The Real Fake World

The Real Fake World is a reflection of my life told after the passing of my mother who suffered from cancer for over six years. The memoir is not only about how this experience affected my life and relationships, but also how it is generally relevant to being human. What makes this story different from most is that my mother was psychic, or what she liked to call a 'sensitive'. I knew since the age of ten that she would die young. She told me she would, and she was never wrong.

I begin the story with a metaphor - a crashing plane. An adolescent boy deals with the illness of his mother, pretending not to feel the world around him, until which time the plane begins to crash and he is told that his mother is dying. Not the kind of dying though that the doctors have told him before, not another surgery or another tumor, but the real kind, the kind he can feel and knows to be true. A feeling of turbulence builds and mixes with the threat of an impending end that presses the boy against an emotional wall that refuses to let up, and like a threatened animal, it leads to desperation and the rules of his society to crumble from within him. His mind reaches a point that it will do anything to find a way to escape itself. This breakdown reshapes how he sees and hears his friends and family, it escalates his sarcastic and sometimes humorous view of the world, and it leads to the trashing of his self-esteem as he throws his body carelessly into alcohol abuse and the arms of the women around him. Knowing from a young age that his mother would die, the boy struggles through life against this power, turning it every which way he can in his mind to come to an understanding of it, and doing his best to try and stop it.