INTRAMUSCULAR 2.01 (Patreon)

Babam! Back again, and start to a new arc! We're going to be doing a lot more shenanigans in the sleepy town of Hollow Springs, dearies, and I'm very excited to play with the upcoming, incoming evolution to our story so far!

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The phone is ringing.

The phone is ringing.

The phone is ringing.

It does that, nowadays. Every few hours, sometimes, and other times, a few bursts, intermittent, across close-together minutes.

I do not answer.

I stay where I am. It is warm, wrapped in soft covers that smell slightly of sweat and familiarity, the only light entering the room that which has managed to sneak past the curtains or from my phone, when it wakes up to scream at me.

I do not answer.

I… think it’s been three days. It’s hard to tell. I haven’t gone out much. Haven’t eaten much, either. I stay in bed. I drink water. When I need to, I walk to the bathroom and relieve myself. 

Then I come back to bed.

I’m starting to smell. “Sweat and familiarity” has started to transition to stench. My hair is so greasy it feels weird to even touch it, and my breath is… best left undescribed.

It’s not as bad as it could be, but I think that’s because I haven’t really eaten. I tried, once. Second day after I came back. Made a plate- stale breakfast pastry and a glass of milk.

I vomited up the first bite. The second one, too. My diaphragm still vaguely hurts, a whole day after, from the way my body rebelled, heaving up bile and choking breaths for almost half an hour after.

So I drink water. That much, I can still do. And I piss. And I stay in bed, in the dark.

And I ignore the phone when it sings and carols and pleads and screams.

Sometimes, I even sleep.

I don’t like sleeping. 

Used to be I could track my mental health almost exclusively through my dreams. However much or little I may have compartmentalized or minimized or buried things, if I had a dream of weird colors and dozens of characters and nonsensical, fantastical stories, I knew I was at least mostly ok. However well I thought I was doing, if I ended up in a dream that plays out like a funhouse-mirror of something realistic, set in the “real world”, then I knew that there was something very, very wrong.

My dreams aren’t so easy to interpret anymore.

It’s… it’s like when you wake up, and you can tell that you slept. Not just an eye-blink, eyes-closed and then opened; you can tell there was a period where you weren’t, a point of something like darkness, or an absence, but not how long it lasted. An impression of having not-been, or having floated in nothingness.

My dreams are like that, now. But they last longer than an instant.

I float there. I sometimes can only tell if I’m dreaming by realizing that my blanket is gone, that there’s no more smell, no more screaming of the phone. I realize that I can’t move, because I have no body, and because there’s nowhere to move to. I try to look around, but I have no eyes, and there is nothing to look at, nowhere that can be looked at in any way because it’s not real, even if I did have them.

It still moves like dream-time. Every moment could be hours or minutes or days, and it’s impossible to know until I wake up. It’s not one-to-one with reality.

But I remember all my dreams now. Every one of them. And they’re always nothing.

And sometimes, there’s things swimming out in the nothing. And I can’t do anything but pray that they don’t see me.

I’m not religious. I never have been. My parents tried, when I was little- so many churches, a new one with every move, every sunday morning. It never caught. I read the bible cause I was always so bored there, and I asked questions that were annoying to most and aggravating to some. I got agnostic pretty quick when I went to college.

But I pray.

I don’t know to what. It’s not words. In a dream, in my dreams, there are no words, not really, and even moreso in these new ones. I do not have knees to kneel with or hands to clasp, and I do not have a mouth with which to scream and beg and supplicate.

But I pray. I pray to anything that is listening that whatever is swimming in the nothing, in the time and space and mind that Is Not, does not see me.

And then I wake up.

I never remember waking up. At some point, I just am. I look out with real eyes at real things, at a blanket that covers me and is starting to stink and into the shadows cast by my curtains being pushed by my breath and the air-conditioning. I hear my phone start to ping and whistle and scream again, like a hungry bird begging for food, for attention, and know that I am awake again. But I never remember waking up. I just know, always, that the things I did not see in the place that is not didn’t see me yet.

I haven’t played the game.

MEAT and its smaller cousin remain where they lay, plugged into the wall, cartridges embedded into the headset like shrapnel through a skull. I haven’t dared to touch it since my… friend sent me back. Its headset, cobbled together out of kid’s toys and fifty-year-old electronics and strings of tissue, fit like a glove- and when it went dark, and I moved to take it off, I found my hands touching hard, cool plastic. I took it off easily enough, and the gloves and haptics afterwards, letting them hit the ground as they fall from my hands.

I didn’t even unplug it.

I’m scared that it won’t need the outlet next time. That it’ll light up as if nothing’s wrong when I put it back on, severed from any electricity and removed from what it should need.

I’m just scared.

It was easier in the game. I could bury my head into itself and shut down if I needed to. I chose, willingly, to bury the dissociation, the pain, the sheer fucking panic at the thought that I’d be stuck there forever. It’s not healthy, but I’ve done it before. The brain can be trained to ignore some truly incredible warning signs if you learn how, and I learned how young.

