When the ocean came for me, I could see it rushing in from a long way off. My feet, clumsy and heavy, stood rooted to the tenuous ground they knew. I knew my demise would be by drowning, and I tried early to make my peace with the water, tilting my head back when it rained to taste the liquid and feel it running into my body, mingling with my cells, which I knew from biology were already three-fourths water. I hoped that I could soften the blow, warm up the frozenness of those far-off waves, I hoped that I could be prepared. Even back then, when I was so much younger, I was apart from the world with my knowledge. They asked why I didn't apply myself, why couldn't I be more sociable.

My mother says that everything I do in life is for dramatic effect; she warns me that the world doesn't like a faker; she tries to prepare me for this hard, prosaic world by espousing hard work and honesty. She thinks I should take more AP classes, get more summer internships, work harder, fulfill my potential. I wonder if adults see potential always where there is only an unwelcomed bitterness, cynical and farsighted, something that looks like Intelligence or Talent Gone Astray. In a few days, my mom will find out that I ended up in this place, no matter what my efforts are to hide it. When I came in, they asked if I wanted them to tell any family members that I was here. It seemed like too much bother, too much work. I can see all the conversations already, I have this farsightedness in me, like anticipation. The air moves and I can already feel the blow, is all.

The walls in this room are smooth and white, the lighting flourescent and sterile. There is a plastic potted plant in the corner, its leaves thick with dust. The floor is smooth and tiled; it reminds me of high school, that institutional white, with those flecks of gray so the dirt doesn't show up as much. They let me in through their extra-wide door, and they didn't even lock it behind them. It locks every time it shuts. I'm waiting here; an intake worker is supposed to come and tell me my sentence, scribble wisely on their notepad about my flatness of affect. I am glad that waiting is one of my talents.

I didn't mean to end up here, in this hospital in a strange town where I was only supposed to go to school, then scurry home every break like a good daughter. Between my bitterness and my cutting and the way the horizon got flatter and flatter, I knew the drowning was closer. But I made a good effort, I intended to do all of my homework, I went to classes when I could breathe, I even took a few notes. I smiled at people when they said hello. I tried, but I get the feeling that anything I did could only delay this imprisonment, or circumvent it with death.

But if I killed myself, I just couldn't take what my mother would say. They say I'm a danger to myself. She would tell me I'm faking it again. I guess you'd think my logic was twisted, because if I was dead I wouldn't hear what anyone had to say. I'm not so sure my mother couldn't reach me to criticize even beyond the grave.

There's nothing in this room for my eyes to rest on; the walls are white and slippery and the floor has no good pattern, and no interesting randomness either. I say waiting is a talent of mine because I am a very experienced daydreamer. You might even say I am a professional. It's a way to get accustomed to the water, like I was talking about. A way to swallow the rain so the ocean won't be so unfamiliar. Slipping away to a vivid daydream must be a lot like having hallucinations. I'm so good at it I can't be aware of the real world around me at all, not even if I tried.

This room is so slippery and sterile, I don't even need to close my eyes. I do anyway. I'm so fucking tired.

my first entry brings me up to 719 words, and i will have to start another one. it seemed the only natural way to "jump inside".

The fountain was an incredible piece of glasswork, really intricate and subtle, Möbius-strip-like the way the eye wound around and around in it. The very center was a wavery tube of opaque glass, a dark color on the blue side of indigo, and the glass was like water frozen in complex curvy patterns radiating asymmetrically into paler and paler blues. Valerie ran her fingers along the edge closest to her and it was clear glass, thin and sturdy.

She'd seen the fountain before, traveling the streets of the Endless City. Usually her daydreams started in an apartment she thought of as her own space. It was on the twentieth floor of a 50-floor glass building, in a northeast corner where the sunrise was cold and brilliant. Glass was overused in her daydream city, but she loved the excess, the land-of-Oz feeling it gave her. It wasn't only the skyscrapers that were made of their translucent colored glass, but the little buildings as well, the streetlights, the bridges. The wires and plumbing and innards were always hidden with a layer of opacity; the floors were texturized and gritty; other than that, her world was fresh and clean, visible and, well, Endless.

This particular fountain she found herself dawdling by was in a small park where three roads intersected in a triangle of traffic. It was morning, and there was a dewy velvet carpet of grass underfoot. She hadn't realized until now that the room in the hospital was completely devoid of windows. She drank in the outside morning air, lay down in the dew just to feel messy, a part of the world. Even the sensation of cold was welcome. She closed her eyes, opening her pores to the liquid underneath her, losing herself in the privacy of her own head.

"So they've taken you." The voice was quiet but peremptory, a little patronizing. How rude, Valerie thought. She kept her eyes studiously closed and concentrated on the dew.

