[Trigger warning/a mention of depression]
I was a therapist. I’ve quit now - but past me would have never even considered the possibility of quitting. After all, I’ve always had a particular interest in the deep lives of others. When I was little, I was often called annoying due to my incessant nosiness towards my peers. I couldn’t help the curiosity, and I certainly couldn’t pass up the opportunity to learn about people, in the form of patients.
One patient bothered my conscience so badly that I can never stop thinking about the things he wrote in his journal.
I’m not allowed to give any information out about my patients, but what I will and am doing here, is giving their story rather than their identity. For that reason, I will be calling them M, and I will not disclose the location of all this. M was a patient with severe depression and anti-social personality disorder.
As an exercise, I recommended he write his feelings and how his day went through a diary I gifted him. He would then return the diary back to me at the end of the year, we’d talk about it, and I would gift him a new one.
While the exercise is certainly healthy, I myself wanted desperately to read about the life a social recluse had. It would give me insights on how these people may feel, and better methods to tackle these problems during sessions. In a way, I admittedly was using him as a reference. It’s not every month that I get a socially reclusive patient - most of them can never make it past the first step of their door.
The diary was careful at first, with only a few sentences talking about what M did that day, or his mental status.
The writing eventually settled in his routine, and the writings became more detailed, solemn, and intricate. Some things he wrote were intense waves of sadness.
I will not be disclosing those sections, even if they are during the readings I’m about to reveal. The rest of the diary is akin to hallucinations and delusions, yet M did not experience these symptoms prior to these entries.
Here is the first entry that contained these inexplicable incidents.
• Diary Entry No.108 2022, January 5.
I played a horror game for the entire day today. I wasn’t even sure what time it was because of it.
(He goes on about the game he’s playing, and how he relates to the main character.)
The light coming from that screen was my world. It was the ONLY light, as my room is completely black normally.
I don’t usually turn the lights on, ‘cause the dark is comforting to me. I was more accustomed to the darkness, and this room hadn’t seen light in weeks.
My stomach sank when I felt a warmth behind me. A glare of light floated on the very edges of my peripheral, but it couldn’t be possible.
My place in the game was inside a dark basement. Even so, I turned off the flashlight in game, telling myself thats all it was. But the glare stayed.
Despite the perfectly warm temperature on my back, I felt an indescribable unease, my body tensing tightly. For some reason, I refused by both body and mind to turn and look at the source of the light. I thought maybe this unease was due to the remnants of the horror game I was playing.
I forced myself to believe that perhaps a window blind had cracked open slightly, and was letting light in. I normally keep these blinds shut so much that they are caked with dust. And yet, that was the only plausible explanation I could think of.
This gave me courage to investigate, so I spun slowly towards the source of the light.
What first came into view was my window. Perfectly concealed behind the blinds, and no crack in sight. It wasn’t the light from outside, then.
Then there it was, a ball of light, directly in the corner of my room.
It was a perfectly rounded orb, and looked as if the sun outside had shrunk and placed itself in this dark confine.
When I looked around it to see where it was coming from, my retinas were burnt with its image, following my eyes’ every movement.
The light, in all its brightness, didn’t illuminate a single part of the corner. Not even the surrounding walls were brighter than a deep black, but this light was there, so bright, it should have illuminated at least half my room.
Through the blackness surrounding it, I squinted to get a better look. It wasn’t even near my lamp, or even a power socket. It wasn’t confined to the walls, either. It simply floated in that corner, about two feet from the ground.
I thought I was going crazy. The years I spent locked up inside finally took a toll on my grasp of reality. But the warmth I felt radiating from it tore down my foundations of disbelief.
I paused the game, removed my headset, and stood from my chair. My knees, weak from almost no exercise, felt particularly wobbly.
I felt light-headed at even the thought of approaching this light, but something in my subconscious urged me forward.
The closer I got the weaker I felt, but I was now about 4 feet away from it. The dread grew into a pit at my throat, and it felt almost wrong to be this close. It was like I was standing on a mossy rock at the edge of a raging waterfall, one slip and I would fall down, down down.
Unable to go any farther, I stiffly moved around, trying to get a good angle around this light so I could see how it was floating there.
Nothing.
I reached my hand toward its rays, and suddenly my entire body was flashing warning signs. My fingers graced the faded edges of the beams of light, and my hand was getting hot. My eyes were filled with the glare of the light, and my hand grew as hot as it was close. My ears were throbbing somehow, and I could hear muffled whispers and echoes growing louder.
With a widened hand I tried to grab the light.
Before I could fully wrap my hand around the light, my hand burned.
I let out a scream and tore away from it, rushing into my bed, turning the computer off, too. I clutched onto this diary with my unburnt hand. It’s all a dream - when I wake up tomorrow, it’ll be gone.
(Part 2 coming soon)