Imagined Phenomena

Finished: September 27, 2021

Reality and fiction; its a balance you teeter. Something you hold strongly to your chest and take with you to bed. Inside, your thoughts buzz as your chemicals swerve like a car on ice. Journeys to fantastical lands of strange oddities, nightmarish dystopic visions of a ruined landscape, its all yours. They exist only because you do, yet seem to live by their own wits. As it takes you through its varying cracks and crevices, unable to control the pull, do you feel fear or excitement of what's to come? Or are you merely a puppet being dragged along by its strings. By the end, you feel uncertain.

While you sleep, the world flashes before your eyes until you can't remember it anymore. Sometimes, you lose yourself in the fuzz, forgetting what was really happening in the reality before the fiction. Was it really snowing? Did you really miss school? Are your parents still alive? The sudden tension of emotions weigh on you as suddenly? Fiction feels like reality.

You look out your windows, you check your phone, you call your loved ones, air struggling to pass through your tightened chest. Soon, you come to realize something; your own mind had lied to you. There was no snow, you hadn't missed school, and your parents were perfectly fine and well. Yet, your own mind had implanted these false ideas as if they were fact. You swore you saw snow out that window, but in actuality, it was the middle of June during a heat wave.

You regain control of your breath and relax, welled up tears beginning to recede. To consciousness, you've safely returned, but for how long would it be before you'd again be submitted to another morning of self doubt and questioning? It could be tonight, tomorrow night, or even a night 4 years from now.

Starting your day, you promise yourself an earlier bedtime seeing as you woke up without your pants again.