"That won't go over well, you know."

Dammit, thought Valerie. Can't you see I'm ignoring you? She squinted one eye open to look at the intruder. The person was tall (or maybe it was just the angle), dressed androgynously in tight black leggings and a baggy Hamlet-style shirt, but black instead of white. It was belted, and Valerie wouldn't have been surprised to see a sword dangling from the left hip, but there was none. Their hair was dark and neatly cut; the expression on their face, looking down at her, was even more patronizing than the voice.

"What are you talking about?" she said grumpily. It was pretty common for people in the Endless City to address Valerie as though they knew her. She thought there must be a kind of logic to it, one just beyond her reach. It was better in the City to let intuition be as important as reason, she'd found. And it was better not to make assumptions. Gender, for instance, was often surprising. Valerie made friends with the plural-pronoun-as-singular-nongendered a long time ago. Otherwise, the assumptions were sure to embarrass her, later on.

"You. The hospital. Locked up."

"Who the fuck is they?"

"Are. Are they."

Oh, she did not want to be talking to this person. "I could have stayed in that hospital if I wanted to be patronized," she said.

"Oh, you'll get used to me. I'm not so bad. It's mostly show, you know."

"Please don't stick around long enough for me to get used to you."

"You're even spikier than they told me you would be, Valerie," the stranger smirked. "I just thought you might want to be warned."

"Warned of what?" Valerie snapped. "How do you know my name?"

"We're all aware of you, honey. You've been pretty important... up till now..."

"Look," she sighed. "You're trying to play some kind of game with me, and I'm not playing. If you want to be direct with me, you can come by my apartment later. I have to leave."

"Have it your way," they said, and sprawled on a park bench nearby, forcing Valerie to back her words up or endure this person's presence. Well, that's just fine, she thought. I don't need dew anyhow. She stalked off down the street, looking for a bus stop or a street sign. She kept walking until the world faded around her.

this thing is limping majorly. i think i need to take a break from it. my count is up to 1448.

I'm having a rough day for writing. I'm not sure where I want to go or what I want to say. I don't know much about the characters, except Valerie. I have vague ideas only.

I was talking about them to Aeryn while we waited for the bus, and she had some good ideas. Their novel is accidentally very similar to mine in the idea, but fundamentally there are a lot of differences. Anyway, they suggested doing a sort of character sketch of the Endless City, you know, political structure, government, all that. Something outside of my actual words.

Here's the vision I have so far: interspersed with action in the hospital (with flashbacks about getting there, life before, etc), she tangles with this prickly, perpetually amused, above-it-all person until she learns more about the Nature of the World. she realizes slowly that

(thought: "You can't realize a thing any other way than suddenly, I think. The seeds might be there, the truth you're not willing to look at, but looking it full in the face is something that happens in an instant. There's no slow progression; there is only not-knowing in the face of increasing odds.")

she realizes the nature of power in this place, well actually first she realizes that it's real, fairly quickly. that they know about the outside, they can act independently of her, even do things she can't do. even control her in ways. control the front. interact with the front. etc. so then she realizes that the power structure is not her idea of fair: a political sort of thing. and she goes on some Quest some Cynical Crusade to make things better. possibly when she starts going too far some Miss Shirley type even locks her away from the front. and stuff like that. i don't know how it ends.

i'm thinking the Endless City is ruled supposedly by a council, which listens to the public and pretends to fairness. but the miss shirley type is the only real person in this council, and she or he is a puppet of the Dark Organization. who oppresses the City how? i don't fucking know. my head hurts. each person each type of person has their own job, their own people they're allowed to interact with, their own amount of freedom. the prison is often arranged to look not like a prison, such as for Valerie.

wow, my head hurts suddenly. i will have to save the intensive thinking for later.

On a lighter note, I got a Sony Clie!!!!!!! It is so fantabulously fantabulous that I can't hardly believe it. It's such a new model that there's no fold-out keyboard for it, though. Hopefully they'll come out with one soon. 3rd quarter 2002, is what stowaway's site said. So. I wait.

We also got tons of halloween candy, but that's entry fodder for a different journal.

Doran sighed as he watched Valerie walk away. She knew so little, and stood for so much. He worried about this abrasive girl, so painfully direct and guileless. He suspected that they had more in common than she would ever want to admit. Anyhow, it was dangerous of him to try to speak to her. The Red Court would call her up on the carpet, shred all that dignity, spit out another docile, broken twit. And they would know if he tried to interfere, especially if he won Valerie over. Her naïveté with its layer of the tough-girl act was rare in this beautiful, dangerous, oppressive city.

If there is fear in her eyes, he reflected, it's not a knowing fear.

