Suppose you were cool enough for this story to be written about you, published, and loved by hundreds of people dedicated to spreading how amazing you are. So hundreds become thousands, and admiration like that in thousands breeds something sinister—hundreds of people dedicating themselves to not liking you, so they recruit more people to not like you, and hundreds become thousands.

Thousands to your left cheering your praise, thousands to your right clamouring for your head, and you standing in the middle covering your ears so you don’t lose your head to the lust of the applause or the guillotine screams from the despisers. 

Suppose you were able to run away from it all to some far away town to live in a simple, comfortable house and have your popular status metamorphosed into recluse/mystery/has been depending on who was asked.

Mornings were easy, spent learning how to knit or sew or garden, afternoons for tea or whisky and reading, evenings for agonising if you were a coward for running or brilliant for escaping. Days turned into months, and you finally make the inevitable mistake of making a friend in town, 

Suppose this friend understands you like the back of their hand, but a hand that is more closed fist than spread palm. They get you: as in their bad bad parts recognise your bad bad parts, and that's nice, but you are the sum of more than bad bad parts. Still, you allow the friendship to creep around you like a vine.

To be honest, it was getting lonely being by yourself in this place where nobody knew you used to be so fucking cool. This friend you make takes you dancing in the clubs on the outskirts of town and comes very close to kissing you so many times you eventually kiss them yourself, just to get over it.

Suppose the kiss is nice, very nice, you go back for seconds, and your mouth finds more skin of theirs, and their skin likes yours, and the trip back to your house is very stressful because you need them now more than ever.

The sex is nice and doesn't ruin the friendship. They show you how to garden or knit or sew, and you show them how to write stories that reach across time, back, forth, middle, spinning like dancers on ice. Gratitude for each other makes everything better, and they take things further by introducing you to more people at the house party they hold.

Suppose at the house party, you look at your friend and realise you love them, but you cannot stay. This love will make you ache to tell them everything about you and the truth about where you came from and what you ran from.

But instead, you leave, and this time, the cowardice is not a question but a clearly enunciated speech of shame replaying in your head. It trails you as you move from city to city, searching for one big enough to swallow you whole, big and full of cooler people than you.

Suppose you find a big city and a big frenemy group, and you go to parties at odd hours of the day and work at odd hours of the night doing creative things. You have no time to think or pause. The whirlwind of adjacence to fame and status is a tapdance and your feet were made to move exactly like this.

You know everyone who knows someone who has what someone needs. It’s all jump rope of big city living till you make The Mistake, you become famous. 

Suppose this fame is the best thing that has happened to you because all the people who admire you are powerful and shield you from the noise. You are untouchable because you have no need to pay attention to anything other than being a star. It is heady and intoxicating, like old wine opened in a dimly lit room full of appropriately beautiful people wearing nothing but jewels and skin.

The parties get bigger, and the people get braver in their use of power, and you tell their fucking stories so well they all fall for you. And as affection of this kind does when it mixes with fame, it becomes infamy.

Suppose infamy lands you smack on your ass one random afternoon, you hit your head and the stars that flash in front of you before you pass out are dull and grey. When you come to, you want nothing of this life. You have not wanted anything of this life for longer than you can admit, but everyone else was so loud in your ears that you could not pay attention to yourself in ways that mattered more.

This time, the escape is an excommunication. You are stripped of all protection and status and banished from the power and the beauty. For the first time in your life, you are ordinary. 

Suppose being ordinary takes you to the depth of suffering. You can’t tell stories because you are on the couch, rotting away, in a house you always kept open in your hometown. It is an ordinary house, that when the rot lifts, you make a home.

You paint a new colour, try a new meal, sleep on the floor, sing to yourself, cry in the kitchen, tell stories you want, and feel your life breaking open for the final time.

Suppose this final life of yours breaks open and presses some long-awaited joy into your hands without any fucking terms or conditions for once.

And you can breathe in deeply for the first time in all your lives and breathe out so much relief you feel like you’re floating because you don’t know the weight of a life until the day it becomes fully yours, until you become fully yours. 

Suppose you were just this cool?