Worlds Within Worlds is the working title of a series of metaphysically inclined writings that are shaping themselves into a story without my conscious direction. These are essentially unedited first drafts that I have made no attempt to shape. The idea  is to let creativity flow as it wishes.  Please comment on whatever aspect you would like.

An introduction to the series and a list of the posts in order (should you wish to begin at the beginning) is on the  Writer’s World  page. 

Girl Talk: India Evans. www.pavelzoubok.com

Meet my alter-ego.

I am not real:

Worlds Within Worlds #2

I am not real, and yet I am. I sit, all flesh and blood, at my computer desk, staring at the screen that is my business world. My clients and colleagues are merely a photo and words on a screen, as I am to them. Prunella Smith; they read it alongside the photo of the thirty something woman with the blond spiky hair and a smattering of freckles over her Caucasian skin. They see a me from last year when I had blue tips to match my eyes. Now the tips are as blond as the rest, but I have one red stripe on the side along my long fringe. That isn’t the Prunella Smith that exists in the web though; the one floating in cyber space has blue tips in her white blonde hair.

Though the photo shows me leaning against my deck railing with the pond and rainforest behind me, my friends in the world within the computer screen can’t see that I’m tall. They can see the fine muscles in my arms though, the ones that can hold a porte de bras. And no, that isn’t some kind of bra-to-go; it’s a ballet term for an elegant movement of the arms. Yes; I am … er  … was, a dancer before the back gave out. The back. It doesn’t belong to me. It is, rather, the bane of my existence, the weight than ties me to the ground and prevents me from flying. But I digress. Though I still love to dance, my professional days are over; I am now a photo and a profile on the computer screen of anyone who searches for my name among the millions of web users.

Prunella Smith. Yes, it is a mouthful, but I use a shortened form. I’m am Aussie; we shorten everything, even if you tell us not to. Luckily, Prune never stuck, though childhood bullies tried to glue it to me. Some liked Prue, but I didn’t. Ella is what people call me. My mother tells me she had to think of an unusual name to offset the rather dull moniker of Smith. She briefly considered hyphenating her name  when she married, but thought that Richardson-Smith sounded precocious, so she lumped a fancy name on me. Actually, I like Ella. It suits me fine. I never felt the need to change it, unlike other performers I knew.

I am not my name, however, and I am even less a photo and a profile on a web of electronic pulses. Expressions of me can be seen, but I do not exist there. I exist in a world my friends on the other side of the world can’t see, yet they trust that I am here. They believe I exist, simply because I have a photo and words, but even without those relatively tangible proofs of my existence, I would exist. They just wouldn’t know it. So why shouldn’t unseen beings exist as well? Just because we can’t see them, doesn’t meant they aren’t there.

If I had a photo of me in a fat suit, my on-screen friends would think me fat. Their minds would create a different me. If I changed my name and posted a photo of someone else for my profile, that is who they would think I was. But that person wouldn’t be real, it would be a sock puppet – a hand moving like a mouth, but with no words of its own. Until someone exposed the puppet, though, no one would know it wasn’t real. Online, a puppet profile is as real as a real person’s profile. So who is real and who isn’t?

And you thought talk of the Fae was fantasy?

I trust that someone real is behind the words of my internet friends, but the version of them that I communicate with in this world of the World Wide Web is an illusion. In truth they are just numbers in a matrix, a series of zeros and ones in patterns that create what we see and hear there. These numbers express our thoughts as lines of symbols on the screen, and once there, they define us.

Our words, as written, are who we are for those who cannot see our faces or hear our voices, and if we offend someone with our chosen pattern of zeros and ones, others may brand us unfairly. But they do not know that their assumptions are untrue, and cruel words spread like wildfire even about the sweetest of souls. For a world that is so intangible, the web world on our screens is very prescriptive.

We label ourselves with very word.

And I haven’t even turned the computer on yet!

The thought of entering someone else’s fantasy world is uninspiring today. The novel awaiting my attention is a fake world within the fake world of my computer screen, but I would rather enter it than check my emails. I do not want to risk having to deal with a message from Dita.