Hello.
I’m not sure what good this will do, but I feel a need to inform you all about the experience I had, in case… I don’t know, exactly. In case you experience it too? You’ll understand soon why that’s not really a valid reason, and I can’t imagine that anyone else who’s gone through this (assuming such persons even exist) would gain anything new from my account. Hell, I can’t even imagine such a person would want to see the world from anyone else’s perspective again, because I certainly don’t.
I’m not quite sure who I am, but the doctors kept calling me Zachary, so do with that what you will. I was in a mental hospital for about a month, and between the therapy and the pills I was certain I was turning the corner on dealing with what I experienced. It’s still sometimes difficult to pin down who I was before, but as recent memories have started fading it’s been getting a lot easier, and sometimes I think I can even feel the shape of my old life, if only at the edges of my consciousness.
At any rate, my memories of this past month are pretty clear, as are the events of the minutes just before everything happened. I was going to go into more detail about my recent life, but I think I’ll wait until closer to the end of the post because I’m beginning to feel like I’m just putting off writing about my experience. I only have a few hours here anyway.
I don’t remember waking up that morning, and I don’t remember if I left for work on time or not, but I do know I was already late and stuck in traffic on the highway in my city, a few days before Christmas. It was 9:07, bumper to bumper, near gridlock, and had been for a few minutes at least as I can’t even remember touching the gas pedal. I’ve been told that I called work about fifteen minutes earlier, but I don’t remember that, just the flashing of emergency lights up ahead. The last thing I saw before everything was the clock ticking over to 9:08, and I sighed in annoyance at the continued delay.
A few seconds later, I got light headed, and my vision faded as I felt a flash of anguish, of sadness and anger that came out of nowhere. It lasted only a second but it felt so real, so personal. My vision came back, but before I had the chance to react to any meaningful degree, I got hit with a similar flash, of grief and pain, and an overwhelming sense of finality. It felt like I was dying, though there was an undercurrent of relief, and then it happened again after just a moment. This time, though, a bolt of fear and panic lanced through me, mixed with hatred and an unshakeable feeling of being cold. Along with this, however, came the blurred image of a man leaning in, too close, and cast in shadow.
I started to panic, but before I could, another wave hit, then another, and another. Dozens of moments flashed through my mind and each time they seemed to last longer and longer. I was scared and alone, crying and unable to breathe, then I was confused and largely unaware, not recognizing the people around me as my vision faded, then I was smiling up at my husband, his hand squeezing mine as he told me how much he loved me, and my sight faded. One after another, each longer than the last. Sometimes I was dreaming, only suddenly realizing something was wrong and not being able to wake up.
I was dying, over and over, in every way I could imagine. Waking up to an oncoming car and my bones breaking, desperately reaching for the surface as my lungs filled with water, gasping for scalding breaths in an acrid darkness, fumbling for a family member’s hand as it slowly became harder to breathe, and one terrifying moment of utter bliss leaping off a balcony, only for a flash of regret moments before the ground. Sometimes there would just be nothing, no sights or smells, barely a whisper of a voice somewhere I couldn’t know. I thought I was seeing all the different ways I might die, up until I was taking a selfie in the passenger seat of a car that ran a red light.
It was not my face on the screen.
I started to get memories from each experience, as well. I knew I was dying of cancer, I knew I had prom in a week, I knew I wasn’t going to see my wife again, I knew my husband was going to miss me, I knew my family would never find me. All through these, I could feel my own thoughts, separate from what I was experiencing, panic and confusion setting to the side as I came to a realization: I must be hallucinating, because the only other alternative is that I am experiencing the final moments of other, actual people. I only felt like I could move my own body between the visions, each memory fading until I saw the steering wheel of my own car, suddenly glad I was stuck in traffic after having experienced in intimate detail how it feels to die in a high-speed collision.
