Hi everyone, I’m new and this is my first story. It’s a true one about something that haunts me.
I was raised Mormon. Those who know will know. I first felt the symptoms of depression when I was in Jr. High. The religion led to me rationalizing this as a spiritual failure. If I felt bad, it must mean that I was bad. Like I said, those who were raised in that will know what I mean. This was all reinforced by my bishop, who said that I needed to pray more, read my scriptures, and open myself up more to the love of Jesus. Big surprise, it wasn’t working and I was mentally deteriorating. My bishop said that serving a mission would change everything for me. It was a cultural expectation, actually, that all young men serve missions. I felt like this truly was the thing I needed to do to fix whatever was broken inside of me.
I was called to Lubbock Texas. Not fabulous, I know. The mission didn’t fix anything, so I doubled down harder. I would stay up all night reading scriptures, babbling prayers. I went entirely, completely, Tyler Durden manic. My mission companion said I did a bunch of strange things. I put my shoes in the freezer. I would walk backwards. I would sometimes speak in tongues. My companion told me because I don’t remember any of it. Apparantly, I had a seizure. I hit my head on a curb and suffered a traumatic brain injury. I was in a coma for 2 weeks. The church sent me home, and I have permanent brain damage to this day.
When I came home, I found out my parents had gotten divorced. They had been planning it for a long time and were just waiting for me to leave to do it. My dad was nowhere to be found. My mom refused to accept that I had come home from my mission early. She called me the anti-christ and told me that if I wouldn’t go back on my mission, I would have to leave and figure things out on my own. (I have a whole poem about that, you can ask in the comments if you want it.)
I was homeless, mentally ill, and physically ill from the brain damage. I had a limp, and I was dizzy all the time. I had several failed suicide attempts, and I was pawning off what few belongings I had for food.
I didn’t know this back then, when I wandered the streets in winter, psychologically mangled. There was an arcade not far from where I went to high school. It was called the Atomic Arcade. It had tons of vintage arcade games and rare cabinets. It was operated by just 1 guy and there weren’t any attendants. He was too lazy to close it at night so it was always open. He would come by every other day in the afternoon to collect the quarters. He never bothered me, even though I would loiter there to stay warm. I think I was kind of a scarecrow for him. Teenagers would go there to drink and they would be rough with the machines, but they were hesitant to do it when I was there, watching.
Accross from the stool I would sit on, there was a Galaga cabinet. An original one from. The 80’s. That meant it still had the old PSA’s. “winners don’t do drugs” and “FBI warning.” Once in a while, a face would pop up on screen. A missing child ad. The kid looked familiar, but that would have been impossible. The kid went missing before I was born. I would stand in front of that Galaga cabinet and wait for the ad to pop up. In the brief moments it was on screen, I would try to memorize the kids face. I would try to imagine the kid as an adult, trying to place where I had seen them. The ad was from 1985, so I did the math and calculated that the kid would have been in his late 20’s. I would do this for hours, for days, trying to figure out where I knew this kid from.
One day, I came to the arcade and the Galaga machine was out of order and unplugged. I stared at the black CRT screen and I realized that I couldn’t recognize myself. The person looking back at me was a complete stranger. He copied my movements like a reflection, but it wasn’t me. I wondered if homelessness had changed me so much that I couldn’t recognize myself. I looked homeless, my hair haphazardly cut with a pocket knife and scraggly beard. It was my eyes though. I didn’t recognize my own eyes. They were dark, sunken, too old for my age. I felt sick. I knew the owner probably wouldn’t like it, but I plugged the machine back in. I had a horrible feeling about the missing kid’s face and this strange sensation of not recognizing myself. The screen flashed and Galaga began cycling through its sounds and animations.
I waited, and the missing child ad popped up. A face I was familiar with, rather than my own estranged features. I realized that the missing kids face, looked like me as a child. I was the missing kid, but that wouldn’t be possible. I was born in the 90’s. The kid was probably born in the 70’s. I felt like the ghost of this kid. The adult he could have become. Lost in machines and lights and sounds, never heard from again, but still haunting this place. I wonder if I had died back on my mission or countless other times and I had become a ghost, haunting the city, the arcade. Maybe me and the kid switched places. He served his mission, got married in the Mormon temple, had kids, served as a young men’s leader. I went missing and he was found. I believed I was dead or a ghost for days. It’s called Cotard’s syndrome, apparantly.
I was eventually able to get a job and I found a cheap slum house to live in. I slowly put my life back together, got into therapy. I would find out that the brain damage from the accident had caused something called Prosopagnosia (face blindness. That’s another poem) essentially, I lost my ability to recognize complex shapes. They just don’t get stored in my memory. For a long time, I thought I was just an asshole, but my brain was just broken. It’s a rare condition. Some people are born with it, some aquire it from brain damage. Thing is, I remember some faces from before my accident. I just can’t store any new faces in my memory. I still remember what I looked like as a kid, but I can’t recognize myself today. I still get spooked by my own reflection, it feels like a stranger is looking at me. Whenever I wanted to die though, I would go back to the Atomic Arcade with a $20 and play games all night. It was a place I could go where I didn’t feel alive. Me and that missing kid on the screen, left ghosts there. I could spend a night as that ghost. As of today, the arcade is gone. Closed during the pandemic. Still, I remember my own face in the machine. Part of me is still there, in the static.