We all think we have an idea of what madness is, but in all reality you don’t. I’ve come to accept that our physical death is nothing compared to what happens in the other plane and there is nothing we can do about it. An unseen world that we share with our…. counterparts. The madness I will never understand, but I realized that at a very young age that they will take us all sooner than you think. You won’t see it or feel these gods take you from this world, but they are and will do so when they so choose.
It all started when I was five years old. I was that kid that thought everything was cool. I used to put on my fake retainer in the morning, wear my mom’s glasses even though they made me blind and would touch everything and anything in reach. It definitely stressed out my parents like no other until the day I fucked my whole world up on a family vacation.
My parents took me to Disneyland one summer and we lasted no more than an hour. We were walking through the shop area at the entrance and my mom had to use the restroom so my dad and I just waited outside as usual. I was just kicking my legs, minding my own business when I noticed a contact on the ground. I thought I knew what it was. My mom replaced her glasses with them and they changed her eye color, and I wanted to be like her.
It grosses me out knowing I didn’t even wipe the thing down, but it’s not like it mattered anyway. Nothing matters. I popped that thing in my eye and I started wailing. I screamed enough to pass out. Ended up waking up in the hospital a few days later with an eye patch. They had me heavily sedated while they tried to figure out how to “fix” my eye. Up until they realized there was nothing they could do.
My parents were devastated when they heard that. They were afraid to extract it, or even tamper with it at that. They have yet to see such a phenomenon. The contact had fused to my eyeball and the eye itself was pitch black as if my pupil took up the whole thing. Every time they touched it the infection would visibly grow so they figured if they’d leave it alone and the antibiotics would do the work. They were wrong.
On and off those things for years and the infection didn’t subside, nor did it grow. It just was and that’s what I lived with. I didn’t look at my eye for as long as I took the medicine they gave me. I guess I was scared and always had it in the back of my head that I’ll look at it again when it got better. Don’t get me wrong, I would open it when I had the patch on because I wouldn’t feel so self-conscious about it.
The first time I opened my disgusting eye without the patch I thought I had gone mad. I was ten when I finally decided to open it in the mirror before I got in the bath. I was confused and mortified. I saw myself and someone who looked like me, but they weren’t. His features were fairly similar to mine except for his long hair which I did not have and he had a smile that was cut from ear to ear.
He didn’t even look at me. At the time, I thought he was looking up at something. I still don’t know if they had or have a consciousness of their own considering we follow the same path. Just in different planes of existence. I fell back and scurried away from the mirror and that’s when I got my first good look into the madness itself. Everything had a yellow hue to it as if the world was stained with cigarette smoke. The first thing to catch my attention was the tube of toothpaste.
It had a different logo on it that read, “Grest Bilepaste”. Second was the bathtub. The water was a greenish brown color and all my action figures were small humans that were pale as can be with blue lips wearing plastic garbs. They all reached out to me with their mouths wide open and I screamed while scrambling to find my eye patch. By the time my mom and dad kicked the door in I was huddled up on the floor crying and it took a few years of therapy to get the courage to look through that eye again.
Seven to be exact. High school came around and with that came peer pressure and fitting in. My patch surprisingly made me quite popular. Sympathy or not, I never had issues making friends. Some of my friends and I decided to take a trip to the boardwalk and get our buddies’ older brother to get us some beer before we headed out that way. This would be the first time I’ve had a beer outside of my dad’s supervision and of course I over indulged.
Not like I was throwing up or anything, but definitely relaxed to say the least. We were all just lounging on the beach until one of my friends got the bright idea to snatch off my eye patch. We were drinking so it was all just fun, then they asked if they could see it. Out of all these years the only people to see my eye were the doctors, my parents and myself that one time, so I said, “Fuck it. Why not?”
I opened my eye and there it was. They looked in amazement as I looked in horror. Each eye saw a different, but similar face. One was missing their lower jaw and their tongue whipped around like a snake. The other had a quarter of his head missing with rotten bananas sticking out of his skull. They were looking at me while their counterparts stared at the sky. They kept asking me what was wrong but I was too busy taking in the view.
There was a couple pushing a stroller with their intestines hanging out the back of their shorts that dripped a blue substance. There were insects buzzing wildly above the stroller getting picked out of the air one by one by a green tongue. Naked vendors wore the pattern of their normal selves clothes on their leathery skin as they passed out hotdogs with buns that legitimately looked like a butt with a cylinder of cement inside of it. Beach goers leaving pieces of themselves that would skatter away as they ran through the sand to jump into the dingy yellow ocean. All looking up towards the sun that wasn’t there.
