___________________ ღღ ___________________
Erick
¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯ •.¸ ¸.•¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯
[ - Friday Sept. 06 2019, 5pm, College - ]
Content Warnings: neurotypically ableist language, falling asleep in class
The bell rings, startling me out of a vivid dream. Instinct keeps my body still as my mind struggles to get up to speed. Eventually I feel more or less awake, and do my best to blend in with the rest of the class by gathering up my notes and pens. This had been the final course of the day, and also the third one I’d fallen asleep in during lecture. Thankfully, again, nobody seems to have noticed my drowsiness.
End cw: falling asleep in class
With my backpack packed, I move to join the flow of other students exiting the room. After the discrete math test this morning, all of my classes had been relatively quiet and easy. Both in terms of subjects covered and hallucinations suffered. I’ve been counting my lucky stars that I haven’t made a fool of myself yet in front of anyone other than Matt.
I make it into the hallway and get swept away in the river of people rushing to escape the computer science building’s cramped corridors. I briefly consider checking my phone to see if Matt replied to me while I was asleep, but decide against it. I’d been checking it religiously once I woke up enough to remember that I’d frantically sent him a bunch of messages last night, most just some variation of “i can’t stop looking at these memes Matt. please stop me”. He never got back to me, but that’s not entirely unusual, maybe last night he managed to get to sleep at a reasonable hour. And maybe today has been super busy for him. If he did reply, I figure, it can wait till I’m home. If he didn’t, well, then, confirming that will just make me spend the entire ride home finding even more ways to feel embarrassed about my lapse in judgement. I’d already sent a text telling him to ignore it all and flat out lied by blaming it on alcohol that I hadn’t drunk.
I finally make it to the glass exit doors of the building, and push through them into the cool autumn air. The sky is a clear, crisp blue, and the sound of birdsong fills the air.
I’ve got about ten minutes until the bus is scheduled to leave, and I quicken my pace. I shove my hands into the front pocket of my thick orange hoodie and make a beeline for the central campus courtyard, and beyond that, my ride home. The bus stops a few blocks past campus central, and I always get there as early as I can in fear of the bus driver leaving early. It’s only happened once this semester, but it sucked enough that I’ve made a point to arrive early ever since.
I keep my head down and try to walk as quickly as possible through the throngs of people walking and talking along the paved path. Most of the classes at this school are held in standardized time blocks, so right now there’s an entire horde of students coming from and going to pretty much every building in at least a four block radius around me.
Sometimes Matt and I see each other in this mess on Fridays, since we both get done with all our classes at the same time. But the odds of running into him without coordinating it are quite slim, since his last philosophy course is several blocks away. I tell myself I don’t want to see him anyway, but my heart’s not in it. I don’t want to admit it, but I’m terrified of his silence today. I’m afraid he’s been taking his time trying to figure out how to respond to my texts, and I’m not sure which scenario is scarier: that he’ll tell me the texts I sent aren’t the kinds of texts a normal cis boy would send, or that my obsession with trans femme research is bordering on creepy and I’m really taking this whole thing too seriously. He was only trying to send me memes, after all!
I move on autopilot along the edge of one of the many stone-lined paths stretching across the giant grassy field in the middle of campus, lost in my spiraling thoughts. There are huge streams of people crisscrossing this area, and the places where two or more paths cross each other are chaotic clusterfucks. Thankfully it’s the middle of the semester, so most people know how to navigate the mess by now. I’m so used to it I barely notice anything besides when I need to swerve out of someone’s way.
I do notice, however, when the world around me starts to slow down. It feels like the space between each beat of my heart grows a little longer than the last. I’m suddenly intimately aware of the slap!ing sound my ragged shoes make against the ground, as well as the sweet scent of freshly mown grass hanging in the air. I try to just keep walking through the crowds as I normally do, but every step seems to take just a little longer. I feel myself becoming more, my perceptions expanding and sharpening until I have access to so much more sensory information than a few moments ago. The faint warmth of the sun beats against my skin from its position half-hidden behind the buildings ahead, and the background noise of all the moving, talking, and laughing people around me grows almost deafening.
My eyes catch a flash of deep purple ahead in the crowd, and it tickles at something in my brain. I need to go towards it, now.
I move faster through the throngs to catch up to whatever’s drawing my attention like a paperclip to a magnet. And then, I see her.
I stop in the middle of the pathway, and stare. The kid behind me curses as they narrowly avoid knocking me over; I don’t even register that I’m in the way.
Standing a little off to the right of the pathway ahead stands a tall, muscular, bronze-skinned woman decked out in full brown leather-looking armor. It’s her, the same person I’d seen in the bathroom mirror. She looks like she could snap me over her knee without breaking a sweat, and I’m not even sure I would mind.
She has an odd look in her emerald green eyes, gazing around at the crowd, then up at the buildings lining the courtyard. There's a little violet cape covering her right shoulder that flutters slightly as she turns to inspect the people closest to her. As if to highlight the fact that this is not a woman to fuck with, I catch a glimpse of a whole ass sword just casually sheathed at her hip.
She looks a little uneasy, her right hand hovers near the polished silver metal of the sword hilt. I notice suddenly that no one else seems to be taking any notice of her at all. There is a badass looking woman of color in medieval cosplay standing within hugging distance of a stream of students at a college in a liberal as hell city, and not one single person so much as bats an eye at her. It’s absolutely surreal.
As if sensing my attention, she turns her piercing green gaze my way. Our eyes meet, and I feel a sudden wave of vertigo and nausea.
For a brief moment, I’m standing on the grass beside the path, staring at a thin black-haired kid with a blank expression on their face. My eyes narrow, scanning the person’s bright orange clothing and complete lack of weaponry. No, no this isn’t right. I think, They look nothing like a helpful spirit or legendary warrior! Why in all the stars would we be bonded with someone if none of us know the reason?
