Who Was The Thief? Dr Evil? Goldmember?

I can't remember quite how any of the movies went.

In the last week or so, I've totally lost my mojo. My spark, my pizazz, whatever it is that makes me me. My personality, if you like. I can't write anything decent. I can't even SAY anything decent. None of my words come out right, and even simple sentences sound flat and boring. The amount of times in the last week that I've started an IM conversation with someone, and then immediately wished I hadn't, because the way things are now I just know that they'll talk to me and wonder what they saw in me...oh hell, I don't even want to think about that right now.

Thank God I haven't been making phone calls as well.

Somehow, in just those few days, I've gone from being someone who's fun and charming and sparkly - at least on a good day, in good company - to someone who's awkward, and worse, dull. Everything I say to people sounds like one of those generic "So, how are you doing?" emails that all of us here have gotten far too many of. And let's face it, nobody likes those emails. In a way, even the obnoxious ones are better, because at least they're good for a giggle. The way I am right now, I'm just a shadow that barely registers on a person's radar. Watchers are dropping off (and no, that alone doesn't worry me, it's just in combination with other things), FB friends are falling off my lists, comments aren't showing up on blogs and statuses and posted links, IM conversation partners are signing off in the middle of conversation because they forget that they're talking to me. And not just on FB, which is glitchy enough that it happens at the best of times - on here, on msn, everywhere.

I'm just kind of fading away, right before my own eyes.

I don't know what's happened to me - I'm hoping it's just a combination of hormones and lack of sleep. I feel gray. Like an iceberg that's been sliced off just beneath the surface, or like a pretty, empty shell, or like a meringue - sweet on the outside, and with absolutely nothing inside.

I make friends easily. Always have, probably always will. I can, and have, moved to a brand new city - even a new country - where I know nobody, with no fear whatsoever, because I know that people will like me. I'm generally inoffensive, moderately pretty, quite sweet, and my naivete and my ignorance and my strangeness - and even my vanity and my occasional arrogance and my lack of humor - are things that people find easy to forgive, because they can sense that I truly, genuinely care about them. Perhaps it's this ease with which I get to know people that's such a curse as well as a blessing; perhaps it's the fact that I don't have to work hard to meet people that causes this grayness in me now. A thing that came to you easily can always leave you easily. The majority of the time, I feel comfortable in my own skin, but I do go through phases where I feel incomplete, as though I am not a real person at all but merely a simulacrum that looks and walks and talks like a real girl, that reads and eats and has sex and laughs with her friends, but is ultimately hollow.

These periods have been happening since I lost my memory five years ago. I don't know if they happened before that, because I can't remember. For a year after I lost my memory, I kept lists about myself that I updated every couple of days. Books I read. Foods I like. Foods I dislike. CDs in my collection that I enjoyed, and ones I didn't. I built a whole new person up from scratch, and I fought so hard to make that person dimensional and multifaceted. Slowly, painfully, I built this person you call Sati Marie Frost, this person who loves Japan, and is scared of bug larva, and will choose a good hamburger over any other food, and wears bright eyeshadow every day, and thinks you can never have too many pairs of pale pink stilettoes, and reads romances voraciously, and laughs at word puns, and loves any sport where she can cheer for a team, and decorates her room with carved African masks.

After a year I started recovering some memories; after two years I had eighty percent of them back, but even though those memories evoke emotion in me, too often they are like things I've seen on a television screen or in a book, things that happened to a character I like.

And even five years later, I still go through periods where I feel, deep down - or as deep as I go down - that people will sense this in me. That sooner or later, the spell wrought by my superficial charm will wear off, and my friends - especially the smart, perceptive ones, like you all that I've met here - will realise that underneath the easy smile and the friendly manner and the veneer of intelligence and wit, there is nothing but a swirling mass of emptiness.

This is why I choose not to associate with certain people on the site, and also why I don't bitch about them. I don't trust them, but I empathise. I understand why a person would lie about themselves, about their job or their looks or their family or their friends. I understand what it's like to feel like a shell of a person who's surrounded by real ones, and I understand the temptation to make-believe like you're more than you are, although I haven't indulged that temptation in a very long time.

I can understand Pinocchio's wish, to be a real live boy. I do wonder if he was secure when he got it, though, or if he wondered constantly if people would realise that once he was made of wood.

Do you ever really stop being made of wood, though?

Again, none of these words are coming out right. I want so much to be understood, but even I can't entirely understand what it is that I'm trying to say here. I do so want to meet you, all of you, to be a part of your community, but I am scared that when I do, you will recognize the hollowness in me, and even those of you who have met and liked me will realise that all of the things that you liked are as fragile and insubstantial as the saran wrap covering those meringue cases, and once you peel off the protective layer you will find that all you're left with is sugar and air.

I don't know, I guess I need a break. I'll be around. Maybe reading blogs now and then, or you can find me over on Facebook - there are only two of me there, and they're both me, although the one with the black and white eyes is a work profile that I rarely use.

I'm not gone forever, unless I blow away on the wind. I'll be back once I feel a bit more substantial.