I stare up at the solid-color ceiling of my bedroom. I feel uncomfortable; tossing and turning in bed. Every inch of my skin seems to burn against the pillow, the mattress, and my blanket. My eyes are open, but they see nothing. Nothing real. I'm standing in the middle of a field of wheat. Its drained-gold color spreads in all directions around me, and I stare at every inch of it in hopes to find something which does not adhere to its mind-rending pattern.
The sky.
Beautiful clouds drift across it, like white, homogenous leaves moving downstream. The sun shines brilliant white-and-gold rays down onto everything around me. I feel its warmth spread through me like a warm trickle of molten lava dripping through my veins.
"Kyle!"
The voice is like a sharp, unstoppable cut through the landscape. Like a giant's scythe - it bull-rushes through the field, moving with an unrelenting force nothing can stop. The wheat shakes, bends under its wrath. Crumbles to ash and to dust.
"Kyle!"
I try to ignore it, but I feel a dread-cold blackness seep inside me - tar fed down my throat. My eyes open, and I am blinded by uncharacteristically forceful and brutish light. I give a sharp intake of breath through my nose.
"Kyle. Can you hear me?"
I nod. Not out of any desire, but perhaps by some human, social instinct. She looks down at her notepad. Writes something. Looks up.
The Psychologist. Hestia - that was her name. Featureless face, featureless voice, and words that are harsh to my ears whenever I hear her - rubbing them raw. Whenever she talks, I feel like she's trying to fit a puzzle piece into the wrong spot, and attempting at twisting it into place so it fits. It drives me insane.
"I was asking you a question. Did you hear it?"
I shake my head. Again, that instinct of conformity.
"I asked you about Robert. Do you still feel like you were at fault for his death?"
Somewhere in the back of my mind, a compressor clamps down on my every inch of soul and squeezes it until it hurts so much that all I want to do is cry, lie down, and fall unconscious. But my face stays blank, and the pain numbs.
"No."
Hestia makes another note in her pad, and her eyes swivel back into my line of sight.
"Is that so? You claimed you were suffering… ‘withdrawals'. That was the way you put it, as I recall."
"Yes. Withdrawals." I nod again. This time it is not instinct, but my mind reacting to a flowing torrent of memory, as if from a dam which has been closed for a very long time.
"You never specified."
"Specified what?" My face shifts and changes. Like glass over a fire. My eyebrows drag themselves downwards, and my head c***s slightly to the left. It is a question posed in facial tension.
I do not hear the words as she says them. Rather, they highlight themselves in a senseless, needle-spike whirlpool of my mind as characters stringed together with some innate sense of meaning:
"What are you experiencing withdrawals from?"
I am in the field again. There is no wheat this time. Only dark, barren land. I feel no sense of peace or quietude here now. It is as if a gust of wind has just blown through, leaving behind that faint aura of cold. Empty as the darkest void, and biting as the harshest winter. I feel myself shiver, and through my eyes I see Hestia looking at me, patiently.
She nods. "I understand. Take all the time you need." Her face and words vanish as she says them, like long-accumulated dust blown away by the faintest breath. As she finishes the sentence even her lips degrade to flashes and buzzes of electricity inside my head. I'm lying in bed again. It's nighttime outside, and nothing but the artificial glow of the city drifts through my half-closed windows. The sounds that I can almost comprehend in the background lack any meaning excepting "city at night".
"From him."
The words are nothing but distant echoes as I say them. Afterimages on the winds of the sleeping city; the barren wheat field. Meaning nothing to anything or anyone. A distinct, familiar pain surfaces in my stomach, like a thorn, slowly pressed harder and harder into my skin there by the evening tide.
Meaninglessness.
My own thoughts only belong to me. Outside of the confines of my mind, they are worthless. The pain stops at a high-note of acute agony just under my belly-button. My eyes are stung with tears, and my fists are shaking. I clench and unclench them, in synchronicity with my jaw, as I lie, still as a wooden board, on my bed. And thusly, lying there in agony and suffering, tiring myself to sleep, has day after day gone.
