Tervel Andrews

CHARACTER MONOLOGUE: HANA NOZUKA (IED TOKYO)

"It all starts out on the right track, so to speak. You do all the right things You have all the skill and imagination and passion to keep moving forward. You genuinely care, because even at an age when you really shouldn't have any idea what you want out of life, you find yourself in enough dreams and daydreams to know there's nothing else you'd rather be doing. The fantasy worlds you create seem more real, more reliable than anything in the real world that you always have to crash back to. The world that hurts. After a while you're pushed back into that world so often that you start to see the positive things, or rather, thing. Imagine it as a tether, holding you in place so you don't fall to your death. Or maybe a bungee cord, because no matter how far you go out into the adventure, you always get pulled back into safety. Then one day, for no apparant reason, the tether breaks. And it turns out that instead of being spirited away to the other world, you find yourself stuck in the real world. Not on the shore, but landlocked and cripple, with no forseeable way out. Maybe I should have started the water anaology sooner. No, but the tether breaks and you start seeing all these frayed threads and you observe them and trace them back, because it's not like you have anything else to do, and you realize that there were more tethers, all connected to the same line. And they all broke, too, right. But it's so tough now that you can't even figure out whether they broke on the fantasy side or the real world side. And you see them all unraveling. And you feel it happening to you. And you can't do anything, because you never learned...tether repair, or whatever. You never expected to need it. The tether wasn't supposed to just BREAK like that. *sigh* That's what it was like when my brother died." ~ Hana (IED Tokyo)