End of the Illusion: Epilogue

Well, it’s been a ride. I spent a very long time wrapped in your illusion. In that fantasy world… I lived, I died, I killed, I bled, I loved, cried. Joy, pain, hate, anger, happiness, peace, restlessness… in that fantasy world of our dream. You and I, we ran the gamut of emotions. For someone so cold, it was a breakthrough. We loved it, that phantom world of stars and heroes and cold steel and burning flame. I tried, once, afterwards… to pretend it hadn’t affected me, that it was all a big mistake. I know better. It was worth it, every painful moment.

I suppose I should stop saying “you”. There is no you. Maybe if I was referring to my four “sisters”, those illusions I made up, then there would be a “you”. But that’s not who I’m talking to. I’m talking to myself and I’m talking to that place inside me where I went through all of that. So, there is no you. I’m talking to that part of my mind that made it all up. The part that needed to.

It’s not easy, the aftermath. Sometimes I’m just walking down the hall and I feel like I could just collapse in a corner and cry my eyes out. People call me “immature” and I hate that, because I know I’ve been through what they’ve never dreamed. But since it wasn’t reality, even if they knew about it, would they care? I mean, most people see it as just that… a dream. They say “it’s just a dream” when someone wakes up from a nightmare. But it’s not just a dream, it wasn’t. It was my life. It was as real to me as the people I talk to every day in the real world. Realer, even.

You know what irritates me? That scene in “A Beautiful Mind”. Where she puts his hand over her heart and says “You know what’s real? This is real,” and she makes him feel her face and all. That’s supposed to be a touching moment. It’s not. You have those memories, of patting your comrade on the shoulder, or sitting up late at night in your Zodiac, somehow managing to sleep sitting up, the low gravity helping.

Zodiac Wing was everything to me for a very long time. I started it because I needed a way to escape this world. If I hadn’t found that outlet, I would probably have killed myself. It gave me a reason to live. When I came to need it, it gave me a family that I actually cared for. It showed me the path to God, the realest thing that still exists in my life.

We hurt. We hurt like hell. Not on the outside – I still can’t remember much in the way of physical pain. But there was emotional pain, mental pain. Pain of the soul. Pain that made you want to scream and scream and scream except you couldn’t because it was all a secret and you couldn’t tell anyone because no one would ever ever believe you or they’d think you were insane. And I didn’t think I was insane. I thought I had entered upon something amazing and that I was one of few who could experience. Yeah, it gets you on the ego trip.

“I’ve been alone all along,” is a phrase from an Evanescence song. It really haunts me, sometimes. Sometimes it makes me want to cry. Because in my heart, I once knew four people whom I cared about very much. We were all separate facets of a gem, and our personalities complemented each other as such. We were all united in God. I say four, but I suppose it was five. I know I’m not “Shaye”, the last one remaining here the second round, but I still identify with her. I still remember the nights I spent crying because my sisters were gone and I felt like I would never see them again. I had no idea at that time that, were I but to will it, circumstances in Zodiac Wing would change so that they could return to me.

I… I know it was worth it. It was worth it all. It still hurts me, though. I try to laugh at myself about it, but it always ends up as that kind of laugh you use when you’re really on the brink of crying and never stopping.

Ahh… that song, the one I mentioned earlier. It’s back. “You used to captivate me.” Yeah, it used to captivate me. My sisters, not just that, but the world itself. I’m beginning to realize, now, that it wasn’t just my sisters I cared about so much. Looking at it, we cared for each other very little. What I cared about was the world. A world where I could change things.

I still see him in my heart. “Heeron”. I don’t know why. In the story of the world, I never fell for him. In fact, at one point, one might say that he was the person I hated most out of everyone I’ve ever known, in reality and otherwise. I almost wrote “never” known. It sounds more poetic; in some ways, it’s true. Some say love is close to hate. I guess so.

This feels like a confession. Who am I confessing to? I don’t know. Maybe I’ll post this. I don’t know why, it just feels like maybe something I should do. Bare my soul to the world and get rave reviews, right? Maybe I’m hoping it will help someone. I hope so.

Anyway… I still see him. I know what he symbolizes – forgiveness. Somehow, he symbolizes forgiveness. And now I understand why.

