Let's begin with the Between.

When I was a kid, I lived on the third floor of the rectangular apartment block, over the dentist clinic occupying the first floor. The clinic was narrow and long, with cabinets stretching on one side and the long tiled corridor connecting them, with entrances on both sides of the block. The corridor was dimly lit, possibly to hide terrified kids from each other (it was late USSR, and it was deemed best practice to drill kids' teeth without an anaesthetics; there were, to put it mildly, screams from behind the doors). Not a pleasant place, in itself, but you dive in on one end, move swiftly and purposefully through the dimness, and emerge on the other side, in the different street: it was the Between. I've just devoured three Pern books I had, and I adored Lessa, and I, of course, wanted a dragon.

When I was in my early teens, my parents gave me, among manifold other gifts, the best gift of all: the entire shelf of fantasy and science fantasy books, most of them published by the infamous North-West publishing house (who were one of the first to seize on the opportunity provided by the opening of the iron curtain, and obtained - possibly stole? - translated and published as much as they could, bless their entire hearts). From Le Guin to Zelazny to Bradbury to Heinlein to Stasheff to Sapkovsky to Tad WIlliams to a handful of Conans, up and down the scale of quality and coherence; the fantasy books in tasteful dust jackets with beautiful cover illustrations (mostly Whelan, some Vallejo), the science fiction with bright matte hardcovers. I have already grazed my way through the beautiful abundance of our home library, through dimly understood classics to the jungle-and-cliff joys of The Adventure Library (Verne, Hubbard, Dumas), but this was an entire new world. This shelf was my best friend, my companion, my teacher, my refuge. Something about the blatant refusal of this genre to tie itself down to the mundane was irresistible to me. Later I added to it by hunting for books in the little opportunistic kiosks, by scouting whatever scattered volumes our local library had, by devouring those pre-Internet 'library' CDs that the adventurous and generous pirates of the late nineties sold, filled with hundreds of books translated with a wrench and a prayer.

I didn't care for the quality of those translations. I devoured without distinction, peering past the clunky sentences and indecipherable artefacts of shitty unedited translation, with the ardor of the newly-converted. I was refining, among other things, the lifelong obsession with hurt/comfort (or, as the fandom puts it, the joys of putting characters into Situations - something that brought me over to fandom later). There's a couple of passages in Harrison's otherwise mediocre Death Planet series that are still indelibly seared into my brain... but I digress. I was enthralled. I had, of course, received my first (mangled and weirdly framed to get it past Soviet censors) copy of Lord of the Rings when I was seven, and fell through each new edition, each new translation, into the Underhill joy of it.

I lived in a complicated, culturally narrow, beautiful and cramped place, othered by my half-and-half ethnicity, by my parents' university jobs, by our walls lined with double rows of books, by my dreaminess and awkwardness. I did not fit anywhere, except for those shelves; I disdained the company of my peers and craved it.

There was a family café we loved, The White Parakeet (it did, indeed, have white walls and the irritable white parakeet in a cage), that with soft serve ice cream and beautifully crispy pizza approximations. But I was obsessed with place for two pictures on two walls: glossy prints of fantasy art, one depicting three red dragon ships unhurriedly gliding down the verdant river. The other was Rivendell, or at least I was convinced it was so: spindly marble spires and gazebos climbing down the overgrown cliffside, glinting in the late sunlight.

I loved them so much, those pictures; I would've devoured them if I could. They were, in retrospect, undeniably kitschy, and all the better for it: they were windows into the not-here, the beautiful and unreachable other. I still sometimes glimpse those spires, those tall green shores, in my dreams.

And the best of all was the early realization that I don't have to contend myself with reading - that I could put myself into the Situations, with none the wiser. My imagination of that time had been happily composite, stealing bits and pieces I liked to weave them together or take apart. In my bed before falling asleep, in the bus inexorably taking me to the daily school ordeal, on the stairs, at my table with an open textbook I wasn't reading, I was best friends with the Corwin of Amber, whose Shadows gave me legitimate way to travel through all my favorite worlds. I acquainted the Fellowship with the joy of Russian bardic and rock music, I helped Usagi Tsukino to save the world, I adventured towards Lucas Wolenzack, I heroically protected poor Luke Skywalker from his father, I was the fifth musketeer and the blind prophet and the dangerous witch and the loyal sidekick. and I went to the stars and to the dungeons, to the forests and to the deserts. My past was tragic, my clothes back and silver, my mien mysterious, alluring and competent, and my secrets deadly. I was magnificent, and free.

As I grew older, that silver-and-black girl has slowly dissolved. The characters were put into their situations all by themselves; then I discovered the English-language fandom and the endless possibilities lurking therein, and let them do the work for me. Then this feverish urgency faded too. I could, and would, discern the good prose from the bad. I became picky about the quality, started noticing the underwires, the structural flaws, I revisited some old loves and noticed the tin under the golden foil. I had, in short, grown up.

But I miss it, this abundant, uncontrollable, weed-choked garden of my imagination. I'm mourning this undiscerning ability to take in everything in the world and make it my own. And instead my brain is trying to make my dreams literary, for God's sake. To make them, original, and beautiful, and logically viable, and coherent, and thematically resonant, and ready for the Other's eye. And every time I reach and brush against this wildness, this kitschy joy and freedom, I flinch.

In the conservationist biology there's a concept of "pathology of command and control", the urge to strange the nature out (monocultures, ordained gardens, trees planted in a straight line). But overcontrolling the ecosphere kills it; life thrives in the weeds, in the complexity of the uncontrolled, in the layers of compost on the forest floor. Letting the - tasteful, kind, well-meaning - observer into the garden of Eden makes it wither.

When I scroll past those godawful, teenagerish AO3 summaries, I feel bitter envy under my annoyance or condescension. They don't make for good reading, those Mary Sues and awkward crossovers and angsty songfics (and perhaps that makes me angry too, that their joy doesn't serve mine); but how amazing must it feel, to play with such abandon, how vivid it is to reach for a cliche for the first time in the world.

The dreaded writer's block, as we talk about it, is usually the fear of showing your work to the world, showing your self to the world. But I've recently noticed that I'm anxious to show my words to others, to spend as little time with them as possible by myself. I send friendly victims the most underbaked drafts imaginable, less 'drafts' and more 'sometimes I've just typed up'. I don't think it's a drive to share the pleasure, or even to fish for praise. I think it's just an anxious check-in: is it normal? Is it a normal human thing, that I just wrote here? Is it okay? Am I okay?

This whole text, as many others, might just be about masking. I keep circling back to the idea that the very term, 'masking', is a misnomer, a falsehood. You can't take off your mask and skip forward through the meadows of your autistic self. Just as the autism is an indelible part of me, masking is an indelible part of it. Just as the joy of the unbridled imagination is a part of me, the disdain and terror of it is the part of me. It's a vine that grows in me and through me, from the same soil, from the day one. To be is to be seen, to be seen is to be seen. To be seen is terrifying.

I miss that rowdy, collaged, embarrassing world waiting for me behind my eyelids, the compost from which I could grow.. I'm always reaching for it, all the one afraid that one day I will, and it will all be Backrooms, a copy of the copy of the copy. But inside of me there are two women in the tall tower, and the old woman fishing in the seasky, and the girl growing together with the tree that holds the world in her backyard, and - and - and. And I owe them to try.