I fumbled around the steering column between each moment, trying to hit the wipers or headlights or hazards, anything to let the poor drivers behind me know something was wrong, hitting something before realizing they probably already knew, I’d been sitting there essentially hallucinating for an hour at least, surely someone had called an ambulance and they just weren’t here yet. After the next vision, I looked at the clock.
It was still 9:08.
That wasn’t possible. It had been at least an hour, maybe an hour and a half, and just as I was beginning to think maybe the clock was broken, it ticked over to 9:09. In that moment, the small sense of relief was overtaken swiftly by a fresh wave of panic and confusion, and as those moments kept passing, each now feeling closer to a full minute, I began to sense something else, like something tugging at my mind and filling it with static all at once, building to a crescendo as I watched my kids, their kids, all filing out of the room while my aged wife took my hand in hers as she said farewell.
As the vision ended, I felt like some thread snapped, and I cried out as the static that had been building seemed to crash down onto my mind all at once, like a tsunami against the shore.Providing a full explanation of what came next is frankly impossible, so I’m going to touch on some highlights instead, but I would like to address something here. What I experienced that first minute was far and away the worst experience I’ve ever had in one respect: I’ve always been afraid of death, and nobody should have to experience that terror more than once in a single lifetime. After everything, I estimate that I experienced somewhere near a hundred deaths, amounting to over an hour’s worth of memories, full of fear and anger and acceptance and rage and love and sorrow, and a lifetime of emotions and memories hidden just behind the veil of a death imminent.
If that was all it had been, I might have gone mad, or merely been traumatized by the experience. I might have called into work and taken the day off so I could spend the rest of the day at the bottom of a bottle, or maybe I would have called up a friend and we’d have gone somewhere to get my mind off what I’d seen. Perhaps I would have called my family, whoever they are. With hindsight, however, I’m grateful for those experiences, because otherwise I would not have had any preparation for what followed.
All at once, with that last memory of death, I experienced an explosion of information. At times I felt like I would flow from one memory into the next, other times I was certain I was watching dozens or hundreds at a time, and sometimes I felt like I simply couldn’t feel myself at all. When it started I was overwhelmed, and I was afraid I would be experiencing more deaths, but the suspense of witnessing a sudden death quickly faded. One minute I was watching a TV show alone in my apartment, other times I was a banker, a cheerleader, a thief, a pilot, eating, and biking and running and gaming all at the same time.
Some moments were touching. I was a toddler, taking my first steps towards my mother without help, or receiving help across the street by a caring gentleman, or being left a hundred dollar tip. Sometimes I was terrified, asking my parents to leave the light on, or asking that cute girl on a date, or even being chased by some large animal I could hear but couldn’t see. Usually I was simply doing something boring, like eating a frozen dinner or solving a crossword.
As it continued, there were a couple of things I picked up on pretty swiftly: First, each experience lasted exactly 57 seconds. I confirmed this repeatedly over the course of the ordeal, whenever someone, usually a student happened to be looking at a clock. Second to that, the absolute time seemed to be the same, about eight minutes past the hour, though sometimes I saw it at 38, and weirdly 53 a few times.
The third thing I discovered, or, I guess it’s more accurate to say proved, was that these weren’t just memories, but actual real-time experiences that were happening at that moment, or which had happened just before I entered this latest set of memories. One in particular made it quite obvious this was the case, when I saw my own car from the perspective of the driver behind me in traffic, something which felt like it’d been years since I had to deal with, and I watched as I seemingly began to spasm and moan before the blinkers started flashing and the wipers went off. It set my mind at ease when that driver noticed immediately that something might be wrong, and determined to keep an eye on my car until his exit.
Actually, sorry, but I just want to take a moment to share one of the less glamorous things I learned: I spent a lot of time on the toilet. It was altogether very few of you but some of you are so frustrating on this. The best method if you’re sitting down is to straighten your back, relax your muscles, and breathe deeply. I’ve seen a lot of good and a lot of bad, and after personally testing I can confirm that many of you have really bad form and nobody ever talks about it. Again, sorry. I know that’s a random tangent but some of you are really dealing with way too much pain and seem to think that’s normal for some reason. Nature is efficient. If it hurts, you’re doing it wrong, barring medical conditions.