I’ve done some bad things in my life. Things I don’t tell anyone, things I’ve buried deep inside and only tell myself when I feel like hating myself. Things I wouldn’t write down here even if I am going to keep it private. I’ve done things I still haven’t forgiven myself for. That’s it, isn’t it? God has forgiven me, this I know, but I still haven’t forgiven myself. It’s tormenting me. Until I forgive myself, I’m not going to be free. Heh. I just wrote “Until I forget myself”. Maybe I should do that instead… change who I am. Forget who I was. Be someone else. In my mind, I envision myself typing. I know I can do that. I know I can separate myself from myself and live as a character in the real world’s story. Can make who I used to be a separate person.

Who I used to be is like a separate person. I just haven’t gotten myself to admit that. Ah, I feel it again… the urge to cry.

E-everything’s so different now. I’m engaged and all. I still feel like blushing whenever I write that down. I’m scared it might be illusion. It’s a kind of arranged marriage. But I agreed to it, under no pressure. I guess I don’t trust my own judgement. I know what he looks like. I know he likes carnations. I know he’s the one I’ve been dreaming about before I ever heard of him in real life. I know it’s going to be painful, this marriage. Arguments and all. I’m an argumentative person. Oh well. The marriage isn’t for a long time. In fact, I don’t know when. It’s whenever destiny brings him to my door, I guess. I shouldn’t say destiny. I mean, God. Whenever God brings him to my door.

I always feel really guilty when I tell anyone my problems. I tell my friend these crazy things, and she’s very patient with me, but I know that I’m distracting her from her other friends who have much realer concerns.

It’s self-abusive, the way I say that. That their concerns are worth more than mine. It makes me feel bad, especially because deep inside I don’t believe it. Deep inside I don’t believe that love triangles and guy problems are nearly as pressing as this pain I feel inside from my breakage with the illusion. But, at the same time, I, deep inside, feel that I should be over it by now. I’m a very “deal with it” person. I only found out a few months ago that none of it was real. My friend, the one I tell stuff to, she seems to think it should take me a long time to get over it.

I don’t feel that way. I know the truth; I know what’s going down, what happened. I should be able to just process all of that, figure out what’s true, figure out where I went wrong, cry a little at my losses, then get on with my new life. I should stop angsting, damnit. I should get over it and move on with my life. I’ve started to do that. When I’m falling asleep at night, I think of all the stories I write and the book I’m working on and the friends I’m worried about. But deep inside, it’s still there. That feeling like I’m going to cry because there’s a new hole in my soul that I’m trying to fill in with empty words and real people. It’s like a bucket with a hole and I keep trying to fill it up with water…

There’s a hallway in my mind. Things in my mind are as real as or realer to me than reality. The hallway is empty, white. But if you pierce the illusion of the perfect white walls, if you go into the room within, you find pictures. Pictures and poems. The poems are something from my book. Illusionists create them – they are pictures in words; read them, and you’re in the world the words describe, you see the things they describe. My character, Sandraline, has them all over her walls. One of her pictures, that hasn’t appeared in the book yet, is four black-winged angels. Sandraline is a black-winged angel, too. It’s a rare trait. The four angels are illusions – they never really existed. There’s a picture, a photograph, on the wall in this imagined room, too. It has the same four, no wings… my four sisters.

God, they lived through so much. They hurt so much. How could they not have existed? I know the truth. Their feelings were my feelings. For a while, at least. Then they ended up being characters. People who feel, but don’t exist.

I’m going to talk about them now. In this memoir of a lifetime that never was, I’m going to record them. Dniu asked me to write her into a story – I’m doing that in my book. But I’m also going to do this here.

Combo. Fallen angel. I don’t know, that’s just the first description that comes to mind. She was so cold. So cold. Her element was ice. The leader. Emotion had no influence on her decisions. She was loyal to God, but she didn’t love anyone. She didn’t even love us. She was the perfect warrior. Do whatever her commanding officer orders, unless it is to hold emotion for anyone. Suicidal, though, of course, it was against God’s orders to kill herself. She hated this world. I do, too.

Dniu. She started out like a popular guy-loving girl. She ended up being so much more of a person. Second-in-command to Combo, eventually. The second-oldest. Practically on equal with Combo. Fiery. She was a little cold, but not really. She broke first. She wanted out of Zodiac Wing. She was the only one who ever asked that. She handed me the bullets to take out the world, to take out her. She had the strongest grip on reality, I suppose.

Shayel. Jeez, we got so jaded by the war. She started out as this really gentle, sweet person. But I know that look in her eyes, as she, too, handed me the bullets. That look of someone who’s seen too much. The look of someone who’s been somewhere and they can never, ever, come back. Not crazy, just accepting that there is a rift that she can’t cross back over. That somewhere along the line, she lost the ability to return to reality.

