My name is Jonathan. You know, like King Saul’s son? It’s a biblical name despite me being at best agnostic. A friend who sort of faded away in my life once explained to me that it’s heavily implied that the biblical Jonathan was a, “gay icon” of sorts, so I guess the shoe fits. I…I don’t believe in a god deep down; being a physicist and mathematician can make that challenging, but I was brought up Christian, so I have a certain respect for traditions and practices. Hell, I was even in NA and AA for a while. “Pray as hard as an atheist can,” and such and such, you know? I guess what I’m trying to say is a god would be nice, but I don’t feel or see him or her or them or it in this world, so I’m more inclined to not get my hopes up. Fuck, why am I telling you this? I guess I’m of the sort that feels that context is key. Every detail matters.
Speaking of key details, here’s a big one: I have a number of mental illnesses. According to my doctors and friends and family, at least. I’m not saying I disagree; in fact, I very much do. I just want, NEED to clarify that I’m being totally honest in that statement. Anyway, this leads us to our first plot beat.
I was very depressed my final year of high school, despite being a textbook overachiever with promising prospects. In my freshman year of college, drugs, of any and every type, filled that emptiness. Thus the time in NA and AA. But after my parents pulled me out of my death spiral and convinced me to get the help I needed, I ended up deteriorating fast. So fast, and so dramatically, in fact, that at one point I was, “borderline non-verbal.” This led them to suggest running a 0.16 Milliamp current through my skull several times a month for about a year. This did, in fact, get me speaking again, and crushed a lot of the depression, but it also destroyed a good chunk of my memory. I recall bits and pieces of a life before all this, but nothing really cohesive. The price we pay for nice things, like a correctly functioning brain, I guess. That and the trauma of waking up during the procedure the last time.
This is all to say: my handle on reality? Questionable. But I know that something has changed.
You see, lately, the people around me have been different, odd in very subtle ways. A slurred word here, a mispronounced one there, a request to repeat myself only to be cut off half way with an appropriate response. Little things. Innocuous things. Things most people would never notice or just chalk up to normal human behavior. But it always makes me feel uneasy, and it wasn’t until I saw my partner’s reflection in a hand mirror that it occurred to me: he was too neat. What I mean is, he was too…symmetrical. He had always been perfect to me, but this was a bit too much. So, as these occurrences increased in frequency. The little glitches in peoples’ speech, I began to study them more closely. After my partner, it was my parents. Then each one of my friends. Then the strangers in the street and at the store. Slowly at first, but then with increasing speed, they all began to become too symmetrical. Then, the bird songs outside became more and more perfect and repetitive, like they were a studio recording on a loop, too symmetrical.
This was the final straw. I began to retreat into the only reality I knew to be true. The one within myself. I avoided going outside. I avoided talking to those “people.” It was difficult at first, especially when my partner broke down and pled for me to get help again, to speak to them, to tell them what was wrong. I even tried, but when I noticed that the skin tag under my doctor’s left eye was now gone, and that he too had become too symmetric, I made an excuse and left the office only to flush my pills down the drain. I can’t trust them. I can’t trust any of them.
They’re outside the door now. Claiming to be here on a wellness check, but the voices on the other side of the door are too clear, too melodic, too symmetric. I know I can’t stop them. They can grab me, drag me back to the hospital. I can’t stop it any more than my weakly sobbed prayers can. The only thing I can do is, when they start asking questions about where my partner is or what happened to my parents, is to retreat to the one place I know is safe: inside my head. They’ll keep asking, but they can’t get me to talk; and no one ever will.