Night One - 2/27/2024
I think I’m going to disappear.
I don’t think you’ll be able to help though, so don’t worry too much. This post is more for me, a documentation of an impossible timeline. Well, Walter and me. It’s just me now though, empty inside and out in a hollow home. A perfectly curated space for me to go insane in. I promise I’m not insane, I know everything that has happened is real.
It started at the end of 2022. It hadn’t been a great year for many people and I was one of the lucky “many”. I was laid off at the beginning of the year, my boyfriend decided he thought red hair suited him much better than the dull brown I’ve been sporting the past 4 years of our relationship, and finally, I lost the apartment when we separated. Being unemployed and moving back in with your parents in your early 30s is not the greatest thing for your mental health, if you were wondering.
The depression I was in was deep and never-ending. Some days it felt like something was physically sitting on my shoulders, keeping them hunched and hurting. By December of 2022, I decided things had to change, and that’s when a dream started calling to me. The dream, MY dream. It was what made me want to change things. Need to change things. I know that sounds weird, but trust me it’s not the weirdest thing about this. Every night, curled up in my old teenage bedroom, I’d have the same dream.
I’d wake up in an unfamiliar bed, but I never felt scared or confused by my surroundings. If anything I felt more at home there than anywhere else I’d ever been. I’d hear the nails of a dog in the hallway outside the open bedroom door heading to what I knew was the living room. The scratching of their nails on the floor with every step is so familiar and comforting to my dream self, but they wouldn’t turn to look that way. Instead, I’d lull my head to my right, to the slightly ajar two-pane window. I’d take my hand out of the comfiest pale yellow comforter and let the light coming in touch my skin.
I’d watch the curtains made out of old thrifted sheets fold and bend in the wind, I’d feel the breeze touch my face and I’d close my eyes and let it carry me back to sleep for a little while longer. It felt so real. The sheets would bundle and move with me, the dust would float in the air and displace when I moved my hand through the light beams coming from the sun that was edging between the trees. Once my dream self listed off to sleep again in their cozy home, my real self would wake up in my stale cold bedroom and feel empty again. The dream went by quickly. 8 hours gone in what feels like minutes, but even if it’s only a short amount of time, that feeling of numbness would be gone. Non-existent. The numbness would be replaced with a feeling of serenity.
That daily emptiness was unlike anything else. So devoid and black, a deep hallway with absolutely no end. I needed that feeling all day, not just when I was sleeping. I became addicted to sleeping, but your body can only take so much. So I started looking. I had a small chunk of change saved from my old job to put towards it, and I also started a job as a morning shift gas station attendant for some extra spending money. The small town adjacent to my hometown was calling to me and I knew the house had to be there. The house had to be just right though, if anything was off the dream wouldn’t come true. Any discrepancy would screw it up, I don’t know how but I just knew. I found 3 listed that fit in my budget, but after visiting the first one I knew I didn’t need to look at the others.
It was down a secluded drive on a lake, normally the cabins cost a ton because of the waterfront, but this one didn’t have any water access so it was cheap. Very cheap, cheap enough that my foot went through the bathroom floor by the toilet when I was re-caulking the bathtub. I fixed it though, all by myself. Besides the hundreds of YouTube videos I referenced. The rudimentary plumbing and electricity work will probably burn down the cabin one day.
Slowly it became a home for me. It became THE home, the one beckoning me to that dream every night. The feeling of peace I felt in my dream hadn’t made itself present yet during my waking life, but I figured it was because other things didn’t match up. The shell of the house did, but not the rest. So I started recreating it, piece by perfect piece. It was easy since I was still having the dream every night. I’d still wake up alone and void of that wonderful feeling I’d become addicted to, even if the box I was sleeping in looked the same as the one my dream self felt so safe in.
First, I adopted a dog named Walter, a 9-year-old 45lb black lab who lived at a shelter for most of his life. We were two peas in a pod. He filled a small portion of that void I woke up to every morning but it wasn’t enough. I even started cutting his nails at just the right angle, so they’d scritch against the floor just right but wouldn’t cause him any annoyance.
