I know this is going to sound crazy, and I can’t blame you if you think it is, but I have to put this out there. Sometimes, I can’t even believe what’s happening, but I don’t think I can deny it anymore. I don’t have a choice. I just need help.
I guess I’ll start from the beginning. It might not seem important, but I think it’s the only way I can explain what’s been happening to me.
Before I was fearless, before I was adventurous, before I was “invincible,” I was a really, really sick kid.
I don’t know how old I was when it started because it’s honestly all I can remember. Every few months or so, for years of my life, I would be bedridden, feeling like someone was burying a knife into my head, and would throw up anything put into my body. My mom was a nurse, and I know how much it broke her to see me like that and not be able to do anything about it. Countless doctor’s visits, tests, CT scans, and medicines would come up with nothing. No one could figure out what was even wrong with me, let alone how to fix it. These “states” could last a week, and once they were over, I was a normal kid again… at least until the next one.
My mom moved into my room eventually, I think because she really started getting scared.
The night it happened, I just remember her lying in bed next to me, brushing my hair behind my ear as the remnants of vomit trailed from the side of my mouth onto the blanket. I was just bleary-eyed, staring at the ceiling and groaning. And she had the saddest look on her face. That’s the worst part of it, for me.
Suddenly, I started sputtering again, emptying the contents of my stomach, if there was anything to begin with. My mom rolled me to my side as fast as she could, but I had already started choking. My throat was searing, and I couldn’t breathe. I started losing sight, and my ears were ringing in my head. My mom was on top of me, panicking, trying to help the best she could.
As I coughed and struggled for air, I was able to clear enough to take something back in again. My chest just heaved, and I tried to blink away the darkness from my eyes.
That’s when I saw it. Unmistakably, floating in the air in front of me, were five blue lines, arranged like tally marks. They followed my eyes wherever they went, just hanging in the center of my vision. They looked scrawled, like something I would have drawn on the walls. I stared at it, curiosity filling me, and weakly held out my hand to trace them. My mom noticed I was pointing at something, but was more preoccupied with taking care of me. As I crossed the fifth tally with my finger, it slowly shrank, and then disappeared. The other four remained for a few moments before they faded away.
After that scare, I was okay again in a few days, like usual. Then, slowly, I grew out of my mystery illness. It would be longer between bouts, until I had a year-long break, and then none at all. I still don’t know what was wrong with me, but I honestly don’t care that much.
I hadn’t thought about that incident until a few years ago, which I’ll talk about later.
Free from my bed, I became a curious kid, and had a penchant for getting myself into trouble, most of the time unintentionally. I always found new ways to injure myself, and I have several scars, broken bones, and stories to show for it. Most of the time it was for the dumbest reasons, but I thought that I was strong enough to handle it, and I would stand up and smile.
This part is a little different, because I don’t actually know if it’s connected at all, but it’s the only thing that makes sense to me when I think back on it.
I used to live in the country, and in our backyard, we had a treehouse. It had a little porch at the front with guardrails around it. And, instead of playing inside of the treehouse like you’re supposed to, I would climb onto the roof using the rails. I just liked to sit up there and look out at the trees and the wildlife. My mom would yell at me if she saw me, but I would sneak up there again and again. Of course, I should have listened.
Getting up was much easier than coming down. The slanted roof was hard to grip as I would try to plant my feet on the guardrail. It was bound to happen eventually, and I finally learned my lesson. I slipped. Landed badly on my feet and then fell backward. The drop was maybe only 15ft, but as soon as my head hit the ground, I blacked out.
I woke up in an ambulance, and my head was pounding so hard I didn’t realize my right ankle was broken. At least going to school with crutches made for a conversation starter.
I didn’t see anything that time, but you’ll see why I think this is somehow related, as this was the only gap in the timeline.
This next instance is going to be… hard to talk about. I’m not going into too much detail. For my sake more than anything.
During middle school, I was on a mission trip in New Orleans, coming off the tail of Hurricane Isaac. It had been a few months, so things were slowly getting back to normal, and my church group had organized a game-day fundraiser for one of the schools there. We were going to be there for a week. During the day, we’d hold events for students, and at night, we’d explore the city.
