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Okay, so.

Before we get started explaining any more of this fucked up little fairy tale..

I suppose it's time to come clean about who I am.

And maybe kinda sorta why I'm doing this.


I've been.. a lot of people in my lifetime. Lifetimes.






I suppose it depends on how you look at it.
Lot of years tracked by this consciousness, I'll put it simply.


The most recent name I go by on the street is 'Ryver Dean.'


But for those of you that know me.. at all.. you probably know me otherwise.


Dia Renalda,the Gatherer.
Amanda Catherine, the Keeper.
Jack Wolfe, the Fuck Up, aka JoA. (More on that later)



An exceedingly long time ago for me, I started out 'normal.'


A little girl born with an exceptional mind and an extremely broken body.


I was born half-blind, half-deaf, and with extreme tibal torsion.









In other words, I had a tenuous grasp on this world at best, and walking was out of the picture.



Abuse started early. Like, while I was in the womb early.


I was a Survivor before I drew my first breath.


Didn't know it then, of course.




My father, of course, had no idea of the abuse. Worked near constantly, leaving me in the care of..



Well. We'll leave that one up to your imaginations, eh?


Named me 'Amanda Catherine' after laying eyes on me once.


Said he never knew what love was until the moment he met me.


In the time that he could when I was small, he spent time with me. Teaching me to talk, attempting to teach me to walk, pointing out the details of the world around us and explaining them in intricate detail so that I could enjoy them too, and understand their use. Oh, I loved my Father.

Ahem. Any way, he noticed my fascination for learning grew in leaps and bounds from a source of pure boredom. My mind wanted to go so fast not even my hands could keep up. And oh, how I tried to walk and run to 'be better'....and foolishly, with a child's thinking, to outrun the pain.


I didn't wind up capable of running until I was 12 years old. So, clearly, that didn't work.





My wonderful, kind spirited, loving Father instead offered me, unwittingly, another escape route:


Reading. Oh, the freakin' written word. I live, breathe, and consume text, it seems.


Oh, and boy did I take to it. I wound up learning to read competently even faster than I did talking.




And therein lies the kicker: While English was my first language, this was not my 'home world.'


Fiction was. A world where the good guys were always stalwart and true, the bad guys were easily distinguished by their pointy horns or black hats, and we always defeated them and saved the day.





Or, well, so I thought.


As I got older, I was hesitantly diagnosed with "high functioning autism."


Simply put, the docs had no idea what I actually counted as, so they stuck me with that one.


Off the books. None of my behavior quite warranted a 'formal' diagnosis on my jacket.


School was..hell. Imagine being a rabbit unable to walk upright in a pack of hungry hyenas.


That was my daily.


I would limp home from the bus stop, nursing minor wounds as I went, ducking into the bathroom at home as soon as I arrived so I could clean up any small blood streaks or hide the bruises.


The subjects at school were interesting, but..


I absorbed them like a computer downloads 1mb these days.


If I cared.


Capturing my interest with anything beyond friendship or strange details became difficult.





Anything past the first time hearing it became boring, and monotonous, and repetitive.



At some point as I grew older, I had a falling out with the fiction I could find.


Nothing was advanced enough, or interesting enough, or held enough 'real life.'


Part of me began to crave the life that everyone else got to have. (Ha, was I naive).



So, in a fit of malcontent, I began to write.


Hesitantly, at odd moments, things I saw as a part of my world.


Things that I saw, that no one else could.. until I pointed them out.



On paper or in person.


One of my earliest works, a poem written about the shadows that haunt your walls and the inherent screaming that could be heard within tv static, that one actually won me awards a couple decades ago.




I didn't care at the time, thought the whole 'award fair' notion was foolish.


The only thing I cared about was my father's hand in mine, and.. a book. My first nonfamilial gift.


A silly thing, I'll give you. My "reward" from a minorly known author of the 'Rainbow Fish.'


Ernest Borgnine decided that day to sign one of his books and hand it to me.


For no other reason than he had read my poem, and loved it, and wanted to see the girl that wrote such scary fiction to smile over the bright pretty colors and the story.



And smile I did. He had no idea, but it was the first purely kind act towards me from an adult outside of my family whose job it was not to help me. Just a friendly stranger.



In that strange little moment, I deliberately built my first real connection to the 'real' world.



As the years passed, I began to wonder, why wasn't the real world more like fiction?


I thought to myself at the time, surely we face the same choices, right?
But, day after day, regular humans continued to disappoint me.


In a child's eye, I declared selfishness, and laziness, and greed, and apathy to be evil.



What a well developed moral compass, eh? Yeah, that was my problem.


I literally could not understand why things would keep fucking up around me.


