i had to write a short story, so i did. my teacher sent a copy to the dean of students. i’m not sure why. still, i thought i’d share.

Staring with a manic attentiveness at the glowing, pixilated screen that has kept her attention for the past few hours (or is it days? even years?), the girl idly taps her fingertips lightly over the keyboard, making enough contact to maintain an open connection with the physical world yet still clearly separated, a chasm gaping, whether solely in her mind or in some more cosmic form as well. Her face is attentive, yet her eyes are glazed, almost as if she’s paying greater attention to something she sees only in her head than what is on the monitor before her. What could be in her head that draws her attention away from the world that encompbumes her completely? Flashes can be seen in her eyes, faint flickers of terror and agony and bliss. Looking more closely at the girl, traces of sleeplessness can be seen, shades of grey and black surrounding her eyes. Her hands tremor slightly, seemingly of their own accord.

Slipping beneath the skin, becoming one with the lost soul sitting before you, you are suddenly swept into a maelstrom of pulling and tearing winds, flailing wildly in an attempt to restabilize your universe, suddenly gone awry, suddenly capsized, suddenly skewed from the truth, from reality. Slowly coming to rest, regaining an unsteady balance, you look out and are unable to tear your eyes away from what you—what the girl—sees, both in the world and in her head. Screams echo through the world you now inhabit, terror-stricken whimpers of doubt and remorse followed by wails of utter agony, seemingly inhuman and seemingly everywhere and yet nowhere. Uneasily looking around, you can see flitters of unknown beings, unknowable beings, always in the corner of your eye and just out of sight, flickers of color, shape and sound. What is this place?

You see images that you’ve never seen before and yet that seem eerily familiar, echoing nightmares and dreams you’ve had timelessly. Wheeling patterns and colors that you cannot even begin to fathom are echoed by sounds that are too much and too little to process all at the same time. The world you inhabited is irreversibly changed, perhaps scarred, and there is no way to escape the dreamland sequence that you have catapulted yourself into. Night horrors scuttle past you, emanations of black that give off an evil stench both physically and emotionally, leaving a taste behind that saturates and pollutes. Everything seems tainted, perhaps permanently, as you step towards the eyes that peer out into the reality that you left behind for this gorgonian daymare.

As you look out, you see horror after horror occurring, death, madness, plagues, fires, and floods. Disease is everywhere, people dying in the streets even as they flee, desperately pushing their children away from them, towards the pestilence sweeping down upon them, in a vain attempt to escape, to find life, to live, only to be crushed in their path by others fleeing. Your mind starts to cave in under the constant pressure, as you realize that if you had not stepped inside this life, this world, this existence, much of this would not happen and may not happen and could not happen. Insanity circles ever nearer, ripping gashes in the boundaries you’ve thrown up in a vain attempt to protect yourself and you can hear it whispering to you, seducing you, trying to draw you into the riptide current that, as if it were Charybdis, will inevitably and eventually bury you under a thousand pounds of grief, sorrow, and rage and leave you screaming out your pain to an uncaring and unhearing universe. Struggling mightily, you push it all aside, desperately, fearfully, and fall, gasping for breath, back into the reality you once knew, a comfortable place, a normalcy. Yet you are not where you were nor what you were; life seems unchanged, the same as it was a mere second ago in the mind of another and you realize that the voice you hear is your own. Suddenly, you find yourself screaming and tearing at your own face with your nails, ripping futilely at the flesh that now encompbumes you, trying desperately to eliminate that which has become you as you understand what you were and realizing that you have become what you fear most. You are yourself or the girl or the girl is you or the girl has become you and you are doomed to scream forever at the ceaseless hell surrounding your mind. You watch as you (or what was you or what you wish you were) turn and walk away and you, drawn as if by a greater force than any you have yet felt, turn back to the screen that keeps you prisoner. Were you ever other than you are?