Sorry for the tangent, but pain was always part of the experience if someone was feeling it themselves. And yes, I can confirm that passing a kidney stone can easily be more painful than your average childbirth, but as expected it’s far, far less emotionally rewarding. Weirdly, I never experienced birth as a child. Occasionally I would be looking out from a stroller or crib, or being held in a mother’s arms. There were definitely memories from toddlers, but never a newborn. Whatever reason there was for that eludes me.
On the other end of that spectrum, though, came some more upsetting experiences.
Death remained an experience I stumbled across more often than I’d like. Usually it was someone who was wasting away, often with family nearby and sometimes without the ability to recognize them. Sometimes though, it was someone who had experienced a fatal accident and they were just taking a while to fade, other times they were actively overdosing, and a couple times I was someone in some warzone, the staccato popping of distant gunshots only drowned out by the roaring of my own blood in my ears as I slumped against a wall. There were a few instances where I knew a person was in the process of going out on their own terms, and, like before, one of the worst feelings was watching someone realize, surely too late, that they had made a mistake and wishing they could have stopped it.
With death came even more disturbing things, though. Not just having violence inflicted upon me, but watching violence be enacted upon others. A gang preparing for violence against their rivals, a school shooter planning on the fly how to deal with the police, a few cases of sadistic torture, the stabbing and defiling of a woman in an alley. While uncommon, many of these I can’t forget, and more than anything else I saw I wish I could.
Thing is, I was eventually both the perpetrator and the victim. In fact, I believe it’s no exaggeration to say that I eventually saw through the eyes of everybody on the planet. I was stuck living that minute so many times that I lost count more times than I can count. When I realized this might be the case, I told one of the other patients in my ward, and they asked me if I remembered anything about being a certain politician. Apparently, this man was a major sore spot for a lot of people, but I honestly can’t recall anything about him. Either he was so similar to other politicians that nothing stood out, or he was asleep at the time.
Oh yeah, I was able to see active dreams as well, fairly frequently as well. There were some frankly wacky things, even if most of those memories faded much quicker than the rest, but it is definitely true that a minute of real time can feel like ages inside a dream. Obviously, even without the loss of details that come with time, describing dreams is an ultimately futile process, but some of the stranger ones I still find funny, like the one where a fictional character was replaced at their job by the dreamer until the character came back, and they started fighting before seeing a dancing cat made of peanut jars and deciding they needed to leave, or the dream where the dreamer was watching a janitor sweep dead penguins into a pool overflowing with them, only for a spaceship to come through the clouds and crash into the pool, sending bouncing penguin corpses every direction as they woke up and whispered a confused curse into the darkness of their room.
Obviously there were nightmares. Bombs and teeth and public embarrassment seemed to be some of the more common ones, but there were definitely some very unique fears on display, such as people with paper-thin skin and voids beneath, or any number of creepy crawlies, or being chased through abandoned buildings. There was even one where the dreamer woke up screaming after a vision of themselves collapsing into a pile of coral, which I find amusing for some reason I can’t explain, and more than a few dreams which even I was convinced weren’t dreams until something messed up happened and they woke up.
Many of the visions were simply dark, rarely you could hear the muted sounds of breathing or rustling or snoring, so these must have been people who were sleeping without dreaming. There were, however, a few instances where someone was clearly sleepwalking, and it was always amusing when a family member witnessed and tried to interact with the individual.
I did attempt to call out for help frequently of course. Even after I had come to terms with what I was experiencing, I still wanted to call out, to ask for help, to maybe get some comfort or just interact with another human after so long. As you might expect, it almost never worked. The vast majority of you never noticed I was there, seeing through your eyes and feeling flashes of your thoughts and memories, but some people heard me, and even responded to me. Most of these people seemed to be suffering from an untreated mental illness of some sort, though some seemed healthy and were understandably freaked out. Of course, I’m not quite sure what to do with that information now, but at the time, I was so unbelievably thankful to those brief moments of human connection.