But then comes the crash. The moment after the defenses come down, where the brain realizes that they’re not currently necessary, and then, if you’re not careful, the dam breaks, the things hiding behind it, pressing into it, breaking past and flooding through you and over you until you’re drowning.

Brings back old memories. Old, aching memories, ones that know just how to hurt me, just what to say. It’s like being a teenager all over again, the feeling of being trapped in flesh not-my-own bubbling up like bile in the back of my throat and demanding that I spit it out or swallow it back down and let it burn. Wrapping myself in the dark, in the colors behind my eyelids, in the comfort and pain of a blanket wrapped so tight that even softness feels sharp against raw sensation.

The phone is ringing again.

Sometimes, things just take time. The brain, taking time to process. Three days, give or take. I let the thought drift away and go quiet, not acknowledging it, not letting myself feel its weight. 

Truth be told, I don’t think it would have taken me three days to recover from what happened. I think it would take a few weeks of wondering if I can still taste raw meat in my mouth, maybe a change to vegetarianism for a while; a bit of ongoing anxiety and twitchiness from almost dying; certainly more nightmares than I’d know how to articulate, let alone count.

But some things demand immediate, and constant, attention.

I don’t know if I’m real.

I’m a little ashamed, if I’m being honest. I thought I’d more-or-less resolved the whole “what is reality, does it matter” debate a long time ago, but… this is fresher. It’s one thing to view, in the abstract, the idea that perhaps human senses, limited as they are, can’t tell you if you’re actually real empirically, can’t prove that other people exist as more than sensory responses. That’s something I’ve dealt with. The answer, quite simply, is that since you don’t and can’t know, it doesn’t matter, isn’t useful to think about, and/or you should be a good person just in case. Cause why not.

But it’s one thing to confront an abstract idea, and another to stare something like death in the face and wake up again after.

I put on the headset.

In the game. With that… computer-thing, telling me it’s my friend, giving me the option to go home- and to do so, I put on a headset. 

When I woke up, the headset was off my head. In my hands. As if I’d reached up and taken it off- but I don’t remember doing that. I don’t remember it, so all I know is that I put on a new headset, and then… woke up here. Back in the “real” world, like nothing had happened.

It would be easier if I could have woken up with the headset still on me. That would have been easier to rationalize, made simple to connect- the machine-thing in the game connected me back to the machine-thing in the real world.

But I opened my eyes- and the headset was in my hands.

Everywhere I look, I wonder if I’m still in that cave, right now. If this isn’t an illusion, somehow. Maybe I was just… foggy, coming back. Performed some moves on instinct. Maybe there was a lag between my consciousness coming back and my subconscious mind, that I’d be able to do something so basic and random without realizing it.

Or maybe none of this is real.

It doesn’t feel likely. It doesn’t feel, physically, like there are other forces touching and affecting me beyond my own awareness, like when I’d feel carpet under my feet while in MEAT, or be able to eat and feel it. Logically speaking, I do actually think that I’m back.

But I woke up with the headset already off. So I don’t really know. And after what happened in the “game”... that’s all it took. I couldn’t hold it back.

The phone is ringing.

Fuck.

I reach a hand out, almost startled at the cold beyond the blankets, and grab it.

That’s enough. Fuck it. My brain can break down on its own time. This… it has to be enough.

There are people who care about me, and a job that I need to do… something about, and this game, this… divine revelation or alien vision or weird alternate dimensional bullshit… I need to do something about that too. 

I pick up the phone. There, on the screen, staring right at me, a name that hurts and soothes to see.

Jaybird is calling.

I sigh. Long, and slow, and deep.

I pick up.

“Jesus fuck, finally! Where the hell have you been, I’ve been worried sick! I’ve been calling and texting for like two days now, I thought it was weird when you didn’t show up but then you didn’t respond to a get well text, and then your coworker called me from your job, and then-”

“Hey Jay.”

“Are you ok?”

I listen to him breathe over the phone. He sounds panicked, and it hurts me to hear it. I caused that pain. My pain, in the face of the idea of hurting someone else, of hurting my friend, feels almost worthless.

“No.”

He lets out an explosive breath, something past the point of a sigh. It hits me like a release of tension, an exhausted sound, like letting loose an emotion that was weighing on him.

“Ok. Want me to come over?”

I want to say no. I’ve hurt him enough. Forcing him to help, forcing him to care about me again, adding back the weight of what I am to his burdens…

But I know better. I’ve had my fair share of people calling me an idiot for thinking the same.

Not all my coping mechanisms are my enemies. Some of them, after a lot of hard work, can help me guide me to what I need.

“Yes please.”

“I’ll be over there in twenty minutes.”

I hang up right after. I’m not sure I could handle more conversation, and I don’t want to distract him from the driving.

That’s an excuse. I don’t want to talk right now, no matter how badly I want to talk right now. 

I let out a breath.

Close my eyes.

Pray a little.

When I open them, it’s still there. 

The seam in my wall. The one that was there when I got back. The one I saw when I woke up, the headset in my hands.

The one with the glistening red veins in it, beating to the pulse of an unseen heart.