Natalie Morrison, July 2, 2012

Hopefully this letter finds you unreal. Hopefully no one finds this letter, really.

It would be quite complicated if you were actually real, reading this somehow.

These letters, they’re… gone, well, most of them. Into the fireplace, as soon as they’re finished. Properly labeled and posted, into the fireplace. Now, that may seem odd. And… well, it is, can’t pretend it isn’t.

But that’s okay, tons of things are odd, and that is definitely one of the many odd things. If you’re reading this, you’re likely in possession of all of them. All the odd things. All the odd letters of mine, typed in a fearful frenzy. The stories of my nightmares, the steak through the heart of the metaphorical (and occasionally seemingly literal) vampires that stalk the metaphorical (and occasionally seemingly literal) thirteenth century slavic castles of my mind.

If you could do me a favor, throw them away. Burn them. Maybe don’t burn them. That didn’t work the first time, apparently, since you’re reading this. I hope you can’t do me a favor. I hope you aren’t reading this. I hope my fireplace has a damned bottom. An end. Too recently in my life I’ve become acquainted with the infinite and unknowable. It’s pretty frustrating to wake up falling through infinite gaping maws of teeth and wet flesh until suddenly you aren’t falling through anything but sweat and alarm clock tones.

Prolonged proximity to infinity is really rather exhausting. I’m just trying to make my living as an anthropomorphic animal-human avatar erotica artist, but no, I’m confronted near-daily with the unending immensity of non-euclidean beings stronger than strength and madder than madness. How am I supposed to draw wolfman dicks for basement dwellers in peace when I’m faced with the irrelevance of my existence and all human existence in the face of the forces which speak into my ears dark chocolate whispers of forbidden sense and lemon meringue screams of apocryphal nonsense.

So if you could really do me any favor, I would rather you unexist. No suicide, that’s just stinky. Just don’t be possible. Yeah. Be impossible, that’s it. Because what I really want is for these letters to be impossible to read. So if anyone read them, It’d be convenient if they were just as impossible as the circumstances they would hypothetically find themselves in, ya know, reading letters that I watched burn to ash with my very eyes.

I’m not going to pretend that my life is noble, or important, no. I’ve become too acquainted with the utter irrelevance of humanity in comparison to the dark puppeteers which orchestrate the storms in the clouds of the universe. I’m Natalie Morrison, an internet porn artist, of both questionable caliber and character. Driven mad by contact with the unknown and unknowable. And you’re a hypothetical impossibility reading my self medication prescription receipts.

These letters are my bloodletting, my leeches, my plague-age psychiatry. They work, mostly, so that’s good enough for me. You tend to do odd things when you’re possessed by odd thoughts, ghosts of nightmares, dancing dreams that hear the beat of the lucid night even when the sun is overhead. “Hallucinations” they’re often called. 

Hallucinations are a psychological phenomenon, these are more like psychic vampires, werewolves, video game bosses… I compare them specifically to vampires and so on because of their simultaneously alien yet predictable nature. You have to trust this judgment, of mine, please, they’re not… Internal. I’m certain. Painfully certain. 

I wouldn’t call my experiences “experiences” if I wasn’t sure I was living them and not just feeling them. They’re real, at least half real. Certainly more real than you if you’re reading this and are at all considerate of my feelings about your whole “existence” thing.

So, to slay these dragons, to bleed these bloody thoughts, to let myself free, to draw more porn of admittedly questionable quality for people of admittedly questionable taste, I write these letters. As soon as I see them start to burn away, the phantoms vanish. The seventeenth century pirate ship that seemed to be -actually- built into my house yesterday is... gone, after I wrote the captain a sternly worded letter about how inconvenient the whole thing was.

If anything about this experience can be considered positive it’s my newfound respect for the written word. It’s oddly useful for dealing with extra dimensional manifestations of hyper-realities beyond description. Kinda like a can of raid, you know, but for soul crushing surreal bullshit. Existential horrors like being inside an impossibly old pirate ship atop an impossibly old ocean, or in the belly of an old sleeping god at the bottom of the deepest trench on the coldest planet, or the unprovable and unshakable awareness of my surveillance by a coven of cannibalistic nuns possessed by a voyeuristic and frankly disgusting lust for human meat and private video footage.

They’re not always horrifying, these ghosts of other places, times, people, gods, or kitchen appliances. Sometimes they’re… intimate, pleasurable, interesting, or even hilarious. At one point, my bathroom was replaced with Eddie Murphy’s bathroom. I’ve got his phone number now. It worked, but he didn’t remember who I was. That was simultaneously comforting and deeply saddening. That half truth evidence is usually the only kind of evidence left of these more-than-memories.

It’s not… consistent, at least, in content or intensity. So sometimes I take my sweet time writing a letter. Sometimes, like with this letter, it takes it a while for the sensation or manifestation of your existence to become too much to bear.

This letter is for you, whomever that may or may not be.

Hopefully no one.

But yeah, this is another one of those bitter pills I swallow to cure the dark thoughts.

This time, you’re the sickness.

This letter is to let me forget you, let me forget the horror of this awareness of the half real nature of my experiences. Until now I was somewhat comforted by the “solvable” shape of the experiences which haunt, harass, and occasionally attempt to digest me. But you, you make me more afraid. See, I can “see” you, and I’m flexing all my recently acquired madness and cutting pretty hard with all my recently sharpened senses of selective awareness… all just to forestall the horror of your existence reaching me at my core.

You’re reading this letter, I know it, and yet I beg you to not be even capable of doing that.

I write this letter to defeat your existence, to banish my knowledge of your knowledge of my only escape hatch from this mad world I’m doomed to live in.

Please stop. Please unread, un-BE, unbecome, let me be, let me go back to before, when I could just spend an afternoon burning away at my word processor until I could forget all the horrors for weeks on end while I yiffed it up with the other degenerates on my chat rooms.

Because if you’re real, the others are likely real too. And not only that, but my letters are readable. They aren’t burned. They’re in the fireplace in black burnt crumbs of cheap paper and expensive ink, but they aren’t, you’re reading them.

Die. Die before reading this letter, something, anything, please, let it unmake you, at least to me, at least to me in my fragile mind prison atop the pit of madness at the center of the dark heart pumping sad blood through the veins of my shitty, shitty body.

Please don’t have been able to read this. Not even for me. For your own sake. For Humanity, and the others, too. Because if you can, they’re… they’re all real. All my letters. All the terribly possible living deaths of the universe sleeping in my forgotten dreams burned away in my now crowded fireplace.