My trips to the outside world had mostly been confined, in the past couple of months, to necessities. I would go out and get whatever it was that I needed - food, an appointment with Hestia - and I would go back. Back into my apartment. Two rooms, but it felt to me more like an expanse of some never-ending, rumbling metropolis, hidden deep underground. No noise penetrated here, but rather some deeper, unheard bustle was heard from within. That bustle, I would come to realize, was nothing more than me. Me and myself. Those were the only people abiding in this place. Perhaps if you knew me, you'd be able to tell from a single glance. But that was the thing - no one knew me. Not really. Hestia pretended to care, pretended to think that she had some understanding of the kind of person that I was, but she was just as clueless as the rest of them. Because no one really wants to know your problems.
But do they?
I sit there in my bed in the early morning and I stare into my own reflection in the distant mirror of my bathroom, the door of which is open, in the half-light. That's what I've realized - there is only ever one type of person who cares about you - cares about what you think or what you feel or what's wrong or what you want or what you need, without any motivation like money or fame or-
No.
There's always motivation. That person is your loved one, whose loved one you are as well. That person has a motivation but it's the only motivation that's worth anything to you - they want to keep being with you. Not some manic-depressed, husk of a human that you're on the path to becoming.
I'm mixing up analogies and the real world. The point I want to make is that your partner is the only one who would love you unconditionally. You're just as much a part of their life as they are part of yours, and they want to stay sane and in some semblance of balance in a world that's like a wrecking ball crashing down on them every second that they breathe, but of course you can't just stop breathing - you have so much to live for, unless you don't, unless there's nothing left, but there's never nothing left and if you believe that, then that blind optimism is probably what makes your loved one love you in the first place, and they don't want to lose it because then all they're left with is a negative number, where before there was their zero but there was also the happiness of mutual love added on, which means if you're gone that zero turns to dust and you step back another step and left with not a lack of love but the inverse of it.
But who is "them"? That's an analogy for me.
That is the thought that pierces through my head as I stand up to go and make myself breakfast, and then just for a split-second there's no air in my lungs and I'm choking and I can't breathe, the words scream by inside my head as I think them, unsure if they're new realizations or the rehashing of things I'd thought about before. And then it's gone, and I keep going, my daily tasks still needing doing.
This is the ultimate conclusion: There is no one left in this world who feels that way about me. I no longer make enough of an impact on reality for anyone to be invested in me enough to care if I go away.
But going away is not my strong suit.
Clinging on to life, even though whatever I do these days to feel alive barely counts, is something that I've grown adept at. My brain has grown a callus where a burning, gaping wound had been before. It hurt every step of the way, but now I just feel numb. Hope is what makes my reality. The pain of hope.
Every interaction is measured on two pillars. One party versus another. It doesn't have to be two, but it almost always is, because every interaction consists of an impactor - the party that creates dialogue, and a receiver - the party that reacts. My fear is based on this subjective but concrete belief. I am afraid that if I meet a person, my impact, or effect, on them will not be significant enough for them to care about me. Every time I think about it I hurt inside and this primordial fear has driven me to become practically a hermit. Now I'm here, eating breakfast, stuck inside my head, with no way to escape except to try to form a bond, but if you've ever lived on this planet, you know that even for a person with a normal mental state this is no easy task - a bond is sacred despite extroverts telling you the opposite - it's so much more than the ability to talk to a person. It's the ability to exist in two places at once. Inside a person's head as well as in your own body. This notion feeds off the human fear of mortality. It's psychology, forming bonds. Doesn't it sound so disgustingly simple? For as much as people that are like me - introverts at heart - tend to tell themselves and others they don't really need them, they're always lying through their teeth. We all do. Otherwise, the confines of our own minds will clamp shut around our throats and kill us.