But the outside mattered more than most Citizens knew. Doran knew; he remembered Valerie's birth four or so years ago. Before her there was another Valerie, one who lived peacefully now in her tiny locked apartment on Fourth Street. The old Valerie never asked questions or resented her lot in life; in the end that was why she did not make a successful or believeable teenager. It is difficult to teach things to someone with no curiousity. The new Valerie was turning out to be another disappointment, a failure, a nutcase. Doran was afraid they'd scrap her as well, start over. Her replacement would be a little less intelligent, less reflective, less proud. He knew where his loyalties belonged, and the Red Court would really have his ass if they knew the way his thoughts were so tinged with blasphemy. But he felt a compassion for Valerie, a little twinging sadness.

She disappeared from sight, walking north on Seventh, dangerously near a part of the City not approved for her use. Damn it. He'd have to get in touch with someone to bring her back, and his radio unit gave him such a damn headache lately. He made a mental note for the hundredth time to ask a techie to look at it later, and wired the info in anyway. They'd find her even if he didn't report; security (especially around such an important fronter) was always double- or triple-layered. Or more. Still, they'd also find out that he'd talked to her, sooner or later, and he'd slipped up too many times to withhold information. The Red Court always assumed incompetence was treachery.

He'd really been too direct with the girl, earlier. But he had no patience with games, despite her accusations. Life in the City necessitated meanings-within-meanings, manipulation, layers of screens and obscurity. Secretly, he was fed up with it. There is only so much hiding, so many passwords, so much code that a person can take, he thought. It's why I like her. It's why I told her. She has nothing to mar her forthrightness. And everything I told her, she'll know soon enough. It would be a waiting game to get called on it, though. Not a single liason would be pleased with him; his privacy clearance was high, but he doubted it was that high. Valerie was, after all, a matter of national interest.

"Ms. Nesbitt? Hello?"

I open my eyes to see a woman looking at me with pursed-up lips and an opinion already forming in her pointy little head. Dammit, if I'm going to waste such time daydreaming (or was it dreaming, period?), I could at least be refreshed by the experience. You know, wild sexual adventures, exhilirating explorations of bug-free wilderness, that kind of thing. The dew and the sunrise were pretty good; I could have lived with that. This room feels stuffy and hot. But that person who talked to me really kind of shook me up, more than I'd like to admit.

"Valerie, is it? I'm here to admit you," the woman says. Like I've been waiting outside the door all this time. No, they're plenty quick about locking you up, but you're not actually there until you get The Chart.

I've never been in a hospital before that I can remember, and this hasn't caught me at the best of times. I really don't know if I can summon up the energy to talk to this person.

Maybe that's the whole problem, what put me here: an energy leak, like a hole in a tire. And all they need to do is stich it up, pump me full, and drive me away. Except most people, when they get tired, if they get a chance to rest they're fine. Most tired people would not experience the world as so many waves licking around their ankles, hips, neck. There is no darkness innate in tired. Or maybe there is, and no one passed me the guidebook.

Maybe everything's wrong with me, maybe nothing. I've never felt so lost about my life. (That means you're borderline) whispers a voice in my head. (Persistent identity crisis. Manipulative behaviour.)

Oh yeah, and I have voices. I actually thought everyone had those, until earlier this quarter. My roommate, who is talkative, is taking Intro to Psych. Not that they teach you about voices there; they save that kind of juicy stuff for Abnormal Psych. But conversations have a way of meandering, and we got on the subject late one night.

It was when she was talking about how sorry she felt for schitzophrenic people, maybe. She said something like, "Do you know that crazy - mentally ill people, some of them, hear voices all the time in their heads? Like, they can't get away from them."

I've learned to be neutral and follow along. Maybe it was when I decided to open my mouth and swallow the water that I found out talking about myself made people uncomfortable. Imitation can be closer to the real thing than the thing itself, and I was always a quick study. So social interactions, fraught with hidden dangers, are mostly a matter of me nodding and looking interested. When I've heard a person talk for a while, I pick up their cadence, their style. When I'm in a group of people, I mold myself to the accepted flow, which never has too much room for individuality anyway.

Every interaction, every situation, has hidden expectations, concealed sinkholes. I walk carefully. I have a reputation for being quiet, but I'm not a quiet person. Just too tired to venture into unsafe waters. Too anxious.

"So tell me, Valerie. What brought you here to Wilbur County Memorial?" I thought tiredly about what would happen if I punched her in her lipsticked, sickly sweet mouth. I'm not a violent person, but I should warn her to check the box that says "hostility towards authority figures."

I am in the middle of a section, and need to go back to it, but I'm just too tired right now. I feel talentless and exhausted. I keep wondering why the sections are so short. So, 2560. That's enough for one day, although I might write more this evening.