I’ve included this original prologue written when I was seventeen because it shows a terribly anachronistic mode of thinking that is at once fraught with the arrogance of the “I am so mature.” and filled with interesting insight to how I must have thought as a seventeen-year old. It is frightening for me to read this, but that’s okay, I just hope I have grown at least a little since then.
Age 25
Prologue
1988
No one understands me. No one cares. Why do I even exist? There was a time in my life when I always felt as though there was always something wrong, someone against me. Why couldn’t people be just so…perfect. Why did everyone have so many faults? I believed in Utopia.
It was in my secondary and university transition years that this wonderment beset me. I was a first generation Chinese in America, torn by my heretige and the social demands of American culture. I did not have the problem many orientals did in getting accepted by my caucassian peers, rather, I had difficulty in the manner of thought and philosophy, due to the difference in the Chinese parental view and the societal dictations of American ones. I was a confused stubborn child who could not face the hardships and could not cope with the trauma of growing up. So I created this, Utopia.
Being a creative child from birth, I early grasped the vastness of the imagination. True, that in our present life we can see the universe as vast and limitless and we stand in awe of it, but even more awesome is the mind and the imagination. The universe may be infinite, but my imagination can concieve of an infinite number of universes, so truly, which is more limitless?
This mode of thought took root shortly after my attempt on my own life early in my secondary school years. The cause of such a foolhardy gesture was a beautiful, petite girl that had so captivated me at the time. I had given myself wholy to her, sold my mind and soul, so to speak. In the process I succumbed to the basest of emotions – Jealousy. It is said that jealousy destroys trust. So it does. My relationship quickly deteiorated from a good, budding mutual friendship to a horrifying one-sided obsession, an obsession that ended in catastrophe.
From the experience, I learned maturity: honor, compassion, duty , loyalty, and most importantly, friendship. I looked on my role as the ideal philanthropist. What I couldn’t seem to understand or cope with was that if I could change and try to be so `perfect’ then why couldn’t everyone else? As you can see, I still hadn’t learned humility and was still quite arrogant and immature in that respect.
Suffering from a broken heart, I refrained from falling in love again. It would have hurt too much. However, deeply buried within, me the obsession continued in subtle disguise, every so often resurfacing during emotional lows. This was so different from the first time I had broken my heart in elementary school, in which following the pain, I had looked desperately everywhere for a duplicate. With this first girl I had broken all contact with her in order to try and forget her, but with the second, I strived to become good friends with her again, hiding my pain in gestures of romance. As a result, we became closer friends then ever before, but remained as such – friends. In trying not to have a single girlfriend, I opened up and consorted with a wider array of girls. Yet, with a degree of dissatisfaction, none of them seemed to fit either of the previous girls’ standards. What I had created, was an ideal from which even the previous two could not match. Being an incurable romantic, I was melodramatic about everything. I romanticized even the most mundane trivialities in life until to others, I was living a full and rich life beset by tragedy after tragedy. This was not far from the truth, for between my romantic depression and the increasingly high demand from my parents for better academic performance, I suffered a great deal. It seemed to others that I could cope with these depressions, as pride forced me to present a pleasant facade to the world, however, inside, I was bare, even raw, and it hurt.
It was at that time that I created Mikeio Ichishita. This girl, being a figament of my imagination, lived up to the ideal template I had set for her. At night before I fell asleep, I would talk to her, and she became increasingly real. Pretty soon, I enjoyed my sleeping hours far more than the waking ones. Fantasy had temporarily filled the gap caused by reality. Each encounter became more and more vivid and soon they began to drift into my dreams and become a part of them. In those dreams I had full control of myself as if I were awake and it was at that time that I felt as though I could command a greater measure of control over my dreams. In time, this control became absolute.
Mikeio was the perfect girl and the imagination was limitless, so one evening, I looked into my a mind and saw a perfect void, and in that void I created heaven and earth, but being only ideas they existed in a vague term and were shadowed by darkness, plastic, unreal. So, I gave them credence and made them become as real as my own and said; “Let there be light.” and I saw that the light was good.