In my experience, monotony tends to form well-trodden paths inside my thoughts. You no longer have to fear that some change will force your brain to exert energy in these places of comfort. My brain uses this to displace reality, and in a second I am out of my apartment, and outside, on my way to the hardware store to look for a replacement light bulb for my bathroom. In a night, the wheat field is regrown. Sometimes I wonder that if we all lived in our minds, we could solve world hunger. But afterward, I guess, we would have to solve world loneliness.
The sun shines above me in both worlds, and I take the time out of my day to give it a faint smile, if for nothing but the desire to seem happy. I read somewhere once that if you smile it tricks your brain into thinking that you're happy. I can never tell if that's true, though, since every emotion I feel is felt through a thin lens that I can no longer distinguish from the actual things that it tints.
The hardware store is brightly-lit, and a clerk by the counter looks bored and uninterested in anything that's not in front of her at the counter. I make my way to the section that I know contains the lightbulbs. I grab the one I need from my pocket, and go through the rows of different models, comparing them to find a working copy.
On my way back, I find myself in the wheat field again. I'm lost. I cannot recognize any of the usual landmarks - the formation of wheat stalks that looks like a sun-shaped birthmark, or the one that's shaped like a crescent. I walk, calmly as I can, through new and strange stalks, making sure to mark out the path I take. My fingers ache, eventually, from the all the brushing past wheat. My eyes burn from all the reflective gold and my throat is parched.
I go into a small corner-shop, and buy a bottle of water. The cashier is unresponsive to my thank you and goodbye. I don't mind - I'm unresponsive to his unresponsiveness. More and more wheat seems to grow out in front of me as I walk. Not a single cloud has formed in the sky, but I can tell that the humidity in the air is different. There's a smell in the air… it's-
The river. I'm at a bench, sitting down. Looking out at the huge river in front of me, with a thousand small ships en route to some unknown destination. The clouds are here - they hover over me, with their gray cousins gathering on the horizon to the distance.
"Hello."
The voice is jarring. My heart skips a beat, and color infects my cheeks as it begins to move faster. My eyes dart upwards to look at the source, and my brain feels like it's ready for anything, its fight-or-flight numbness encasing me in a deep-seeded sense of dread.
"I was wondering where the closest metro line is?"
As my brain processes the request, I take note of the man standing over me. A sharp-edge face, with dark, clouded, uncertain eyes. Clothes like a tourist, but more of a business-savvy one - a dark suit, which he wears in nearly thirty-degree weather. To match my assumption, he sweats and looks about ready to jump into the river behind him. His hair is perfectly combed and is practically woven around his head in neat, dark curls.
"It's further down that way, if you take a turn right at the intersection next to the McDonalds, you should see it."
My words feel strange in my mouth, the taste of stale saliva almost making me gag. I point the man in the direction, and he thanks me, in words that no longer register into my memory. As he's almost about to turn around, something in his face changes, in an expression that I could swear I've seen before, but I no longer recognize the specifics of.
"My name's Davis. By the way."
In a heartbeat, the drumming at my throat is back, and my mind is swimming in a gray abyss of vertigo.
"I'm Kyle."
That name… the last time I heard it said, it was-
A flash of searing agony runs through somewhere behind my brain. I struggle not to groan. I stand inside my field again, and this time I'm in front of the river, which snakes off into the distance, with the wheat still growing in every direction. A papier-mache boat floats at an embankment a dozen meters in front of me. Through the glaring sunlight, I can only make out a vague figure standing there. But it's enough, and I recognize him.
Wait for me!
I know I want to scream it, but not a single sound comes out of my mouth, and I'm left scrambling forwards. As I get closer and closer I get slower and slower, and eventually, I'm at a standstill, but feel like I'm still running at full speed, my head and face full of tears, my hands wanting to grab something so desperately they ache.
"Kyle? I had an uncle named Kyle once."
