prompt: storm, title: the heart of the storm in misc. flash fiction

When I was a little boy living in a little place, the television served as my only connection to the larger world I longed for and my ability to distinguish between reality and fiction was tenuous at best. When the Transformers got a virus that made them glowing-red and evil, I couldn’t touch those toys for months. When the Real Ghostbusters got turned into monsters, it was much the same. When a storm washed radioactive vegetables onto Gilligan’s Island and The Professor found a cure for the Castaways’ radiation poisoning in the nick of time, I didn’t eat vegetables for three years after that. I knew they were shows, drawings and actors, but I believed all their stories were somehow based in fact, had to some extent actually happened. I was a weird kid.

Growing up into a teen, I knew that wasn’t how things worked, but still took my cues for social norms from sitcoms. I saw romantic misunderstandings everywhere and I always cracked jokes, very mean ones, never thinking I was hurting anyone, the biting quips were just how people got attention, how they knew you were smart. I thought we all had metaphorical laugh track in our heads, it was just how folks interacted. I hurt so many with my performative glibness. Decades later, I still feel guilty. I’m a weird man.

I got a television degree and went out to that Land of Dreams, just like every show had always said, that’s where you go to find your destiny and eventually I failed miserably. It’s okay, I am not asking for pity, I realize that wasn’t my path. I lacked the ability to suck up disingenuously, I lacked the ability to put success ahead of family and friends. I hadn’t a large enough hole inside, needing be filled with the selling of a soul.

Or maybe it’s that in my overactive imagination, probably the only thing actually extraordinary about me, I’ve lived every life I’ve wanted more vividly than most experience them in reality, so that drive just isn’t quite there. I end up living the life I need to for my family and friends instead of for the movies in my head I’ve already put through their paces in my daydreams.

It makes me think about how my only near-death experience went, under heavy sedation for oral surgery, how I felt my ego, my identity, my reality being pulled away like celluloid film to reveal the hot-white light behind it, the real power that had been casting this shadow illusion into being.

Have you ever watched a film projector play past the program, past the “film end” warning strip, until the flickering is done and it’s just the light, white-hot light, relentless beating light? It was like that, just like that. I sometimes wonder, who I am beneath all of these stories? I wonder who I’d be washed clean the residue of all these dreams. Maybe in the next life, we will all find out.