>>From: Belacqua
>>To: Perdita
>>Subject: saturday
>>Date: Sat, 11 Nov 2000

Very few people know me personally. If by personally you mean in person, then that's correct, but if by personally you mean what happens behind my eyes, there are very few, if any, who have gotten that deep.

Weekends are cool and not cool at the same time. They’re great because I have nothing to do, but it sucks because I know in a few days I'll have something I have to do, and I hate that. I hate that I HAVE to go to school and I HAVE to eventually get a job and prostitute my mind for however many hours a day just so I can eat. I don't want to deal with all that. I don't want any responsibilities and I don't want to answer to anyone. It makes me furious when I'm ordered to do something because the person doing the ordering is still just a person who's trying to threaten me with some form of punishment if I don't cooperate with what they’re demanding of me. That's why I’ve always wanted to just open fire in a crowd. Then, I’d get to tell people what to do. I wouldn't have to answer to anyone (except the police, but I don't plan to be alive when they would show up).

When I was reading what you said about the girl interviewing you, I was thinking of a very similar experience I had. I was communicating via e-mail with someone who was a psych major just really interested in me as a case study. She asked me if I really wanted to be "normal," and the more I thought about it, the more frightening normal became. Normal is blind subservience. It's not seeing what is really going on. It's being a fucking sheep, looking, acting, and feeling like everyone else. Conformity is terrifying and I don't want to be able to be filed away in some drawer or placed into some type of mold. I have some sort of freedom, at a really high price, but I think my life is far more meaningful this way, even if it always hurts like hell. I simply cannot function in the normal people's world. The only place I know is in my head, and it's so comforting to know that I'm not the only one who lives like that. I could survive much more easily if I didn't have to worry about ordinary people because they're just as much clutter in my world as I am in theirs. I just want to leave it and enter the world no one controls.

I want to totally, absolutely, and conclusively say that you are not causing problems in my life. Causing problems is the last thing you are doing. I don't ever want you to think that you are. You are enriching it.

In any case, I hope your weekend goes well, and I hope to hear from you soon.
I love you.
Belacqua

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>From: Perdita
>To: Belacqua
>Subject: Re: saturday
>Date: Sat, 11 Nov 2000

Belacqua,

By personally, I did mean in person. It's the funniest thing to me that we live in our heads and yet we're forced to pretend we don't. It's more than unfair; it's a complete paradox. It just doesn't make any logical amount of SENSE, but everyone else thinks they know sense better than we do. Well, fuck that because I'm fully determined to never let myself become one of "them" regardless of how much I hate feeling like shit all the time.

A good e-mail friend of mine who feels very similarly to the way I do about Columbine reminded me the other day that Dylan had a little phrase written on one of his notebooks, and it said, "Ignorance is bliss. Then again, that would explain my depression." Enough said, right? Ignorance is bliss. Ignorance is all those ignoramuses living around us telling us to become like them. Fuck that. I refuse. I'm about two seconds away from flipping out at my job, and all I want to do is be put into a nice little media-filtered box with my good friends Eric and Dylan, and then I would know my life had been spent in the only way it was understood to be done, in the only way that meant anything to me. I will not live my life like one of the "normal" people because I never have been normal and I never will be. Why would I want to be untrue to myself?

Thank you for saying I'm not causing problems in your life. You mean a lot to me, and I'd hate to lose you for anything.

I love you.
Perdita