On our last night there, we held a farewell party at the church we’d been staying at. I stood against the wall pretty much the whole time. One of my youth pastors approached me, asking how I was doing. He was in his 20s, and being a budding teenager, I had a small crush on him. So when he tried to lure me away from the party, I followed.
The only thing you need to know about what transpired is that at some point, he had his hands wrapped around my throat. Soon, I could sense that I was losing consciousness, and at that moment, I was just relieved to escape. But just as I started to fade away, he let go. As my vision returned, I saw the tally marks appear against the bathroom tile, like they belonged next to the phone numbers and obscenities scribbled on the wall. This time, there were only three. I wasn’t thinking about what they could mean. I just wanted to focus on something else, anything else. They were an odd comfort to me. But just like before, one of the tallies slowly shrank until it was gone, and the rest disappeared. But that night wasn’t over.
After my attack, I was thrown into the deepest depression of my life. I didn’t tell anyone what happened to me. I lost trust in everyone and everything. I felt stuck in my own body and just wanted to run from it. I couldn’t live with myself.
My relationship with my mom got really bad at this point. I started to reconnect with my dad, who had been absent most of my life. He offered to let me live with him to get away from everything, and I took him up on it.
I realized pretty quickly that I’d made a mistake, but I felt too ashamed to go back. My dad was never home, so I had to learn to take care of myself. His house was run-down, infested, and just generally unsafe. I thought leaving would help me abandon everything I’d been struggling with, but I had just been abandoned myself.
Then, my dad had a workplace accident and injured his back. Instead of staying at home, he’d go out with his buddies or stay with his girlfriend’s family. One fateful day, while he was out, my dad made the mistake of leaving his prescription pain medication in his room. You can assume what happened next.
I was lying in my bed, just waiting for the end and feeling a myriad of sensations that were a welcome change, when my dad came home. He figured out what I had done and came into my room, and instead of being worried, he seemed pissed off and told me to drink some water.
Just drink some fucking water.
I know what happened next on the outside, just from the little I was told. I started breathing slowly, and what did come out was gurgled and strained. My dad seemed to finally realize what was happening, and then drove me to the hospital. There, I stopped breathing altogether. I was clinically dead for two minutes.
I haven’t told… anyone about this next part. I know this is going to sound strange, but… this is what I remember happening to me during that time.
Everything was void. No sound, or sight, or sense of space or feeling. I wasn’t anywhere—until the eternity around me slowly lowered its head and came to a stop. Perhaps it was waking, shaking the time off of its back and waiting for me to come with it.
I slowly became present in a version of my consciousness again, but I was not really there. I was merely a witness to the universe that unfolded itself to me.
I felt as if I were awake, but my mind continued as if I were dreaming; no thoughts or words came to me, because they were already known. Everything was still an impossible black, although I knew that I could see. My vision tried to latch onto anything in the darkness in front of me, and at a distance that I still can not comprehend, I realized I was accompanied by a thick net of writhing, gargantuan shapes. I was only capable of seeing them by the stars that dimly glimmered in between their tightly knitted shadows whenever they shifted.
My eyes strained to make sense of them but I could not. They stayed, tangled within one another, one or many. I knew that they could see me as well. In the miles or lightyears that they could have been away from me, I could hear them speak. Their voices were only whispers, but their words reached across the expanse and straight into me, but I could not understand.
I could not understand.
Then, two deep blue lines bore their way into the space directly in front of me. They were the first thing at that moment to instill in me a sense of fear, as it broke my consciousness away from them, and made me realize how helpless I really was. The tallies sat bleak, waiting patiently, separate from my dark surroundings. They were an extension of me. Wherever I redirected my eyes, they followed, forcing me to bear witness as the tally on the right shrunk to nothing, and disappeared. I was left with one.
That was when I woke up. Everything was a mixture of confusion, unawareness, and feeling like the world was crumbling beneath my feet. I was already losing my grasp on what I had experienced. The sound of their whispers was growing fainter in my ears, and when I closed my eyes, the darkness behind my eyelids didn’t show them to me anymore. It was only a few days later, when I was discharged from the hospital, that they were no longer in my mind, and even though they did not reach out to me, I had a hard time ever feeling like I was alone after that.