Nothing.
I found the exact pattern of sheets that were in the dream, which in my dream I knew I thrifted, so I made sure to scour second-hand shops until I found them. I learned how to sew so I could make the pleats and folds look the same. I practiced for weeks before finally using the material I spent so long searching for, I figured I only had one shot to perfect them, and I did. I even went to 7 different stores to make sure that the bar holding them up was the same style and color. The curtains held their space in the window so perfectly, like a painting directly out of my subconscious.
Nothing.
I slept every night with my bedroom door open to hear Walter make his way down the hall. Cracked my window open just so, even on the cold nights. I bought the exact pale yellow comforter and washed it only in the best detergents and dried it with the best dryer sheets a gas station employee could buy so it would have the softness and buoyancy of that dream bedding. I’d just wake up with bedding so cold it felt damp, and a voidness that was getting deeper and darker every day.
Nothing.
Over and over again, I’d spend all of my free time getting everything just right. To the point where I started scratching the wood around my two-pane window so it had that live-in texture my dream windows had. When the knives made the scratches look too manufactured, I’d use my nails. It’d take me hours after to clean in the gouges and get the blood out, but I did it. And it looks perfect. The tips of my fingers haven’t stopped being sore since but it was worth it. It looks perfect. Absolutely perfect.
But. still. NOTHING.
I just couldn’t take it anymore. Years of working on this place, pushing through the fog and building this place by hand was exhausting me. My parents were worried, but they could only do so much.
Could only watch as their only child slipped further and further into this weirdly concocted insanity.
A self-imposed routine that ended with the same results. They kept stopping over until I stopped answering the door. I let their Tupperware’s of home-cooked dinners pile up on the small porch until the animals tore them apart, scattering the plastic pieces throughout my overgrown lawn.
Every morning I’d wake up in cold bedding, Walter would patter down the hall but the sound of his nails touching the floor would never be right, I’d look out the window but the morning light would be hiding behind the trees barely touching my house, and the breeze wouldn’t be present. Just stale air in a stale house. A fitting environment for the thoughts in my head. I would cry into my stale pillow and then force myself to start my day. I had to afford to upkeep this dream home, even if it wasn’t providing anything of what I wanted.
Finally one day I just,
I couldn’t go back to that dream anymore.
It used to be my salvation. Every day I’d wake up to that void feeling, I painstakingly worked and perfected the house, and while I worked I would only think of the feeling I get to go back to. Sleep comes so easily when your dreams mean more to you then real life. But the idea of waking up to a disgusting void again every morning was starting to draw the appeal away. Every single night I got a hit of that wonderful dopamine rush, and every morning it would slip away just as fast. I just can’t take it anymore.
So, I decided to stop sleeping.
The dream would never come if I didn’t close my eyes.
I grabbed a case of energy drinks from work and sat on my couch to watch old golden girls reruns from a box set. It had been the first time in over a year that I hadn’t spent the evening working on the house, and if I could feel anything, I’d say it almost felt nice. The first 6 hours of the night were pretty easy. Being in my 30’s I thought it’d be much harder to stay up past midnight, but after getting through the first bout of sleepiness around 11pm I was fine.
It wasn’t until 5am, around the time I usually wake up for work that things got.. odd. I’m not sure if that’s a good word for it, but there are not many other ways to describe it.
What happened doesn’t fit in this world, words weren’t created to explain what I witnessed.
I was watching Blanche get proposed to on the season finale when I first heard the scratching. It was so faint that I thought it was coming from the TV, but it sounded too out of place.
After a second I could finally pinpoint it, it was coming from the hallway my bedroom was down. It sounded like someone was running their nails on the wall near my bedroom window, but there was no way I should be able to hear that from where I was. But I just knew, that’s where it’s coming from. Right when my sleep-addled brain registered where the sound was in the house a buzz started under my skin, a phantom touch of something needle-sharp dragging along my muscle and tissue. Looking down I couldn’t see anything, I felt over my wrist but couldn’t feel anything outwardly, just inward. I started itching at it, but nothing was calming the red-hot spark going up and down my forearm.