Interestingly, there was a third group between those, who couldn’t hear me but somehow knew that something had changed. I couldn’t tell you how many people shivered within seconds of switching to them, or looking around like they thought they were being watched. Oftentimes I didn’t even need to say anything to get this reaction, but almost invariably they didn’t react when I tried. Sometimes I could influence a dream, and I would try to warn people if they were in a nightmare, but while I could get through slightly more often, it wasn’t that common.
I’ve gained knowledge in various professions as well, and I’m actually rather excited for my prospects once I’m released from the ward. I’m not quite sure why, but lately I’ve been thinking about becoming a maker of some kind. It just feels right for some reason, like maybe I wanted to be one before all this happened and never thought I had the skills for it? If I ever remember who I am, I might update this post, but we’ll see.
That was the majority of it. Utterly mundane experiences, just a minute in the daily lives of the 8 billion people living on this planet. If I had experienced it sequentially, it would have taken all of 15,000 years. While it was happening, I definitely thought it would never end, but looking back, it keeps feeling as though it lasted only a minute, just one single explosion of 8 billion images.
There was something I was made aware of recently, that there are people living in orbit as I type this, but I never felt low gravity or saw views of Earth from so high up. There were plenty of people in planes, and one person who was in freefall skydiving the entire time, so it surely wasn’t due to the lack of contact with the ground. Whatever that reason is, I don’t think I’ll figure it out on my own.
Not on my own, but I don’t know if I’d care to have help.
Because I learned something else through all of this. Some memories that stood out, and that I won’t soon forget.
The first was sometime within the first ‘year’ and was relatively uneventful. A doctor ran to find a crash cart, then took off at high speeds down a hallway, with some kind of alarm in the background. The walls were white, but I just assumed it was a hospital somewhere, and the vision changed before I could see the patient.
The second came about a ‘decade’ later, and was someone who had woken up shortly before, at the sound of the same alarm. They threw on a lab coat and sprinted down a hallway, reaching a room and throwing open the door. Inside, the room had machines and computers on every wall, save for one, which featured a single large pane of glass. Another person wearing a lab coat was sitting in front of one of the consoles, while a woman in a black suit was staring through the window. As he opened the door, he asked, out of breath, “What’s going on?”
The woman answered, “We’re losing the subject,” her voice dripping with disappointment, face turned away as she continued staring. The other, a man with a short beard, turned from his place at the computer and shouted at the woman, “Losing it? It’s already lost!” He then turned to the man who had just come in. “Shut down the machine. If it overloads, we lose everything.” The man turned on his heel before the bearded man finished talking and sprinted to the next room over, smacking into the far wall ungracefully before reaching toward a breaker panel and pulling the lever on the side of it.
It was almost a thousand years before I was in that room again.
I was that scientist, and he was looking at a readout on a screen, what appeared to be vital signs that had been fluctuating wildly before flatlining. He smacked the wall, and hissed “Shit,” as his fingers flew across the keys, trying to verify the readings as accurate. He stopped, and as the tension seemed to leave him, he whispered, “It’s gone.” At that moment, someone threw the door to the room open, and asked what happened. “We’re losing the subject.” A woman’s voice, from behind, sparked a flash of anger in the man, and he whirled around. “Losing it? It’s already lost!” before turning to the third man. “Shut down the machine. If it overloads, we lose everything.” Once the door closed, he sighed. “What am I saying. The project is already over.” He turned to the woman, then looked past her into the room beyond the glass.
I was shocked when I saw it. The room was large, circular, pipes and wires covering the floor and hanging from the ceiling, all running to the object in the center: A chair, bolted to the ground, with restraints holding a man firmly in place. The man was withered, wrinkly, hair white as ash, with IV bags suspended above. If there was a medical device you could be hooked up to, he had them. Medicine, respirator, dialysis, something holding his head in place… Doctors swarmed the chair, doing chest compressions and checking machines. One of them called out for something, but despite the fact he was clearly shouting, his voice could not be heard.
