Seriously, I'm not making this into a lead-up to some silly twist at the end, where an elf ends up with a dick in her ass, or where some clever little shift happens in the story midway through. And I'll admit I originally wanted to make this a pun - fucking adventure, get it? Get it? - but nope, I just tossed in my favorite four-letter word to reflect just how fucking badly I want to go on an adventure.

I don't care what it is, not really, just so long as it's out of here. Here, where the days grind by and leave things feeling a little more broken than before, where you look at yourself in the mirror and wonder why you never seem to change, except for eyes that just seem drained, and where it seems like you're a toy in the wrong box, where there's no one that's your sort of model for miles and miles around.

Am I rambling? Yup.

Am I a bit emotional? Hell fucking yes.

I dream about it a lot, honestly - a capital-G, capital-E Great Escape, where the surly, sullen chains of this shit rip out of the ground and I can slip past the seams in reality to somewhere better. In some dreams, it's a spaceship, dropping out of the sky like the fist of God and smashing flat everything else, and I can go live out all those books I read as a kid, where some normal person gets to hop on board said spaceship and gallivant around the galaxy doing things. Being someone. Granted, adult-me's daydreams involve some cute alien copilot who has all the same kinks, and turning that spaceship into a badass space camper, with a comfortable bed and a few rooms of cool things, and just touring a bigger world. I want to see storms on Jupiter, and punch out into the big, black, cold void and have someone warm beside me, with a grin and a plan, and cruise through planets' rings before holding one another tight, when we decide it's night.

Or, hell - anyone who's read my writing more than a few times probably knows what an awfully stupid thing I have for Alfie. Okay, I like the comic, admittedly, and I'm just burnt out enough to admit that I've got a crush on her, too, but y'know what? That shit's an adventure, too. People go places, and do things, and the people... God, the people. Nobody here seems like that, with a spark and life to them, with more than a dull grind of work and a trudging, sullen step. I sometimes like to imagine that there's some charming hobbit lass out there, somewhere beyond the border between thoughts and things, pining away for something other than a stodgy life of barrel-making or carpentry and so on, and one day, she'll write a letter and toss it into a bottle, and somehow... well, it's stupid. An orange-red from beyond, yeah? A promise that there's someone else, looking back at my reflection, and stretching fingers out until they can almost pierce that wall. Until they do.

There's a stupid story, I've written for myself, in scraps throughout the past year and change - a travelogue of sorts, each day just an entry of a page or so, describing some gorgeous vista or chance encounter. Trees made of gold in the autumn, and a sea where the water is so clear you can see to the bottom, hills made from giants' bones, a warm, snug caravan winding its way through an adventure with a familiar companion on board.

If it's not already achingly obvious, I fall in love with figments, all too easily. It's okay; they're better than people, a lot of the times, it feels like.

It's fiction, yeah. All this is fiction. My stories are fiction. My shitty attempts at building an adventure for myself out of little more than words, scraped-together charisma, and hope are fiction.

I've written... Christ, what is it now? Two-hundred-plus tales on here, most sinking below the waves on a blue tide because I happen to have an M leading the title. On nights like this, I think it might not be for the joy of writing them, for the pride of putting an idea onto metaphorical paper. Maybe most nights it's not, deep down. It's because I'm tossing that bottle into the ocean, hoping it'll reach some distant shore.

It's an incantation, all this fiction. A sacrifice of ink and keys, all the words and wit at my disposal driven by some urge, deep beneath, that promises that if the right symbols align, if the right feeling is behind it, that one day, it'll click into place, and magic will happen. That it'll work.

That, finally, finally, I'll go on a fucking adventure.