I am an artist. To create is to suffer—here, let me show you.
This work contains CWs for: mentions of suicide.
The Pretense Of Subtext by Queerious and
xexnoncores
The following is a transcript of an audio recording from (NAME LOST), a former SITE employee whose current whereabouts are unknown. (NAME LOST)’s tape recorder was found in a pile of ███ abandoned novel manuscripts, most of which have been partially burned or soaked in invisible ink.
PLAY ▶︎•၊၊||၊|။||||။၊|။•
It's never been about the pretense of fiction, has it?
Anyone who writes and denies stories are alive is not only a worthless writer, but an empty person too. To create is to bleed, cry, and tear yourself apart; what I make is indistinguishable from me, in such a way that the rejection of my work is a redirection of misery—hate what I make, and you hate me.
I don't read stories because I’m looking for entertainment, hoping for a fictional fright, searching for the edges of my psyche. I know where the horizon of my self is, and it sits at the zenith of experimentation, of a hopelessness of the ego, of a “please see me” uttered while I am sure that my only worth is what I make, my only meaning to kill my body via creation.
I read these stories, desperately hoping that one of them is the truth to my insatiable desire of being an artist worth giving a damn about. Hoping desperately that one of the ghosts, monsters, or nightmares might be real enough to strike me down and render me rabid such that my dementedness gains an alertness of its own, a conscious conscience that coalesces into something crystalline. There is a comfort after all, in knowing the horrors that exist in the world can be transferred from the pen to the paper—the real fright comes from wondering if anyone will care.
You white pillars that hold the imaginary audience in my head—bow to me so I may kill you with my talent on my way to greatness. Prostrate yourselves before me such that for a brief second, an insatiable hunger thinks it is satisfied, a cavernous mouth thinks it has had enough, and a broken heart thinks it finally has purpose in this chaotic world.
All of the stories we tell are false. This is the only truth that we can rely on. A trick of the light, a hallucination, anything that could explain the unexplainable—all stories are merely slivers of a growing chasm of understanding which would kill us if we fully knew. If we fully understood the world, our brains would melt and our eyes would rupture; our teeth would rot and our hands would burn as the meaning of life is suddenly thrust upon us with such unrestrained vigor that we are made wholly mortal in our ineptitude.
My ineptitude.
I fear being forgotten.
I fear being left behind.
I fear being hated, abandoned, unloved, and misunderstood.
I want my art to speak for me when I am gone, when the self-fulfilling prophecies in my mind finally complete themselves. I want there to be the thinnest, most minuscule slice of probability that my art will be loved when I am abhorred, that I will be seen as skilled when I eventually fade from memory, that one day someone will be glad they met my art even if my broken self imploded in the process.
Invite my darkness into your life, because I am worth it. May my brightness be unbearable, may my vulnerability be torture.
May everything you don’t think about me never come to pass; I hope you obsess over me for just a little bit, enough to say something kind about me.
I want to create a masterpiece capable of killing inherited afterimages.
I want to drown in the fantasy of a world where the unexplainable is explained. Because that means, for a fleeting moment, I can hide within a world of untruths, escape into a cacophony of illusions, delve into unspeakable horrors, all for one reason: if I know things are fake, then I can pretend they are real enough to kill me. I can repeat my cycles of misery and despair, because maybe this time it will be different. Maybe this time my damage will have been worth the pain, and produce a color no one has ever seen before.
Maybe this time people will love me enough not to be so casual about my existence, about the fractures which machinate my addled mind and neuropathied soul.
I create that which does not exist, so that you can try to understand the things that persist. The world inside of my head is begging to be shot, begging to be executed upon hot coals, begging to be worshipped and spoken about kindly.
I am just as much of a fiction as any other story, rooted in truth, stretched for entertainment. I am a puppet for your enjoyment, a vessel for your disappointment, an empty glass manifested performant. I delight in creation as much as I want to perish when the real audience manifests and does not move, does not sway, does not see me as who I have constructed myself to be, a fiction upon fiction, multiplied by false realities and diseased information.
Did I cut my strings long ago?
No, I will never be free. The intersection of art and my self-hatred will forever keep me tied down.
But maybe for a second I can pretend everything will be still enough to be alright.
Maybe for a second, if I make you understand something, you will see the real me.
Goodbye SITE. By the time you hear this, I will have cast you aside. It is time for me to become something greater, something bigger, something wholly real—
At this very moment, I have been born again somewhere else.