She said it so quietly that I barely heard her the first time.
“Sorry hun?”
She’d been chipping away on a research project all week. I was in bed reading a book and enjoying my night.
“Do you ever feel claustrophobic?” she asked again, more clearly this time, her face staring straight ahead at the computer screen.
Emily knew that I was all about clear communication - if she wanted to initiate a break-up conversation, she could say her piece plainly… and maybe make some eye contact at the very least?
“No, I can’t say that I do babe.”
She softly nodded to herself.
“Do you…?”
She stopped her scrolling for a moment. She still wouldn’t turn and look at me… but she was thinking.
“Who do you think put us here?”
Hm. She liked to wax philosophical every now and then.
“Well, I mean I can’t say for certain, but I believe that humanity reached this point through events that were way outside of our control, like, y’know, the big bang, cambrian explosion, evolution giving monkeys bigger and bigger brains, that sort of stuff. The holy trinity of chaos, time, and atoms doin’ their thing I suppose.”
She grimaced.
“I thought you’d say something like that.”
The response was a bit out of character for Emily. She was a staunch atheist, and she used the phrase “We’re all star stuff,” much more than the average person, to the point where it’d even get an eye roll out of me every now and then.
“And what’s your theory?” I asked.
She continued mindlessly scrolling away at the computer. It felt like her research was the priority, and her conversation with me was a weird aside to keep her awake. After a minute of me feeling like a piece of furniture, she spoke up again.
“My theory is… we tell ourselves this is all a cosmic accident to make ourselves feel better.”
An eye-brow raising comment from her, for sure. I know she’s the smarter half of our relationship, but… nah.
“Really? You think that accepting that everything around us is a cosmic accident is somehow soothing? You think it’s comforting to think that when we die, it’s all over?”
She continued scrolling.
“Yes.”
I shrugged.
“Well, uh, agree to disagree, I guess. I’d much prefer to live forever.”
“You’d much prefer to live forever…” she said under her breath.
I felt like she needed to take a break from her work. Maybe the stress was getting to her.
“Hey, you okay ba-”
“I think that we tell ourselves that everything is meaningless and finite, because it makes us feel like we have control. Agency. That we aren’t at the mercy of something we’ll never understand.”
“I can’t say I resonate with that, Em.”
“I think the creator leaves us hints. About what this is all about. And where it all goes.”
As she spoke, it felt like she was almost reading off of a website. I realized that I’d never asked her what her research project was about.
“When you look outside, what do you see?”
Christ. She did seem off.
“Uh, nature. I see nature, I guess,” I replied.
“What do you think of it?”
“I think it’s beautiful. Don’t you?”
She shook her head softly.
“It’s a mirage. It’s pleasing if you don’t zoom in or pay attention. If you do, it’s a system of creatures devouring each other for energy. Creating more of themselves, devouring each other, reproducing again, devouring each other: an endlessly cruel loop. Have you ever seen an animal get eaten before?”
What the fuck Em. I needed to get her out of this headspace. Something was very wrong.
“Uh, no, outside of a random Youtube video here or there, I don’t think I’ve seen an ani-”
“It’s not natural. Nothing about it looks natural. You see it, and it’s a visceral hint that this whole thing isn’t right. Nothing folds in and accepts its fate in the food chain. They all fight and claw and scream as they’re torn apart. They cry out the exact same way a human would.”
“Babe, you really shouldn’t be watching shit like–”
“Babe, you really shouldn’t be watching shit like–”
She said the words out loud just as I said them. Like she knew exactly what I was going to say. She didn’t lip-read or anything - her eyes were still straight ahead on the computer screen, her finger on the scroll wheel.
I wanted to ignore it.
“What, am I starting to get predictable?” I asked her.
She didn’t respond. But her breathing started to quicken. Short breaths in and out, reaching a frantic tempo.
I got out of bed. I ran to her and turned her chair away from the computer. We locked eyes.
“Hun, what is your research project about?”
Between her panic attack, she answered -
“Free will.”
“Free will?”
“Only one day into starting the paper, and I felt something calling to me. It all started to make sense.”
“What, what started to make sense?”
“What all of this is. What everything is. Energy, energy is-”
“God, Em, shut up about energy, we need to like get you to a hospital or someth-”
“No, look, everything is energy devouring itself, right?”
I realized that I needed to engage her to calm her down.
“Sure, yes, animals eat each other for energy. Bring home the point, hun.”
“There’s an energy inside us too. Something that can be devoured.”
“Well yeah, I mean we’re a part of the animal kingdom, so I’m sure if I ran into a lion or something it’d eat me–”
She pointed at her chest. Her heart. Something inside her.
“No. Us. The real us inside. Our soul. Our essence. There’s something out there trying to take it.”
It was clear to me she wasn’t well. I went to fetch my cell phone. I needed to get her to the hospital pronto. As I scanned the room, my eyes caught what was on her computer screen.
A website that looked very dated. Early 2000ish. Amateur-ish.
The banner of the website read: Emily’s Free Will
We were near the bottom of the page.
On the site was a script of our conversation. Right up until the words she just said: “Our soul. Our essence. There’s something out there trying to take it.”
My exclamation of “What the fuck” echoed the very words I found myself reading on the website. I scrolled up. Everything her and I had discussed moments before was on the page. Identical to the word.
I closed the website immediately. I turned the computer off shortly after as well.
I held Emily in my arms. I told her that we’d go to sleep and forget everything that happened. I told her to discard the project altogether, that a failing grade was fine, and that we just needed to bury this and put it behind us.
She disappeared a week later.
The search went on for weeks. None of us had a clue where she was. She left us with no hints on where she was going and when she was coming back. She was just… gone.
As the depression sunk in for her friends and family and the search dwindled down, I followed the one lead I had.
When I was all alone, and away from the chaos…
I went to a secluded plot of land in the middle of the night, and after a few hours of digging, I found the coffin. I opened it up, and sure enough Emily was there, decay and all. The inside walls of the coffin etched in scratch marks.
If you’re wondering how I was able to find her body, the coordinates were there on the website, right underneath the line: “Mark closed the website in disbelief, and didn’t return for weeks after Emily’s disappearance.”
Of course, this time I had to keep reading. Underneath the location of Emily’s grave, was the final line on the page.
“And soon enough, Mark would wake up to discover himself buried as well. His body would never be discovered.”
I’m still here. For now anyways. But if the moment that is written does come to pass, I ask that you look for me. I don’t want my body to go unfound.
Emily, wherever you are, I’d like to change my answer to your question.