The 'Mental Paths' is the name for the series of story fragments I'm writing for exploring my opinions on matters. I'm not creating characters in the sense of other persons, with childhoods, parents, and friends of their own; rather, these characters are fragments of my own personalities, opinions, and cultural references.

Especially on matters I feel divided on, I intend to have these stories as a means of exploring; I understand models more easily than I understand the complex things they're models of. A drawing, or a physical model... whatever. I generally need to understand the basic structure, the potentially changing structure, before I can really understand the importance of details.

As such, I develop characters who feel symbolic to me of these aspects of self, and I set them to wandering and interacting. The environments they do this in, often, is another symbolic imagery that I'm yet exploring: these mental paths.

*~*

Last semester, in my journal, I drew a picture of a fairly content and in-control feline... a crouched together human... and another figure, a girl walking with her arms touching behind her, not truly observing her surroundings.

Separating her and the other two figures were wavy walls, like in cartoon movies of the inside of a body; it couldn't be seen in the drawing, but the walls were of a transluscent, whitish material. They weren't dripping or sticky, but if one were to attempt to pass through them, they would have a consistency like that of a jello-like plastic; resealing behind you.

The imagery stayed with me, and then I read Kagerou. Four times. Something about the structure of the zones Kano explores, that his voices inhabit---it seemed similar to what I had drawn. Blocking aspects of self away from being explored, passing through your mind with a kind of emotional autism---looking at the ground, avoiding touching those walls, avoiding meeting any of the others. I cringed at this thought, as I'd generally been avoiding staring too much at anyone on campus---and so had an even harder time remembering who was who. Had been avoiding really meeting people's eyes, and especially avoiding opening up to anyone.