes. I smelled the strangest concoction of spices and opened my eyes. Twinkling blue eyes smiled at me. The lunar witch beckoned me to sit on her flying carpet which was currently sleeping under cushions and a low Rosewood table that had a small teapot and a plate of almonds.

“Do you like your tea with milk and sugar?” She asked softly.

I nodded.

With a snap of her fingers, two British tea cups appeared from nowhere and the tea pot filled the cups to the brim and the ornate teaspoons started stirring in the milk and sugar.

Quietly, I sat down on the cushions opposite her.

She pursed her lips merrily, “I’ve been waiting for you.”

At that moment, I knew it would be easy to tell her the truth. Because she made it easy by wanting to hear what I had to say.