“Maybe your finger muscles are just shriveling up because you don’t have anyone to text?” I can do better than that, Yui: My throat is actually shriveled up because I have barely talked for so many years. And it still isn’t enough, it seems:

“Not alone as in single, or alone as in lonely, but alone as if my life in this world is a single-player game” was how I put it in my imaginary diary.

Yes, I have written imaginary diaries about my daydreams with dice. The dice, as long-time readers might have remembered, are supposed to cause a certain level of randomness in the story. By and large, I strive for realism except for the few (sometimes just one) specific change that separates the story in my mind from real life. The current reboot has basically just one change: In it, I have the ability of mental time travel, to send my mind back in time to an earlier point in time. The length of how far back I can go increases with practice. The balancing force is that the past is not really altered: Once the past catches up with the present, it disappears and I find myself in Real Time again, the altered past simply a pocket dimension leaving no trace except in my own mind.

So yeah, I am kind of daydreaming about daydreaming, I guess? Only more elaborately.

Having traveled back in time to late 2009, it is now early 2011 and my imaginary self has mainly been studying Go (the Asian board game). And that is when my imaginary self wakes up one day and asks: “Have you noticed something weird about this story? I am alone. Not alone as in single, or alone as in lonely, but alone as if my life in this world  is a single-player game”.

So I am sitting here alone and daydreaming about being alone all over again, a kind of near unlimited groundhog years. (I refer of course to the movie “Groundhog Day”, which is one of the few movies I can watch repeatedly, although not every day!) If I had unlimited time, it seems I would spend it reading books, playing games, learning new skills. Alone. The more I am freed from my constraints, the more I seek solitude. Year after year of being alone, is what I dream of.

I have a feeling that this is not exactly normal. Or even a good thing, as such. But it is not a suffering. It is, as I just stated, something I daydream about, something that feels relaxing and natural to me. I’ve never heard of anything like this before, but I bet it is more common that I have thought. Perhaps it is just that most who feel that way, eventually disappear from view and live out their lives outside our horizon of attention.

We say that humans are social animals, but perhaps we only see those who are. We are necessarily the children of those who did not prefer to live and die alone. Well, even I would perhaps not go that far. I feel a moral obligation to pay back to humanity or civilization for the benefits that have been given to me. But I’d love to take a few years vacation from people now and then, if that had been possible … but it only is in my dreams.