Escape Room

Everybody has their own exit door to reality, a place where nobody can find us, a place that not a soul knows about. This place might create itself while someone might play video games, sometimes it might be when a person listens to music and well, why not when someone’s writing?

I’m all of the above, but I have always been about imagination in a whole. Imagination, to me, and Einstein, is worth so much more than knowledge.

It started when I was way younger, maybe around 12 or 13, maybe even earlier. Back then, I would listen to music on the bus going to school, while my mom was driving, between classes, before bed… and every time I would build a scenario in my head, a story. A beautiful story that always starred myself and some actor, singer, band member, who I thought was the finest man in the world, the man of my dream; the answer to all of my problems.

I would imagine long walks on the beaches, kisses under the rain, masquerade ball, but most of the time it was simply me singing in front of a crowd, just surprising everybody and certainly even more my crush. Why? I don’t know. I never could sing and that’s probably why I could never do anything else but imagine it.

I’m 21 and now, it’s more like a different world, a whole new place, and a new dimension where my thoughts wander to. I spend hours thinking about how I could be a super bada** spy coming back from a mission to exterminate a threat, coming back totally different as I would’ve left my fine man. Most of the time, it would be a total makeover, I wouldn’t even look like myself anymore. Yes, I’m the perfect Hollywood cliché and I seriously am sometimes ashamed of it.

Globally, those stories always end with me being happy, not without my share of drama, but it does always make me incredibly joyful.

And today, I know it’s more of a coping mechanism than anything else. Maybe it takes the magic out of it, but it’s still my very own escape room. I do that when I feel stressed, sad, mad, worried. When I feel like my world just completely sucks, when it’s too f*cking tough to breathe… and all that, although I have pretty much every that I ever wanted.

I don’t know why. I don’t know why I do it, it just warms my heart. It just helps me.

I often think it makes me weird, it makes me into a rare specimen. It makes me different. Most of the time I see it as a good thing, but when I remind myself how much people are judgmental and how they never understand anything they don’t do themselves… it just scares me. Not only with basic friends, but with close beings, with the person I spend every minute of my life with, the person who just knows everything about me and accepts my weirdness, no matter what.

So yes, I push it back until it fights with its two clawed hands to breathe again, until it just reaches for my heart and crumbles it until I let it out. And that’s when I realise how miserable I am without it. How it defines my very mood, my smile or my tears, my angry eyes or my shoulders, light from the sudden disappearance of the stress.

I think it’s important to live in reality, to differentiate both worlds, but I also think it’s important to escape the madness of this world from time to time. Sometimes, a coping mechanism, an exit door, an escape room do not mean you don’t want to live in reality, it just means you need a break from it.

I hope I will never have to hide my true self once again, the very thing that defines my weirdness, my uniqueness.

Because… the worst in all of it is that I’m the only cause of that hideout is that I’m my own bully.