I’ve had a complicated relationship with death ever since that night in the forest. For the first time in my life, I became keenly aware of my own mortality. Its cold reality was firmly latching itself to the deepest, darkest crevices of my mind; cementing within me the lucid awareness that, one day, my conscious experience of myself, other people, and the world around me, would eventually collapse into nothingness. There’s no point in even elaborating on it. The true depth of its nature will most likely never cease to elude the human imagination.
I’ve heard people compare dying to an eternal slumber.
Gentle.
Comforting.
‘The sweet release of death’.
Yet, after being assaulted in that forest by whatever that thing was, I can’t help but feel like I’ve been lied to my entire life. There’s nothing sweet about going from something to nothing. Anyone who’s ever lived through the experience of losing anything at all, whether it’s a person, a pet, or even just a thing, could tell you as much. Death of the self is merely the most final form of loss. Yes, I’m terrified of dying. I can no longer go back to living a life where death was a concept that only existed in movies and TV dramas. I’ve been forced to accept that my innocence has been taken away from me by that camping trip. And how could it not? I had been in a genuine tussle with the grim reaper himself back then. So, is it really all that surprising then, if my fear of such an experience were to haunt my every waking moment?
I don’t remember much after I was attacked. To be honest, I had thought that it was all a dream until recently. The biggest thing that sticks out to me to this day is the fact that, in that moment, I felt helpless in the grasp of my impending death. My mind had been drifting in and out of consciousness so frequently that I lost the ability to distinguish between what was hallucinatory and what was reality. It was unlike anything I’d ever lived through before in my thirteen years of life.
The experience was so brutally sluggish, so mentally excruciating, that I somehow arrived at the idea that I had been lying there on that grassy mud for months, and perhaps even years. I don’t know exactly. My sense of time was utterly distorted by my shattered consciousness. All I knew was that time was infinitely flowing as I was pulled into that tunnel, mindlessly drifting towards the unknown. I was terrified of what would happen to me once I arrived at my destination. There was a sense of finality to that journey through the tunnel; a looming specter that I couldn’t escape. Like I was being sucked in by gooey, shadowy tendrils whose will was indifferent to my own wishes and aspirations. There was no end to it, really. No matter how much I resisted and pulled myself back into reality, my consciousness was dragged back into the tunnel by those tendrils, and I was once again being pulled to the other side.
I remember… I remember after what felt like a decade of resisting the pull of the tunnel, the camp counselors finally came. The first thing they did was ask me if I was awake. It’s not like I had the mental fortitude to respond to them with any clarity, but I could hear their words clearly. No, more than that, those words kept echoing through my mind for what felt like an eternity. It’s like, every word, every question they uttered merged with me and became a quintessential part of my existence. I can still hear them right now if I try to. I can still feel the vibrations of their voices echoing through me. My entire life was coming and going to the sound of their questions. ‘Can you hear me’, ‘are you awake’, ‘stay with me’.”
“I’m lost.” That was my response each time. And after all, I was lost. My mind, the one thing that tied my experience of the world to reality, would reluctantly return to that tunnel no matter how much I fought against it.
“I’m lost. I’m lost.”
It never ended. I kept repeating the words each time I drifted back into consciousness. I was facing the end. There’s no other explanation for it. And I think, if it weren’t for that girl, if it weren’t for Zoey Brahm, I might have actually died that night. The first time I saw her at Deer Valley High, less than a month later, it looked like she was glowing. A beauty so angelic that the heavens themselves thought it fit to blind me with her divine light. I remember now how I felt the first time I met her. It surprised me how similar she was to the girl in my dreams. The one who sat next to my lifeless body. The one who watched over me as my mind fought tooth and nail to resist scattering into that eternal nothingness.
It was her existence that anchored me to reality. It was all in those beautiful eyes of hers. That cold, indifferent expression that was unlike the panicked looks of the camp counselors was a drug. Just gazing into her eyes felt like a high was being shot directly into my bloodstream, and it served as an opposing force that drew me away from that tunnel and into her orbit. It was a gaze that saw me not as a dying child, but as just another human being that, by mere coincidence, happened to be sharing this planet at the same time as her. There was no fear, no worry, no curiosity in her face. She was simply watching over me as God would, holding my soul in place with that otherworldly stare. Looking back on it, I now understand that this experience in the forest had granted me two things: an inescapable fear of death, and an undying love for Zoey Brahm.
I haven’t been able to sleep since that night without the assistance of melatonin supplements. Every night, I’d find myself roused awake due to the rapid beating of my heart each time my consciousness faded away. As if my body were forcefully injecting me with a shot of adrenaline to protect me from falling back into that tunnel. Sometimes hours would go by of this endless torture. A loop of falling asleep and waking up to my heart exploding in my chest.
