This first part is going to require some suspension of disbelief: six months ago I found a genie in a thrift-store bottle. It wasn’t one of those gold-looking oil lamp things like out of a cartoon. It was a small cylindrical bottle made of deep blue glass, with a glass stopper wedged into the neck. I thought it was pretty and it matched the new towels in my bathroom, and the price tag was 25 cents, so I bought it while my friend was sorting through the coat rack.
I’m spending too much time talking about the bottle. The bottle isn’t important. I always do this, rambling on about extraneous details when I’m nervous. The thing is, I’m terrified to share my story with strangers online, but I think I need to tell someone, and you’re kind of my only option.
Anyway, weeks later I was standing around in my bathroom waiting for my hair dye to finish setting, so I pried out the stopper just to see if I could. This little blue man climbed out and I figured I was having a psychotic break. My mental issues have always been anxiety-related, but I definitely have issues, so going absolutely bughouse seemed plausible.
My fiance wasn’t home or I would have gone to him for help right away. It was just me, home alone with my head covered in chemical dye and wrapped in a plastic bag, trapped in my bathroom with a four-inch man the same color as the bottle he came from.
He babbled at me in a few different languages before he settled on English and I could understand him. He explained that he was a genie and because I let him out, he was going to grant me a wish.
If I sound too calm and accepting about the situation, rest assured that I was not calm at the time. I thought I was losing my mind. But I guess I froze up in the moment, so I ended up just listening to him, and it all sounded… I don’t know, I guess it was convincing.
Have you ever thought about what you would wish for, if you got to have one wish for real? I know I’ve mulled it over a lot in my life. It’s the anxiety. What if I could just wish for everything to always work out, so I wouldn’t have to worry about it any more? What if I could wish for my triggers to just not exist any more? But that actually makes me more anxious, because my brain says I should be worried about those things, so if I wished away my worry bad things would happen. My brain is an ass.I’m doing it again. I’m digressing, because I don’t want to tell you the meat of the story. I don’t want to tell you that, even though I’ve thought about wishes hundreds of times, and thought out how to phrase things so a wish couldn’t backfire, in that moment, standing in my bathroom staring at my little blue genie, my mind went blank.
He said I had to hurry. That should have been a red flag. He said if I didn’t make a wish in the next minute, he would disappear and my luck would go sour. It was a terrible thing to say to a woman with an anxiety disorder.I said, and this is where I screwed up, “Make me the happiest person in the world.”Who wishes for that? I could have wished for money, or great health, or gone with that whole ‘my choices will always work out for the best’ that I had fantasized about before. I did have the sense not to wish for something that had an obvious dark side, like reading minds or eternal life or any of those other sounds-good-at-first-but-it’s-really-a-nightmare scenarios.Anyway, he grinned at me, clapped his hands, and said, “Done!” Then he and the bottle vanished.
The timer for my hair color went off and I took a shower. It felt so weird, doing something that mundane after being through such a crazy experience, but I couldn’t just leave the chemicals in my hair. I don’t think even a genie could make me happy if I burned my scalp.I guess this is when I should explain that I actually am a pretty happy person. I’ve got a good life. I have a job I love (nevermind what it is. I’m not saying anything to dox myself) and it pays well. I have a nice home, my family is loving and in good health, I have great friends. And I was engaged to marry Ambrose, the most amazing, funny, brilliant, handsome… You get it, right?
I always tried to appreciate what I had, because the only thing that was really wrong in my world was my anxiety, and was that really so bad, taken against all my blessings? I was scared of nothing half the time, but I was also happy.
I was exactly as happy after the genie said he granted my wish, which seemed like pretty solid evidence that I had hallucinated the whole thing. I told Ambrose about it when he got home, and he was concerned about me and made me get checked out. It was so embarrassing explaining to the doctor that I saw a genie, but none of the tests showed anything wrong with me. I did not have a brain tumor! I was not developing psychosis to go with my GAD!
Ambrose did remember the bottle and he noticed it was gone. We decided that I must have thrown it out while I was having my little episode.It took a couple of weeks before I started to notice things that weren’t right. The receptionist at the doctor’s office was this cheerful little blonde thing who was always friendly and chatted with me. She said she was going on vacation to Hawaii and she was really looking forward to it. She wasn’t there when I went for my last follow-up, so I asked the doctor when she would be back from her trip, and he said he didn’t have a receptionist. Hadn’t had one in months.