From the left, the woman’s voice: “Maybe.”
Then away from that place, and all over the world.
There were others that I later realized were the same facility, spread throughout my experience. Scientists who had been eating, reviewing data, or on a break, dropping everything and following some kind of emergency procedure. Some ran to check the equipment hooked up to the man’s chair, others pulled up programs on their workstations, typing codes and opening logs, and others simply ran through what seemed to be miles of corridors. Some time after that last memory, I was a man running to the old man in the chair, frantically checking for a pulse before beginning compressions. Even through the gloves, I could tell the old man was even more frail than he looked from the observation room. His skin was cold and loose, and the ribs beneath felt like they might buckle if they were pushed in any harder. The doctor yelled out “Where’s that crash cart?” before the images shifted once again.
I picked up some knowledge from the people working there. Many had been in this facility for years, keeping him alive by any means at their disposal. Their means were great, but it seemed few knew exactly where the funding was coming from, or what was special about him. Still, the man in the chair had been in that chair longer than anyone there, had been there for decades, and it seemed he had finally perished.
Eventually, I had been everybody in that facility, save for one: The woman in the observation room. It was about a week before my minute ended, and she was staring out into the room with the man in the chair, watching him intently as everyone rushed in. She seemed to be deep in thought, but I couldn’t get a read on her history or what she was thinking exactly. Still, the conversation went the same as it went before, right up until the end. “What am I saying. The project is already over,” came the voice to her right, to which she replied, “Maybe.” However, immediately after that, her thoughts stilled, and one shone through: That said, who are you?
At first I thought she had said it aloud, then remembered I had never heard her say that when I was the other man in the room. I felt my blood turn to ice. I hadn’t said anything to her, hadn’t tried to alert her to my presence, and even if she did sense me somehow, how would she know to address me, let alone to make it so clear a thought? Even now, I’m getting goosebumps as I write this account, but nothing has happened yet, so I’m not terribly concerned.
Soon after that, I began to feel static fill my mind. Only once it began to swell did I realize it had been there all along, a low buzz in my mind, and as it crescendoed once again, I felt myself bracing for what I’d see next. Instead, everything went quiet. I was watching someone in their car, stuck in traffic with emergency lights far down the road. He sat there for a minute as I waited to see what would happen. Another minute passed, then another, and when the car in front pulled ahead and the driver didn’t make a move to fill the gap did I realize.
This was my car.
I was back.
I moved my eyes to the wheel, to my hands. Having control felt strange, alien. I squeezed my hands experimentally. The bones in my hand shifted and the leather squeaked slightly. I turned to the clock. 9:12. I watched it a moment longer, and when it ticked over to 9:13, I looked out the passenger side door towards the city. Memories rose, of the people in that city, of the people in those buildings, on those streets. The homeless people in the alleys and the executives drinking whiskey, the bicyclist who had wiped out in a crosswalk and the man who’d been playing a game all night long, the woman getting chewed out for being late and the man chewing out his inept employee.
I threw up, all over the center console. Somewhere in my mind I thought to look for something to wipe it up with, but then I saw how it was spreading, dripping down between the seats, and realized I’d never seen that before. Somehow, during everything that had just happened, not once had someone vomited on their console like that. I reveled in it, staring at my sick before there was a knock at my window.
I jumped at the sound, looking up quickly and feeling a bit dizzy with the motion. There was someone standing at my door, leaning so they could see into my car. Their eyes flicked from the vomit to me, and their muffled voice came through the window, “Are you alright, man?” I swallowed and tried to speak, but faltered as I tried to respond in multiple languages at once. I tried to speak again in only English, but only managed to squeeze out a feeble moan, before giving up and simply shaking my head no. “I’ll call someone,” they said, before rushing off.