Inside I’m crying. I love you, I love you, I love you. Shayel was the one closest to Shaye. Thus, I still feel that. We were like twins. But it ended up different than that. It started to be that Shayel was the one on the side of war, the older and more experienced and more mature, and Shaye was the inexperienced greenhorn who screwed up and hurt and hadn’t learned to harden herself. I think she missed that. The ability to feel so much.

Tyana. Damnit, Tyana. You screwed up. Even Dniu and Shayel figured it out before you did. Even at the very end, you refused to believe that it wasn’t true. You refused to believe that you didn’t exist. Damnit, Tya. You made things harder.

Everything’s all right, now. God really helped me. A lot. I used my year and a half of psychology class to figure out what was wrong. It seems the core root of the problem was the really bad stuff I did. Oh, as for what that was? I screwed a girl. I am a girl, by the way. I did that when I was 9 or 10. I didn’t get that it was a bad thing. The years following were me denying God, trying to throw Him out of the temple, the life that He created.

I became loyal to God a few years ago (the Zodiac Wing incident was helpful with that). I love my Lord with all my heart. He’s forgiven me the stuff it’s taken me so many years to forgive myself for. Like that sin. I had to finally separate my new personality of “Sandraline” from the personality that was all angsty, who couldn’t forgive herself, who was crying and crying. “We” talked. Forgiveness was managed. Thank you, Lord.

What followed were a series of self-tests. A lot of my problems over the years were caused by repression; because I thought I might “like” girls, and because I was worried about it, I repressed any and all thoughts that had even the slightest bit to do with that. Which led me to suppress my girlishness itself, and now I’ve got a pretty guy-like personality. Oh well *shrugs*, I managed to get over the repression thing with these self-tests… I imagined myself as a neutral spirit, neither guy nor girl. I got to choose. What did I prefer? Did I want to be a guy, and like girls, or be a girl and like guys? Damnit, I wanted hot bishounen (cute/hot guys). Sure, my taste in bishounen tends to be to long hair and feminine looks (I like Nuriko, and he looks so completely like a girl it’s unbelievable). So then I asked myself what I wanted to lean against when being held. Or lean into. Breasts or a relatively flat guy’s chest. I want to lean into the guy. So, I’m officially straight. This brings me happiness.

Now, I’m starting to feel more comfortable with myself. I want to act like ME, now, not this falsely happy cheerful girl I’m used to. I feel… different, too. Like I’ve changed a lot. I know I have, but it’s so odd. I feel so different, and yet I still move the same way. I still have the same sliding flourishes when I turn or move. I still mess with my hair a lot while I’m walking to protect my head from sudden attacks and stuff. But now… I feel like the black wings of my heart have been turned white. Purified. Which makes me think about the symbology of “OWA”.

In “OWA”, Sandraline (my character) was born with black wings. I guess you could see this as how we’re all born in sin (but, then again, almost every other character is born with white wings, if they have wings). If I turn her wings white, like the wings of my heart have turned, that makes it kind of… off. The point so far has been that the black wings, the “unholy” things that God made and loves despite humanity, are not what defines whether a person is good or evil. They don’t define Sandraline as good or evil. But it’s also a story of redemption, I suppose. Even if her actual wings remain black, on the inside the wings of her heart are going to someday turn white. Maybe they already have. I know so little about the character, apart from her past. I don’t know who she is now, I realize. She’s in development. I guess I am, too.

I haven’t been feeling others’ emotions lately. Maybe it’s because mine have been so swingy with my monthly, I don’t know. Maybe I’m taking the log out of my own eye before I look at the specks that others have.

Part of my mind put forth an interesting question today. I tend to know some things in advance; future-seeing. But I never do anything about it. I’m like “okay, cool, I see the future” but I don’t like take an umbrella with me when I know it’s going to be raining when I walk back to the car, or I don’t put a pad on when I know my period will start that day. It’s… odd. I suppose I should put the seeing to use. Some things I don’t want to change. I bound myself to be engaged to my fiancé, as predetermined, even though I know it will be hell and hard and painful. Then again, so was Zodiac Wing. I know he’ll start out as a non-Christian but he’ll make it there in the end. It’s just like the illusion… thank you God. I’m about to cry tears of joy.