Arguing with him earned me another MRI. I remembered a cute blonde receptionist. The doctor and Ambrose both said there was no such person.
The boy with Down’s Syndrome who used to bag my groceries was gone too. I asked if he was okay and the cashier said they never had a bagger.
My mail stopped coming. We called the post office and they said that no one had been assigned to our route, and they would fix it.
I started actively looking for missing people in my life. Four of my colleagues at work were gone. Like, no one remembered them ever working there. I could only find contact information for one of them, and his wife said she was never married.
People were disappearing and I seemed to be the only one who remembered them.It was my cousin that broke me. She was a stay-at-home mom with a six-year-old daughter and two-year-old twins. They were the sweetest kids. I found out she was missing when I saw her husband post on Facebook about the challenges of being a single dad.I called him. He couldn’t remember her. He knew his kids had a mother — duh, right? But he said their mother had never been a part of their lives. I couldn’t convince him otherwise, even though the math made no sense. How could his daughter be four years older than her brothers if his wife had run off when she was born?
He wouldn’t listen. He got angry. God help me, he called Ambrose.
Ambrose was already worried about me, even though I didn’t tell him about all of the vanishings after how he reacted over the receptionist. When my cousin’s husband told him about my insane claims, Ambrose got very concerned about my mental health.
He very gently confronted me one evening. Ambrose was a master at calming my moods. He was such a chill guy, nothing ever really phased him, and it was like he could blanket me in that calm and share some of it. I confessed all of the weird stuff I was noticing and we talked and talked and afterward I felt so much better, but I think he was even more worried, and that probably saved him.
You’re seeing the pattern, right? You’re probably wondering how on Earth I didn’t realize it for so long, but keep in mind, I thought the thing with the genie was a psychotic episode. I didn’t think it really happened, so I was not in the headspace to think over the consequences of wishing to be the happiest person in the world. I didn’t get any happier, so it seemed obvious that nothing really happened.
It hit hard when I realized that anyone happier than me was just not there anymore. It probably killed a lot of people. Or unmade them, I guess. I didn’t check Wikipedia until after I suspected the truth, so I don’t know how many were gone before that serious hit to my mood, but I know there used to be 11 billion people on Earth.
It’s quite an indictment of the human condition that I was still happier than 9 billion people.I seriously considered unaliving myself (God that’s a stupid term. Can’t I just say the real word? You know what I mean anyway). It seemed like the only way to prevent anyone else from falling victim to my wish. The more people it claimed, the worse I would feel, and the more people it would claim, right?
Ambrose talked me into trying benzos instead. I don’t think he ever really believed me about the wish, but he loved me and he was so scared of losing me, so he played along and he convinced me that I could just try to force happiness. I guess we’re all lucky he didn’t just have me committed. I don’t know how many people would be gone if I had been through that.
Drugs helped. I don’t know if you could call it ‘happy,’ but I was in a foggy state where nothing really bothered me, so at least I wasn’t getting more miserable. No one else vanished, at least that I noticed. I guess there were probably people all over the world who entered a period of joy and got snuffed out for it, but the benzos made me not really care about that.
The benzos made me so foggy that I forgot to take another important pill.
Ambrose always wanted to be a father. He was scared for me, and for the baby, especially because I had to stop taking the drugs for the sake of my pregnancy, but I guess deep down he was just really happy to be a father, because a few weeks after my positive test, I woke up one morning to an empty bed beside me.
His parents say they never had a son. My parents are upset that their single daughter is pregnant and doesn’t seem to know the father, so I guess they’ll be okay for a while.
The problem is me and the baby, and that’s why I came to you, Reddit. Another billion people vanished when I lost Ambrose, so I’m trying really hard to focus on the good things in my life. I need to be happy about my baby. I need to believe I’m doing the right thing by continuing this pregnancy, because having Ambrose’s baby is the only thing that still makes me happy, and if I’m not happy… Well, you get it by now. Maybe once it’s born, I can go back to that other idea. I can’t imagine raising a child that I have to make sure is never happier than me, but I can’t imagine not bringing this last piece of Ambrose into the world. I felt it kick this week. I have to have this baby. Tell me I’m doing the right thing, so I can be happy about it.