I began to.. wish. Very, very, very hard. For a better life. For an escape. For people that cared.



By the age of 9, life had become Purgatory for me.


I lost my virginity to a family member in our piano room while the rest of the family was gardening.


Many a time, I locked myself in a room or bathroom, crying, wondering why I couldn't just speak up.



My father, incorrectly at the time, believed this to be teenage hormones and bullying mixing badly.



For two years, I learned that some things you can never escape from.


So I began to do so mentally. Creating entire worlds out of nothing to inhabit during the trauma.


Eventually, I made a particularly strong wish one night to make it change.


To give my Father and I a new life, a happy one, away from the pain and stress and fear.


The next morning, I woke up to a different timeline entirely. And a new life.


On the surface, it looked the same. Same people, same environment.


Small details were wrong.


The year someone I knew had died. The color of my front door (had always been red, now green).


Where we ate lunch at my middle school. What the book I had been reading was.


Tiny shit no one else saw or could see.. until I pointed it out.


To the astonishment of my peers, or the apathy and a shrug. "Eh it's okay the way it is."


I grew to hate both responses.


A LOT of fucked up shit happened between 12 and 16.


I like to call those the 'lost years.'


The years where I would 'make a wish,' and.. learn to regret it immensely.


I had thought that writing these wishes down was safe. As long as I didn't speak them, I'd be fine.


Trouble was, my bored little ass would write little short stories in these new worlds.


I began to term it "falling through the cracks in the timelines."


Nowhere all my wishes came true, by far. Or, hell, I wouldn't be sitting here talking to you today.


But sometimes, something, some little piece of information I thought of would get stuck.And find a timeline that it fit, and yank my little ass over to it.


Imagine a world where you never know who your friends are, and are not.



And you're afraid to ask, because you don't want to be pitied for your memory problems.


Or committed for your "obvious insanity."


I got into a lot of trouble in high school. Fell in love a few times. Was forced into a cult.


(Don't ask.)


I eventually escaped THAT shitshow, and returned to my hometown, albeit reluctantly.


To encounter a world entirely different than the one I had left.


It was a shock, to put it mildly.


Suddenly, there was a cousin everyone swore I had been best friends with growing up, living at my house? Pictures of us hanging out as kids that looked to me like they had been faked?


And my friends from elementary school, good lord, I won't even go into those.


You know, a year or two back I asked that cousin what he remembered of our childhood.


His answer still creeps me out. "I don't know."When I asked him further, he elaborated in a very chilling way. "Were we.. experimented on?"At the time, I laughed. I was so used to people not seeing the shit I did, I thought he was joking.


He shook his head, and grabbed my arms bruisingly.


"I don't remember most of my past as a kid, and what I do remember doesn't make sense."He went on to elaborate that he had had a series of pet theories about our childhood, such as our being a part of a child sex ring, kidnappees into the family we are a part of now, and some pretty extreme ones based on our abuse that I won't recount here.


What I remember most of this was his pinning me with his stare and asking,


"What do YOU remember?"


To which I shrugged off his hands on my arms and stepped back, playing stupid.


Singing all the appropriate little songs about how we grew up, what we did, etc.


Lies I had learned well in the last couple of decades.


I remember his look of heartbreak when I did this, though I hated myself for doing it.



For now, I'm going to skip about ten years' worth of information.



Way, way too much to go into right now.



Current day, I have devoted myself to righting the wrongs I have accidentally incurred.


And those I see around me.


I don't like to be recognized for who I "really am," because with that name comes memories.


Flashbacks of happier and worse times. Family. Connections. Bridges to so much pain.


And a life I can't go back to, for many many reasons.


One of which being, it doesn't technically exist anymore.


I change my hair, my name, my voice, my clothes, everything I can to avoid this.


Finally having learned to use my writing 'ability' in better ways.


I like to be known by 'Ryver,' these days. A name gift from someone special to me.


Same for 'Dia,' and 'Jack,' once upon a lifetime.


You can call me any of the above. Just don't call me late for supper. ;D


My last advice for you now, before I get ready for my work day, is this:



Treat everything I say as absolute truth, and absolute fiction.



I am nothing if not a storyteller, weaving a brand new beautiful world of colors, truth, and lies.



What I teach you, I have earned through many a year of heartbreak, toil, and pain.



Please, please don't waste my lessons. I fought hard for them.



I don't relay my past out of some question for redemption, or belonging, or pity.



I tell it for understanding. To show you where the hell I came from.I've been to those awful places you've been. The ones you don't like to talk about.



And for the ones still there, I've made it my mission; "I'm coming back to get you out."As far as all that other shit like details, names, and faces, well..



I am, at best, the most reliable Unreliable Narrator you will likely ever meet.