In the years after this experience, I still can’t reimagine what I saw or felt. I know what I saw, and I tried my best to describe it to you, but I can’t see it anymore. It’s like that memory has been completely barred from me, and I’m unable to access it. And maybe that’s for the best. I can just convince myself that it’s all in my head, and go on with my life like normal. I’m content with telling myself it was something I just made up while I was unconscious, even if I know I don’t believe it.
I know it sounds bad, but I think attempting to take my own life was what I needed to finally get things together. I moved back in with my mom and started taking school more seriously, in the meantime meeting a lot of new people and participating in activities that I had previously lost interest in.
I graduated high school, and then I took a well-needed break and worked for a year, saving up a good sum of money. Then, I started taking classes, enrolled in community organizations, started spending quality time with the people that I love, and started to feel good about where my future was headed. I didn’t have a lot of regard for my own life until recently.
Honestly, I forgot about what happened for a long time. Maybe I just pushed it far into the back of my mind, knowing it would slowly creep its way back up. Either way, it did eventually.
The other day, I was driving home from my night class. I’m a commuter, and I live about an hour away from campus. By the time I was on my way home, the roads were dead and the sky was completely dark. I was in the last half of the trip when I felt my eyes growing heavy. I knew it was a bad idea to keep driving, but I just wanted to get home. Soon enough, of course, I started dozing off. There weren’t any rumble strips to warn me that I was headed straight toward a guardrail that was the only barrier between the road and a 30ft drop.
I’m not sure how, considering it all happened in an instant, but my fluttering eyes seemed to notice that I was barreling toward a bright metal surface, and it woke me up just enough to swerve back onto the road. Thank god there wasn’t anyone that I could’ve hit while struggling to regain control of my car. After my panic had spiked, I slowly rolled onto the side of the road and tried to regain my composure.
That’s when I noticed the single blue line in my vision. It was distant, hanging in the air, and like every time before, it followed my eyes wherever they went. It was unmistakable against the night sky once I was completely still in my car. I was completely awake.
The last tally. As soon as it had come, it slowly broke away in pieces, dissipating into the air, until it was gone. It stained my eyes as I stared blankly at the spot it had disappeared from, completely frozen. I peered into the endless space above me and remembered the night I tried to end my life. I remembered my attack. I remembered those things in the void for what I knew they were, but couldn’t see, and I wailed.
I’ve been spending the past few days going over every time I’ve seen the marks and trying to unravel their meaning. Were they a warning? Were they gifts, prolonging me? Looking at the times when they appeared, I can only imagine what happens now that I’ve used them all up.
I don’t know what to do. Or what I’m even up against. I already feel like my life is over, if that’s what the tallies are supposed to mean. There’s a part of me that feels like this is just how things are supposed to be, and I can’t avoid it no matter what I do, but… I’m scared. I know I tried to leave, I know I wanted to die then, but I don’t… I don’t want to now. I don’t want to die anymore. I’m afraid. I don’t know what those things mean, I don’t know what the tallies mean, I don’t know what any of it means. I don’t know if it means anything. I just… I just want to live.
I feel like the next time I fuck up, it’ll be my last. Maybe I’m just losing it. I don’t know. My dreams for my future feel so far away, and I’m terrified to even leave my room. I don’t even know if I have a future anymore. I’ve made so many mistakes that I wish I could take back, but it’s too late. It’s too late for me.
I’ve barely eaten, barely slept, and I don’t know if any of this makes sense. All I can imagine is being trapped in that void again, this time with no way out. I can feel that darkness creeping up around me, and I wonder whether I’ll be able to hear their whispers in my mind, or see their masses squirming all around me, everywhere, in everything… I feel like I’m being devoured from the inside. And here I am, glued to my bed, not even living, wasting my final chance. But the thought of the world outside my door fills me with dread. They want me, but I can’t give myself to them.
I don’t know what to do.