In that respect, the supplements were a lifesaver, but only as far as actually sleeping went. My dreams were still all too terrifying. I must’ve died in the majority of them. In fact, the only times I didn’t die were in my dreams of Zoey. It was probably impossible to avoid falling in love with her due to how soothing the concept of her existence had been to me. She was the only thing that had kept me sane since that incident, so how could I not? Whenever I had an episode over my own fear of death, I found myself going through her social media pages to calm myself down. Just the sight of her smiling face was more potent than any medicine in the world. If I couldn’t do that, then I’d fill my head with images of those gorgeous eyes. It was the only thing that could keep me sane.
“This is… the first time I’ve admitted this to anyone, but here I am,” I concluded.
I shifted on the sofa anxiously as I caught myself in a stew of my own rambling. Scratching my neck, I nervously took in my surroundings in order to deflect from thinking about how awkward it had been. The office seemed a tad minimalist, what with the surprising lack of décor compared to the waiting room. An abstract painting of a horse to my left, sure, but not much else.
And then, my gaze fell back onto her, seated in the cushioned chair across from me. The surprising ease with which I had rambled on about my deepest thoughts and feelings to another person had taken me off guard. They were the sides of myself that I’d kept hidden from everyone else, existing only inside the dark crevices of my mind. Dr. Santana, my new psychiatrist, didn’t interject at any point.
She was a middle-aged Hispanic woman who wore rounded glasses over her wrinkled face. The gray blazer she wore over her white buttoned shirt was clinging tightly to her arm as she moved between taking notes of what I was saying and resting the folder on her lap to study my expressions, of which she was now currently doing the latter.
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Aside from the curiosity plastered on her face, both her words and her body language were very open and understanding as far as my experiences went. This openness only made it easier for everything to pour out like a broken faucet. Of course, I kept everything relating to Dream Paralysis a secret from her. I also couldn’t tell her about the creature that had followed me around for the past few days. I thought that sleeping was difficult before, but I only managed to sleep once my exhaustion had defeated my fear of being suddenly attacked by the creature once I’d passed out. However, that never happened. The creature never acted out of malice. It never attempted to communicate with me, either. It was like I had an extra shadow following me around from the moment I hacked Ben, to three days later when it finally disappeared.
However, despite not being able to talk to her about that creature, I did feel a huge burden lift from my shoulders once I was done explaining everything to her.
“Well, it sounds like you’ve been through a lot, Tristan.” It was the understatement of the century, but I could tell from her voice that she meant it with sincerity. “But you know, what interests me is that you described, Zoey, was it? As God as she looked at you. It sounds to me like she means a lot to you.”
“Yeah, she does.”
“And I hope you don’t mind me asking but, have you spoken to her at all since that night? What’s your relationship with her now?”
“My relationship…”
My relationship with Zoey Brahm. To be honest, there was a part of me that didn’t want to think about it at all.
I thought back to the conversation in the cafeteria, when I made her laugh for the first time.
I thought back to the meeting in the photography club, when she showed me her true self.
I thought back to the sleepover at her house, when I learned that she was incapable of love.
I thought back to the car ride, when she told me about her desire for a sexual partnership.
I thought back to the dance at homecoming, when I decided to serve her one-sidedly.
And I quickly realized that, to neatly wrap up the depths of how fundamentally broken our relationship was would be a pointless endeavor. In as much as Zoey was probably the reason I was still alive and hanging onto my sanity, getting involved with her had only destroyed what little sense of self I had left. She was my drug, and she knew it. I can’t separate myself from her no matter how much I try. I’m destined to be tied down in this messy relationship for the rest of my life. Was I getting ahead of myself? Going to therapy and naively believing that all of the distasteful parts of me would be hammered down neatly like a stuck-out nail?
“Tristan?”
“Huh? Oh. What was the question again?”
“Where’d your mind go there?”
“Oh, it wasn’t the tunnel. Don’t worry.”
She smiled.
“Well, you don’t have to answer today if you don’t want to. You can take your time with this.”
She reached down at her notes and wrote something down.
“You said you’ve been having trouble falling asleep lately, so I’ll prescribe you some anti-depressants. They should help you with the panic attacks you get when you try to fall asleep. By the way, I strongly recommend not using any melatonin while you’re on it. Using multiple nervous system depressants can increase your risk of overdosing, so you might want to avoid it.”
“Oh, this will work better then?”
“Well, the core of your sleeping trouble seems to be related to your trauma, so curbing your anxiety should be more effective in treating it than melatonin.”