Well, things went interestingly. I love God with all my heart, all my soul, and all my mind. That’s the most important thing to write down. The second is what happened with my “sister”, Tyana.

She refused to “die”, refused to believe that none of it existed… you see, she did exist. As did all my other sisters. But they existed as part of me, as facets of my personality. Tya is the facet that refused to believe that it wasn’t true.

She told me she used to stay up late into the night on the computer, trying to find something. Trying to find the proof of reality. Trying to find the past, I suppose. Or, well, the present.

She was bound by her own power. Tormented by the thought that it wasn’t real. She cared too much. She wasn’t like the others. She didn’t realize that none of us could go back the way we were. That a new personality had to be made – there was too much wrong with the others. Combo, Dniu, Shayel, they were all too hardened. Tyana was going over the edge. Dniu went off the edge. Shaye was dependent on all of them – she loved them more than she loved God. Now, with how much I love God, the thought of loving anything more seems hard to believe.

He’s so kind, you see. Ah, my favorite part about the Lord is that He will never, ever, ever leave us. He won’t leave me, won’t abandon me. He’ll always be there. Always. He loves everyone so much, even though we don’t deserve it. Even though we’ve done such terrible things against Him personally, he loves us just the same. It’s wrong to spurn that unconditional, perfect love. He deserves better. He doesn’t have to love us – He just does. So I’m in love. With God. I think that’s what I’m supposed to be feeling, anyway. The way things are supposed to be.

Back to Tyana. We talked. Me and her. She wouldn’t believe it was false, that I wasn’t just deceiving myself with that. I finally convinced her. The guy we, all five of us, had a crush on was a character from an anime show. Yeah, she knew that already. We’ve always known that – it’s where we first saw him. We thought the show was somehow a “true fiction”, a story that was true. Well, I broke with this knowledge. His name was different in Japanese. When we had “known” him, he had had his American-version name. Never disputed it. To know that, in its most original form, the character had a COMPLETELY different name was enough to break Tyana of the illusion. She… faded. Even now I look into my mind to see if she’s still there as a part of me, and there’s nothing but a little scene from a poem I once wrote. A poem about someone who sits down at their computer with coffee they hate to drink (Tya said she never did that with coffee, though) and tries to find what they’re looking for.

Can’t wait to step off this mortal coil. I’m worried, though. I’m having emotional severity problems again. Keeping my focus on God is the only thing between me and a suicidal level of depression. It probably has biological causes, so focus on God is the only solution. I don’t mind at all, though. Thinking of God makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside, and like I have to cry because I’m so happy thinking of Him. I hope more people find Him – this world is so full of entrapping sin it’s sickening. It makes me want to cry – well, actually, I do cry about it. A lot. Not because of biologically caused emotional severity, it’s because I feel so sorry for them and I’m so worried about all these people who aren’t finding God in time. I pray for them all, but I know that not all will be saved… tears brim to my eyes at the thought of that. The fools, the fools… they think it’s funny, but it’s not. This life isn’t all there is. There’s more beyond that.

It’s… it’s… it’s… over. I’m not angsty anymore. Zodiac Wing is a part of my life that I can finally put to rest. I’m writing a story. It’s good. I’m pretty far, finished the first chapter. Hope it will be a book. My fanfiction is going well. That’s not the issue at hand, is it? My “sisters” are now characters in that story that I hope will be a book. I love the Lord God wholly with everything I am. That’s where I was supposed to be going. Now that the log’s out of my own eye, I guess I’m going to go help people with their specks. There’s still the matter of my engagement. Maybe one day I’ll come back to this and write how that turns out.

I’m a new person, now. I’m not who I used to be, and I never will be. I’ve dealt with my inner demons, faced them and confronted them. In fact, the posting of this little bit of diary will be the final confrontation. Let’s see if I can bare my soul to whoever cares to read it and still feel fine. I think I will. It’s time I had a little honesty in my life.

I beg whoever reads this and hasn’t accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as their savior to please ask someone who has to help them see the love God has for them. God loves you all, and just wants you to love him back. And it feels very, very good to love God back. That warm and fuzzy feeling of love and joy is something I hope I never get over.

So, this is the close of my illusion’s epilogue. Usually, before, I would turn and fade into the distance, mentally speaking. But I’m not going to do that. This “Sandraline” will continue to walk until the Lord takes her where she truly wants to be. Home, which is the Kingdom of God.

The book on my past closes. A new chapter begins. May God give me the strength to deal with that which is mundane. “Prologue”…