I'm Of The Wonderland Persuasion

I’ve always been the hopeless romantic – in a Sibyl Vane sort of way – as in I am naively in love with art and poetry and Prince Charmings and all of the utter tragedy that is love and beauty and the loss of those, knowing full well that reality may suffocate them. Even as a child one might have seen me take some practice swoons onto a fainting couch so that when the time came for me to actually swoon, I would do it right and with the perfect and appropriate effect. Or I might have cried at the injustice of windblown plastic bag, the injustice being, of course, that the bag was plastic and not paper. I would often get trapped in the romantic and worked at staying in that dreamy state – I wanted to be Alice at the tea party.

Unfortunately, the transference of the romantic to reality never really worked since reality is composed of practicality - time management, check book balancing, and (what a majority deem) rationality. Morality also raises its eyebrows occasionally in the realm of the real, though I highly suspect that Guilt is guilty of using Morality as its lap dummy. But my imagination certainly didn’t fit into this world.

I coped (and still do to an extent) with this duality by living two separate lives: my romantic, idealistic side, the one that keeps me in daydreams, vs. practical, snarky reality. And in doing so, I have trouble reconciling myself to..um..myself. I envy people who tend to have a solid, “here I am, world, anchored and secure with who I am and there’s nothing you can do to break me” motto.

It isn’t that I am lacking as far as what I believe in – the universal truths and whatnot. It’s that I am unwilling to give up on the romantic. When I find myself being too practical and responsible, I run to the open arms of Whimsy. It is escapism, I suppose, from all the cold reality that seems to hold me down – responsibility, for example.

But I can’t be real unless I’m daydreaming.