MayVaneDay Studios (Gopher Edition)

losing my passion

published: 3-21-2018

I don’t know why, but recently, I seem to have lost any and all passion for things I once loved to do. Even finishing The Duality of Mankind was laborious and met with anxiety instead of relief and fulfillment.

I don’t know whether it’s due to the crushing disappointment from rejection by a former Creative Writing teacher…

Or maybe it’s because of the soul-crushing assignment in Foods II of having to write an entire story about making jelly.

It could just be that discovering the darkest reaches of the internet has killed my brain and I need a detox.

On a side note, I had a dream last night. I was sitting down to lunch with a trusted friend and confidante- a boy with black hair and a pale complexion who was my age, although we were closer to what I would guess a twenty-year-old to be like instead of hormonal teenagers on the brink of freedom from parental control.

We were discussing the school’s newest anti-bullying technology over lunch. I was busy chomping away at a salad with thin slices of ham drenched in ranch, but I don’t remember in the slightest what he was eating. The same thing, I would presume. But the anti-bullying app- it was comprised of two sections. One reported the latest instances of bullying as they occurred in shorthand much like a police officer would use. The other one was sort of an “After School” anonymous chatting fiasco, but it was sane and didn’t require Facebook to login or authenticate, and it was centered around leaving messages of encouragement and hope for suicidal students.

At least, that was what it was designed for, because on that unfortunate day, it was flooded with students fretting over seeing a forearm-sized purple dragon flitting about the school, slipping in backpacks and nesting in lockers and sucking up water from other people’s waterbottles as they tramped down the hall. There was one girl that it seemed to hang around more often than others- a friend, maybe; she certainly didn’t seem bothered by it at all.

I quickly choked down my salad and left; it was an experimental restaurant, where sensors detected what you ate and you were automatically charged to your bank account when you left. By the time I arrived at the school to check it out, the dragon had been cornered in one of the shower stalls in the girl’s locker rooms.

In human form.

I knocked gently on the shower stall. Bashful, she shook her head and backed into the corner of the small porcelain space, body a blurry silhouette through the stall door.

“I’ll give you a few minutes to get changed,” I said, trying not to be confrontative. “I just want to talk to you about what’s been going on.”

“O-Okay.”

She slowly pulled her clothes back on- where she got them from, I had no idea- and unlocked the shower stall and pushed it open. Only her head peeked out from the door.

She was a pretty young girl, about six or seven. Her eyes were a deep purple, her hair a slightly lighter version of the same shade, tangled and knotted into two rudimentary pigtails. My interface pinged- a little notification popped up in the corner of my vision, distracting me for a moment.

She had exactly forty-nine freckles, it said.