I snuck a look at the clock again. 9:32. I looked out my windshield and realized I was the only car in my lane, and as traffic was flowing slowly around me, I could see them staring as they passed when I turned to look. A knock came on the window again. “Do you think you can pull over?” I shook my head again, and they brought a cell phone to their ear and turned away. A minute later, they said, “Someone’s on their way.” I nodded, then waited for a paramedic to arrive.
I didn’t wait long, and soon they were surrounding my car. I unlocked the door and they did the rest, checking my vitals and loading me onto the gurney as I sat there mostly unresponsive, still processing everything I’d witnessed. On my way to the hospital I kept going over everything, over and over, until I remembered the crimes I had witnessed. I realized some of those people could be saved, that I could warn somebody. I found my phone but failed to unlock it, trying multiple times before I realized it didn’t matter, since the only emergency numbers I knew were local lines. 911, 999, 000, 120. I could try them but I knew they couldn’t transfer calls between state lines, let alone international borders.
Using my voice still felt odd, but I made the effort to call out for a nurse. I know I was sometimes drifting away from English, and I must have had some kind of accent, because it took multiple tries for her to understand what I was saying. When she finally understood that I was telling her people were about to die, who they were and where, and to get in contact with authorities there, she left nervously. Any thoughts I had that she understood the importance of the request were quickly dashed when she brought in a doctor, who checked me over head to toe, all while nodding and saying he would get right on it. When I asked him if he needed to take notes, he hesitated, and I realized he didn’t believe me.
I believe it’s understandable that I was upset by this. I raised my voice to him, I urged him to take this seriously, I told him people were probably dying right now and that he could save them. Instead, he asked me how I could be aware of planned crimes taking place across the country. Like a fool, I told him. I’d seen it. I’d been them. I knew every detail of what was about to happen because I was there while they planned it. He left soon after, and brought another doctor in, who began asking questions.
“Have you experienced anything strange or odd lately that can’t be explained?”
“Yes, just before I came here.”
“Do you find it difficult to talk to other people, like they can’t understand you or what you’re saying?”
“Yes, right now, it’s hard to speak in only one language.”
“Okay. Do you frequently experience sights or sounds that others don’t appear to share?”
“I don’t know, it’s only happened the one time as far as I can remember.”
“Do you believe in things about reality that other people don’t?”
It was there it finally clicked. This was a psychologist. “I’m not crazy, lady, just call the authorities and they’ll figure everything else out.”
“I’m sorry, I can’t just call the police-“
“Yes you can! You can just pick up the phone, look up the numbers, and call and report a crime! They don’t need to know why you’re calling! You just won’t do it because you think I’m nuts!” She was about to say something, but I shouted at her. “People are dying! People are dying and you’re not doing anything to help them!” I didn’t know if my English was holding, but frankly I didn’t care.
“Sir you need to calm dow-“
“I don’t need to do a God-damn thing! Here, show me to the computer, I’ll look the numbers up myself!”
“Sir, please lay down.”
“PEOPLE ARE DYING!” I screamed again, standing up. “Why are you focusing on the impossibility of how I know, of the thing that happened to me, and not the fact that people are dying when they don’t have to!”
I stormed through the curtain around my bed, looked around briefly, and spotted a desk with computers behind it. Going behind the desk, I gripped the back of a rolling chair with a person on it and rolled them out of the way, leaning down until I could see the monitor. I had just looked up the number for the Chicago Police, and was reaching towards the phone to report a murder suicide when I was tackled to the ground. I squirmed and fought, managing to push one off as another came from the other direction, pinning me to the ground painfully. Then, a sharp pain in my butt, a swirl of the head, and I was out.
