Casual Apparitions (3) Mother rarely spoke to me, but when she did her mind was a jewellery box. Pearls and jewels of wisdom dropped in strings from her too red lips, metaphors and anecdotes conjured from the air as if they were nothing. Due to my Cloud!Fever I remember very little of what she said, but one phrase of hers sticks in my mind even now, clinging to my mind like her perfume still clings to my skin. "Never forget. Nostalgia is a chocolate dipped in mercury." Now you can argue the meaning of this phrase if you like, for many will no doubt say it is hardly advice, but I know exactly what she meant. It was a warning, of sorts, and one I have to remind myself of frequently. It means Nostalgia, and I use that capital as a indicator of gravitas, is a killer of the cruelest kind. The more you dip into it the hungrier for it become, the more you indulge in it the sicker you get. You gorge yourself on the past and live it fervently, getting weaker and weaker and less and less sustained by it until you eat yourself to death. A pleasurable death maybe, but a graceless one. Love is like that too, when you think about it. xxx "So.. how was it?" LilyWhite was curled up on the edge of my bed with her head on her knees, eyes flicked up to stare at me. She was dressed in the most extravagant outfit I had seen her in so far, layers and layers of ripped white lace spread across my floor and taking up roughly half the room. Not for the first time I reflected on the benefits of her being imaginary, this was one of the more appreciated ones. "What do you want me to say Lil'? He's complicated and mysterious and divine and he likes Peter Pan. He also seems to be real, which is nice, and didn't seem so utterly repulsed by me that he couldn't hide it. He's perfect." LilyWhite cracked a small smile and toyed with one of the many feathers in her hair. "So you like him." I turned from my diary-writing to stare at her. "Don't make jokes Lily. Of course I don't like him, that would require an emotional range much healthier than mine. Liking people is for those lucky few stable enough to have asperations of relationships, not jangling bags of bones so broken that any kind of attachment comes with a thousand flashing red lights." Lily blinked up at me. "So you like him." "I will concede to finding him fascinating, but I'm not letting it go further. I am not so grossly hopeful. He's just someone to talk to on those rare occasions I go outside." Lily did not seem convinced, but I did not care. I could not let myself get too invested in him, and even if I was, denial seemed a better idea than inevitable hurt. Instead of dwelling on it I chose a far crueler approach - attack. "Speaking of... whatever happened to you and Far?" I regretted my words almost immediatley, when my friend turned a pretty bubblegum pink all over and literally shrank out of existance, leaving an exquisitley made (but unfortunatley intangible) dress lying on the bed in her wake. Whatever had happened, I concluded, must have been pretty awful for her and so was none of my business. In some recess of my mind though I was far from satistfied, mainly because they were my imaginary friends and I should know what was going on with them. Then I realised, with just a little twinge of terror, that I was alone. For what felt like the first time in a long time I was without company of any kind, real or otherwise. I did the sensible thing, what anyone in the same position would have done, and panicked. I shan't bore you with the details, for shaking and screaming are dynamic but hardly interesting, and it's hard to recount them in any way that isn't incredibly unpleasant. I will say however, that when I hit fever pitch and the white noise that constantly seemed to buzz inside my skull reversed to be outside pushing in, the one pallid face to float to the forefront of my mind was Jared's. And that is a fact I was not at all proud of, because it seemed that maybe infatuation had won the day, and the fact that he had such a pull on me already was unsettling to say the least. I had spent my #life in a state of perpetual detachment, and this perfect, idiotic boy had smashed my boundries. Jesus, I was pathetic.