For a second I'm stunned. There is no boat - no sunlight… well, that's not strictly true. The sun feels real now. Hot, burning, and oppressive. My stomach feels like heaving and my eyes want to sink into my skull. Instead, I smile, enough that he notices I smiled but not enough to make it seem weird. I still remember how to do it properly, and even surprise myself with how easily it comes to me.
"He died a couple years back though. Heart attack."
"I'm sorry."
Davis gives me a strange expression. Once again, It feels like once I should recognize. But I can't. Not well enough to know what it means. I feel half ashamed and half angry at this. I've grown so accustomed to seeing nothing but blank expressions from myself and the people around me that I've had to interact with that I can no longer recognize a real expression!
"It's fine. I dunno why I brought it up." Davis smiles.
"You mind if I sit down?"
I still look at him. Neither my brain nor any other means of processing information have any decisive answer to that question.
"What about the metro?"
Davis waves my words off.
"It's fine. It can wait."
I'm alone. The boat at the river is gone. I can see no trace of it in any direction I look, but still, it's almost like there's an afterimage of its trail in the water calling to me. I follow it, and some deeper part inside me screams for me to stop, and even though I know it's right, as I think about stopping the pain in my stomach is there again, and in a split-second I'm on my knees, wanting to scream and drown my screams all at the same time. Somehow. My own thoughts are nothing but a jumbled mess. There are only two coherent thoughts inside my head: I warned myself about this and play it cool. They exist within the same locations in my brain - both simultaneous and equally meaningful.
"I only moved here a couple of weeks back, but you know what? I can already tell this is my favorite place in the entire city."
Davis' voice is once again inside my head, and for a second a jolt of fear stabs through me. Did I miss something? Did he ask me something? But my fears are almost as quickly calmed, and I nod along with him.
"I like walking along here sometimes. It takes longer to get to my apartment this way, but I don't mind."
Speaking feels foreign to me. I say the words like I mean them, but I can't tell if I actually do. Is this way normal people have to deal with when they ramble on to each other? Don't they think about whether or not they actually mean anything they say, or do they just have some vague notion of what they want to convey, and make their brains do the work for them?
"I think it's more important that you get some meaning out of it if you decide to walk somewhere. Otherwise, why not take the taxi?"
I realize suddenly this isn't just one of those nothing conversations. Davis' way of speaking is… different. He actually knows. My heart jumps into my throat and warns me I'm being presumptuous, but in a second, my brain pushes it down and I smile. He gets it! He understands Meaning!
"Yeah."
It's a simple word, but I put all my effort into making it the most powerful word I can say. I try to pack a punch into it, and it seems to me like Davis understands. There is a moment of silence, and my brain is now egging me on, and any remaining voices of opposition are drowned out inside my head by a buzz that permeates every instinct I've ever had.
I look down to see Davis' hand on the bench next to me. I place mine on his.
Crack.
I can't tell if I've imagined the noise of it. But if I didn't, I imagine that it sounds like the earth itself breaking in half as the biggest earthquake known to man destroys it.
Davis pulls his hand away. As he does, my brain pulls away from being behind my eye-sockets. In a second, my mind is swung upside down, with so much force I want to throw up all over again, and my hand is also pulling inwards, in an animalistic instinct of protection moving to my chest.
As Davis' face contorts, his lips moving in slow motion, and his eyes darting hither and thither but also somehow managing to stay in one place, fixed on me, my vision and my consciousness glazes over, as if it's just been covered in a plastic film.
I can't explain, but it's almost as if the reverse of memory occurs. Instead of being in the present and remembering past, I find myself in the past and realizing present. Cold wind rushes over my cheeks, and tears appear against my face.
There is no more wheat field.
It's gone; there are no stalks of golden grass.
My eyes are shut, I can't make them open. I can't tell if it's because of fear or nature.
I can't-
Why can't I?
There are blurs of light shining through my eyelids. It's nighttime. I try to breathe, but my mouth is filled with too much air, and I can't.
But I realize, of course.
The crack:
My skull against the pavement.
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