I came to, realizing soon enough that I’d been drugged. There were restraints on me, holding me to the bed, and I thrashed, trying to get them off so I could call that number. When I couldn’t get them off, I started screaming, “You’re killing them! They’re dying because of you!” It wasn’t graceful, I know, but, well. I was the only one who could have stopped the crimes I’d seen. I knew the doctors couldn’t possibly know, but I didn’t know how to make them see. So I shouted. I screamed. I got better at keeping my words in English and tried to break them down, to get them to cave, to make them see that what they were doing was, frankly, evil. I did it for hours, and I could have kept going, but they eventually came in and sedated me. I pleaded for them to try, just try, and gave them the names, locations, and crimes of as many people as I could before I went under.
That was my life for a time. Wake up, remember everything, then scream until my voice went hoarse, then continue screaming anyway until invariably somebody came to shut me up. I didn’t have a sense of time during this, similar but very much unlike the experience that started all this. Once, when I awoke to see a doctor in my room, I tried to tell them about as many things as I could. How tomorrow, someone was going to kill their landlord in Miami, how a man was planning to kill his family on christmas day in Seattle, how a deranged man in Wyoming was stalking a young woman with horrifying intentions, and he was going to make his move before the end of the year.
The doctor tried to say something, but I told them they can still do something, they can still stop it, they just had to make the call. They interrupted me, a hand on my arm. “Today is January 3rd, 2024.”
I know they said something else, other things, but I didn’t hear them. I began to break down in tears, I knew these people, the people about to kill, the people about to die. Most of them didn’t know their life was in danger, and some had just had one of the best days of their life. They had dreams, and lives, and people who loved them, and now, after so much time, it was certain they were dead. “You killed them,” I said, choking on sobs, then shouted, “You let them die! You wouldn’t listen, and now they’re dead.”
I know I sound better now, as I’m typing this. Honestly, I’m not. I’m hurt, I’m angry, and I’m just trying to get through this but it’s hard, knowing I could have done something if I’d just tried harder to convince them. Maybe I could have told them I knew because I was a conspirator, or what if I had remembered my own phone’s password, or any number of things I never did or thought to do. The other day my therapist told me I’d been making progress. I asked him if he’d ever once looked up the dates, the times, the people, the crimes. He hadn’t. I knew it already, but it still hurt to hear.
The meds have helped, for what it’s worth. Maybe it’s just because I’ve been beaten down and they dull my emotions, maybe they are successfully treating my condition. Well, my doctor says it’s “Unspecified Schizophrenia Spectrum and Other Psychotic Disorder,” if my memory serves me right. Pretty sure that just means they don’t know how to deal with me, and that does seem to be the case. I was told yesterday that they’ll be transferring me tomorrow, that the new ward specializes in handling cases like mine.
I don’t know if you’ll believe this, but that’s okay. In fact, that’s good. Nobody should have to go through what I did. Man was meant to see our lives through our eyes alone, imperfect though we may be for it. We’d all go insane if we knew even only our neighbors’ thoughts, let alone the lives of people halfway around the world. Maybe society would be better or more tolerant, but we’d be miserable, and we wouldn’t be individuals. Even after one single minute of it, I still can’t recall my own name. I can’t remember my parents’ faces. Even if I could give advice on how to handle going through what I did, it wouldn’t matter. You wouldn’t recall it by the end. You’d be just as stuck as I am. Running like I am, if you’re smart.
I’ve found my way to a library a couple towns over and I’ve been typing like a madman since then. Seems I had just enough time to type all of this out. Was really hoping it wouldn’t take quite so long, I think I may have gone into more detail than I needed, but it doesn’t matter a whole lot. I did have to borrow this account to post, and I do apologize to you, random stranger. You’d logged in during that minute and I just happened to remember your password.
Anyway, as for why I’m running now, something happened the other day that I didn’t want to acknowledge. I tried putting it out of my mind, but then the next day, yesterday, the transfer order came. While I was in the middle of a game of solitaire, for the first time since my incident, I shivered. I wasn’t cold, there was no draft, and idly I remembered how strange it was that sometimes people shivered when I looked in on them. That would have been it, but then I heard a voice. A woman’s voice, loud in my thoughts.
“Found you.”