Scratching my wrist raw, I stood and moved from my position on the couch to center myself with the pitch-black hallway. The darkness down the hallway looked inky and completely desolate, a blank space in my otherwise completely normal house, but a blank space that looked malleable. Like it would slip through my fingers if I dipped them in. The pictures I’d hung a foot from the threshold were non-existent, the dark overtaking them in a deep fold.
I thought at first I had fallen asleep on the couch, but my usual dream wasn’t present, so it was hard to know what to believe. The scratching persisted, up and down the wall, up and down my arm. Getting hotter and hotter under my skin. I wanted to look down at the affected area, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the dark. I physically could not look away. My dreams always made me feel light, and that feeling was addictive, but this darkness looked so enticing. Cold, not warm like my comforter, but encompassing like it is in my dream.
With what little cognitive thinking I could register I started to step away until the backs of my knees hit the end table by the couch, never taking my eyes off the void. It called me in, every part of me felt the need to go, but one minuscule part of me asked not to. Said no. The further I backed away the louder the scratching got. The angrier it got. It dug deep into my arm, touching my bone and peeling away at any tendons and muscle that blocked its path. It was searing, more painful than anything I’ve experienced, but I couldn’t mutter any noise. I could just itch at it furiously while staring into the dark. The itching wasn’t satiating anything, the deep heat in my arm was unreachable, but it was keeping me grounded in reality. A malformed impossible reality.
My body kept trying to pull me back toward the threshold, the lack of sleep hitting me all at once and calling me to my bed, but in the back of my mind I knew I shouldn’t. So I kept the backs of my knees against that cold wood, letting it seep into me. Hoping it would cool the heat in my arm. It never did.
I stared into the black as the time passed. All I could do was let the time pass. Things formed in the darkness of my hallway, my mind playing tricks and filling the space with grotesque makeshift people. At first, it was just distorted blobs, indescribable and moving. But as I started to take notice of them, letting my eyes follow their path, they started to take notice of me. Staring back with large eyes that would rot inward and regrow in front of my eyes, decaying but never leaving my form. Begging me to blink first. Pleading for me to step forward, lean into them just an inch. They would take me in their cold grasp and I would become their eyes.
I could feel fingers wrapping around my ribs, grasping and pulling me forward. Just as it felt they were going to break, just as I started to let them take me,
I felt the sun hit the side of my cheek.
The darkness started to siphon itself inward, the eyes frantically pushing through their cycle of rebirth asking and begging me to follow them in. I just let the sun rise more, letting them fall into that inky black. My eyes were completely dry when I dared to look away. I’m unsure if I closed my eyes once since the scratching started, but that seemed impossible. The deep dryness told me it wasn’t impossible. The itching was gone. No soreness at all was present inside my arm, but the outside was ruined when I finally looked at it. It didn’t even look like something my nails could have done. My skin parted into a deep red mess in multiple areas all over my wrist, I couldn’t see much through the blood dried around the sides, the middle was still bubbling where I had been digging the deepest at it, still open and hurting. I rested my hand over it and looked away before I passed out.
Only then did my brain register that I didn’t know where Walter was.
Deep molten dread set into my stomach. A loud siren of “nonononononononononono” rang in my head as I ran into the bedroom. Halfway through my marathon on the couch, Walter had gotten up and moisied to the bedroom to sleep. He had been in the bedroom that whole time. Stuck in that dark inky black, alone. With them.
And I had left him there.
The hallway felt so long by the time I reached the open bedroom door, but I already knew Walter wouldn’t be there. I tore apart the house looking for him, in every nook and every blank spot that could hold my sweet boy. He was nowhere, absolutely no trace of him in the house. After searching frantically for a while I finally noticed that even his beat up bed he loved to sleep on wasn’t in the living room. His toy box was empty and his food bowls were not in their usual spot near the kitchen island.
It’s like he never existed.