They looked to the sky smiling if they could. All at a being that I have come to call a god due to my lack of understanding. It was far closer than the sun could ever be. It was a pink mass that sat where the sun should be with tendrils reaching out in every direction and retracting with one of our counterparts in its grip with their arms stretched as if they were embracing it. The tendrils would bring them close to its shapeless mass and our counterparts were simply no more. They just vanished.
Those few minutes felt like hours before I was finally able to snap out of it and close my infected eye again. Just to see my friends staring back at me with my normal eye. I don’t even think I blinked. They asked if I was okay and I just played it off like I was messing with them and I left it at that. It was nothing more than another gaze into madness. Over the years I would take off my patch and see both worlds for what they were, and that’s when I began to….accept what was going on.
Whenever I looked through my infected eye during the day the god would be closer and our counterparts couldn’t be happier. I also realized that the tendrils were taking those that have passed by another’s hand. Not sure if it matters if you meant to kill the other person or not, but I watched a man get smacked by a car while I was people watching with my infected eye. The driver looked like an elderly woman in clown makeup, looking out at the god over the café and was just so happy. The counterpart that was about to be struck almost seemed like they knew it was going to happen and embraced the impact.
Just to have one of those pink tendrils whisk them away when they hit the ground. In our reality I watched an old lady hit a man with her car and he couldn’t have been more terrified. It was almost as if he was struck with fear and couldn’t move out of the way. It’s pointless to make sense of it. Do our counterparts embrace death while we fear it? I thought I knew until I took my patch off at night. I was always scared to, but there always comes a point of bravery or stupidity.
Regardless, curiosity just confused me even more when I laid in my backyard and looked up at that night sky with my infected eye for the first time. The pink tendrils seemed to reach from the other side of the world, plucking our counterparts like they were nothing and they loved it. The moon was a god of its own and was just as close. There sat an orange ball of fuzz where the moon should be. I initially thought my infected eye was finally dying out and had developed a cloudy spot, but that wasn’t the case.
Our counterparts were stretched thin through a purple beam as they reached back for the earth as they let out a silent scream in the night. I got a closer look when my neighbor’s house was hit with that purple beam of light. It was like a giant flashlight that was focused into a perfect circle and made everything look like it was doused in purple paint. Who knew light can drip?
Shortly after, my neighbor Roger’s counterpart floated up from their backyard. I’ve seen his counterpart plenty of times. One eye was bigger than the other and I believe his nose was inside out and upside down. Can’t forget about those two left feet. Ironically that’s something his normal self would joke about on occasion. He was in his bathrobe he usually wore that was made of lint roller sheets. It always was covered whenever I saw him wear it.
Anyway, he reached back for the house while his body just stretched and with his mouth gaped in terror. At some point his skin stayed and his muscles were stretched thin, then his organs and I’m assuming the ladder considering how far it stretched out. All until he touched the orange ball of fuzz and turned into ash from the top down like a bolt of lightning striking the ground. Word around the block was that Roger had a heart attack that night in his kitchen grabbing a glass of water and his wife found him that following morning.
I became more and more comfortable over time walking around with both eyes open, but it wasn’t very accepted so I was often avoided. It did often get confusing at times but I needed to know how much time we have left. I couldn’t just leave the patch on since every time I could not help but take a glance back into the madness their gods grew closer while all of you went about your normal lives. While your counterparts happily waited for their impending doom with smiles on able faces in a world that made no sense.
Now I just spend my days in and out of cafés and lay out on the beach withering away with my shitty eye staring right at the sun, but that is not what I see. I see a pink god, alien or something just ripping more people everyday and it sits closer than I am comfortable with. Even with how close it is I still could not tell you what it is. It covers the sky with its pink mass and takes our counterparts as they silently cry in happiness. Even the ones taken in the night have started to pass with cries of pain and joy.
It’s like our troubles are its food and it is the madness that drives us, but also the anguish of dying alone that seems to stretch on for eternity until you are no more. I don’t know and I may never know, but I just needed to let this be known. They’ll be here sooner than you think and there is nothing we can do about it. So if I must suffer then why shouldn’t you?