I tried to explain the tesseract. No one believed me.
People are all about 3D this and 3D that. Like that’s all there is. There’s a fourth dimension, you see. One dimension is a line. Two is a square. Three is a cube. Four is a tesseract. You think we’re at the top of the food chain, us with only three dimensions?
The tesseract reaches out. You can get there with your mind, if your brain is configured the right way. I used to go out. Across the vast ocean of space, I would wander. But then I would miss my husband and my cats, and have to come home. Their brains aren’t configured to join me, and I don’t like to be alone all of the time.
Only, I wasn’t alone out there. And they followed me here.
It began with shadows. Everywhere, everyone was seeing them. Some of us could see more. We could see their faces in the dark. We could hear their whispers. And they knew.
You see, they’ve been passing through this region for a long time. Those of us who could see them have been called “mad.” Insane. Schizophrenic. Our brains have a dark, butterfly shaped region that allows us to see or hear them. Very, very rarely, we can do both. But they don’t exist in our space, and the neurotypicals haven’t yet devised a way to detect them. So they don’t believe us.
When you spend every waking hour trying to decipher what is really real, and what your supposedly defective brain has conjured up, you notice things. Like your cats staring at the same shadow you are, seeing the same face. Neurotypicals staring at shadows, but looking away just before they catch a glimpse of the faces within. You meet others online with similar stories. Schizophrenia support groups are suddenly flooded by neurotypicals afraid that they’re catching our disease (as if they even could), because they’re starting to see things.
Once you have been diagnosed with schizophrenia, you become Cassandra. None of your words carry any weight, no matter how true. But they knew we could see them, and they were coming for us first. We had to be removed so they could colonize the planet I led them back to in my wanderings.
The shadows deepened. I watched the planet curve back on itself. I don’t know if it’s because I slipped into the tesseract again. Was I becoming a four dimensional creature like them? Or just seeing things that way without trying anymore? No matter. The lights of North America’s cities were all visible to me, and I watched them go out in snakelike bands.
I found an old sister from my foster care days. She’s neurotypical, but open minded. I folded a piece of paper into an origami box right in front of her. In the squares that made it’s shape, I wrote in boxy letters, F U C K M Y L I F E. A message that, on its surface, looks quite nihilistic as the lights go out. But I told her to unfold it one square at a time, when she needed a place to hide. The letters were actually shapes that I knew would help her find the places they were not trying to colonize. I could see the bands of shadow as they unfolded.
I went back home to find my husband and my cats. I don’t like to be alone all the time. Even though I am never alone in the tesseract. I only thought I was.