“Oh, okay…”
Dr. Santana stood up from her seat once she was done writing the prescription then held the paper out for me.
“So, same time next week, Tristan?”
I stood up and grabbed the paper she held out.
“Sure…”
I nodded my head, staring down at the prescription while walking out of the office. The creature stopped following me around about three days after homecoming. I thought I’d be relieved, but instead my entire sense of reality had suddenly warped. It was then that I truly came to terms with how heavily influenced I was by the influx of different personalities I had been in contact with through my power. Mrs. Brahm’s short fuse, Gwen’s pessimistic outlook and Benjamin’s obsession. For just a few days, I had become the most insufferable person I knew.
But despite how powerful all three of those personalities were, what influenced me the most was, in fact, Zoey’s coldness. How easily I could emotionally distance myself from any problem I’d found myself confronted by, whether they were tied to other people’s feelings or not, felt inhuman. In fact, the first thing I thought when I got back to being myself was how terrible a person I had been since then. As someone who had experienced death anxiety for about three years at this point, my callous outburst in front of Jazmine is what had stuck out to me the most. I screamed that I would kill Benjamin as if speaking from the very foundation of my being. As if all I existed for was to rob that person of their life.
Perhaps I didn’t mean it. Perhaps, despite the murderous rage I felt in that moment, it was nothing but that: a moment. And then I remembered how, the next day, I told Gwen that I would kill him if she had spoken to him about my plans. At the time, I thought that it was just an empty threat I’d made with the intention of keeping her in line. After all, there’s no way that she would risk something happening to him by ignoring my words.
But put these two together: one remark made from pure anger, and the other made from callousness, and everything becomes gray. Perhaps, if I truly wished to, I could have easily persuaded myself to kill him if it served the interests of my goal. That thought terrifies me. More-so than being grounded, than leaving the house against my parents’ wishes, than drugging Benjamin so that our school would lose the homecoming game. All of that was terrible, sure, but it was my callousness when calculating another human being’s life into my plans that disturbed me the most. Just the idea that I was capable of sending someone else to that tunnel had troubled me deeply once I returned to being myself. For the past two nights, I’d dreamed about Benjamin. His hands popping up from the ground like the souls of the condemned, tugging at my clothes and wrestling me against my will to come with him into that tunnel. He asks in a heartbroken voice why I did this terrible thing to him. Why I committed him to that journey towards nothingness. The world as we knew it before we were born.
“Oh Tristan, how was it?”
I was greeted by my mom, Rachel Collins, who was seated in the waiting room on her phone. She immediately packed it into her handbag and stood up when I came through the door. I feel guilty for putting her through all of this. Ever since that incident, I’ve been nothing but a drag on both of my parents’ lives. My grades since entering high school have been laughable, I’ve barely made any friends, and I’ve been distant with both her and my dad. They’ve both been beyond accommodating and understanding of the change in me ever since that incident. They were scared, having almost lost me, and have done their best to help me and spend time with me since then. And while I appreciate their attempts, none of that does anything to curb the core of my issues, so their worrying is probably only going to be amplified once I’m forced into the real world. I feel bad about every single part of that. She deserves a better son than me. They both do. That’s truly what I believe from the bottom of my heart. And that belief eats away at me every day. It scoops away at my insides to the point where every waking moment of my life feels like a terrible stomach ulcer. I’m terrified of dying not just for my own sake, but because of how much I know it would destroy them. I can’t help but feel like my existence has been a net negative on their lives.
“Mm, it was fine,” I said, handing her the piece of paper. “She prescribed some medication.”
“Oh, maybe we should’ve come here from the get-go then.”
Certainly, seeing a shrink about this might’ve been a good thing. But would I have even been able to communicate everything well enough four years ago? In the first place, that thing with the counselors and Zoey felt like a dream, so there’s no way I would’ve spoken about it. What drove them to setting this appointment up was the result of last week’s events. Destroying a classroom and getting suspended, then sneaking out the next day. I got caught walking through the driveway that evening after Gwen dropped me back home. I remember not feeling anything. Much like Zoey, my heart was stone. Nothing about it bothered me at all. Once they’d sensed that change in me, booking an appointment with a psychiatrist seemed like a no-brainer.
But a few days later, the colors that Zoey viewed the world through slowly faded. And finally, the weight of what I’d done to my parents had finally come down on me. And so came the guilt and anxiety that I’d been rid of for the week before, with twice the force. Everything I’d experienced since hacking Zoey was something I had to re-examine with my own eyes, using my own judgment, without the influence of Zoey and everyone else I had hacked that week.
And this included the promise I made with her while we’d danced that night.