A blink later and I’m slam dunked back into my body. I stagger a little off the path and onto the grass, only barely managing to stay on my feet. What the FUCK, I shout internally. The feeling of disorientation and displacement is akin to getting jolted awake out of a nice nap by an irate teacher.
To my surprise, the woman looks taken aback, and her thoughts, which I can still faintly feel, stutter to a halt at my exclamation. She thinks in a language I’ve never heard before in my life, yet I understand exactly what she means by it. They can hear me? she seems to ask herself, emotions of confusion and awe warring in the background.
Oh, shit, I think, realizing she can probably read my mind as well as I can read hers. Uhhh, sorry? I hazard.
I’m torn. Part of me wants to try and converse with her, but the rest of me just wants to ignore her and go scream into the sky. I mean, come on, even my delusions are disappointed in me! Am I literally incapable of even imagining myself being worth something?
I feel a cautious pulse of calm wash through my thoughts. That’s not what I meant, a voice says in my head, which causes me to flinch and look around wildly to see who’s whispering in my ear. A guy walking past me on the path gives me a raised eyebrow, but otherwise no one seems to be paying attention.
You are no doubt worth many things, the mind voice continues, I am only disappointed that this meeting has brought me no closer to understanding the nature of our connection.
My anger quickly dissipates as I analyze the thoughts and emotions radiating off of the woman before me. It feels sort of like the abstract concepts she’s thinking about are bumping up against my mind and I’m translating them into english, rather than her ‘saying’ words to me in whatever her native tongue is called.
It’s Amaranthine, her mind voice chimes in, and this time the intrusive thoughts of her communication are actually an image of the phrase in her language. Like she sent me a mental text or some shit.
Great, cool, I think irately, Are any of my thoughts private now?
The warrior lady shrugs. I assume you will learn to shield yourself from me in time, she quips.
I narrow my eyes, quite tired of being about two hundred steps behind in understanding what the fuck is going on in my own head. And just who the hell are you? I think loudly. I cross my arms and draw myself up to my full five feet ten inches of height, glaring at her.
She smiles slightly, mirroring me by crossing her arms across her chest and remaining like seven feet tall.
“I am called Aniahla Tahana,” she says out loud in lilting Amaranthine, “but you may call me Anne, spirited one. I like your fire.”
Her voice is low and mellow, but it carries clearly to me through the rest of the noise around us. I do not acknowledge the burst of joy I feel at her compliment. I’m too busy eyeing the people who are walking right past her without any indication they’d heard her speak. Fuck this is weird.
Thanks, Anne, I reply in thought after a second. I don’t feel like drawing any more unwanted attention by talking aloud. When I look back at her, she has a look of concentration on her face.
Who, are you? she asks tentatively, and this time her thoughts come across in English. I know my language had previously been just as alien to her as Amaranthine had been to me, and I sense this is an attempt to placate me by making things a tiny bit more normal for my poor monkey brain. It only slightly works.
My name is, uh, Erick, I reply, and I don’t believe I’d have been able to hide the uncertainty pouring out of my brain if I’d tried. It wasn’t like I didn’t like my name anymore, that would be silly. I just feel extremely uncomfortable hearing it applied to me in any context.
Hello, uh, Erick, she thinks, giving me a mischievous smile. For a brief moment, I get the sense she knows more about my emotions than I do.
She doesn’t say anything about it though. Instead she continues: It is, truly, a pleasure to meet you. Her sincerity washes over me, like she’s intentionally pushing the sensation my way.
Great, I grumble. Now my hallucination is taking pity on me.
Anne’s head tilts suddenly, her expression more serious than she’s been this whole conversation. I feel a flicker of fear run through my head, or is it through her head? Distantly, I hear someone shouting aloud in Amaranthine. Anne’s eyes widen in alarm.
I have to go Erick, I will contact you again soon. She closes her eyes, and I can feel her retreating as her thoughts grow more distant.
Hey wait a seco- I start, but she disappears: just vanishes before my eyes without any change to the rest of the world. My heightened perceptions begin to dull down to their normal settings, and I’m left just standing beside the busy path, staring at an empty space in the air.
Fuck.
That hadn’t been like the other times when our perceptions diverged and we slowly grew apart. It had been too sudden, too smooth. Does she know how to control this craziness somehow? And also, hey what the fuck? What did any of this even mean? Am I being visited by a warrior goddess? Had I accidentally matched with someone on spirit-mind mingle?
It takes me a couple seconds to realize I’m still standing there in the grass like an idiot. I start walking again, easing my way back into the flow of people on my left. I don't have any answers for the hundred or so more questions I've uncovered in the past few minutes. But it seems clear that the delusions I’m experiencing are getting more complex. And that, whatever magic- and sword-filled land the girl in my visions is from, it’s a far cry from the society I live in.
Of course, I still don’t even know whether or not I believe there's something supernatural going on in my head. I hadn’t been of one mind about it before that whole face to face encounter, and now I’m even more confused. The possibility that I’m suffering a slow psychotic breakdown makes just as much sense to some parts of me as stumbling into the existence of telepathy and magic ass-backwards does to other parts. Though, admittedly, the psychosis supporters aren’t super sure where the brain is pulling some of the more bizarre stuff from. Like that "teleportation sigil" I had helped with? That seemed impressively complex if it was created from the meaningless garbage chaos of my short circuiting brain. And I've definitely never just invented a whole new language of runes and sounds that make sense and are consistent before, either.
As I think about the sigil, I realize I actually know more about it than I had thought. I know how each line in the overall design works to guide the flow of power from the magic user who activates it towards the nearest Leyline, which is batshit crazy because I have no fucking clue what a ‘Leyline’ is. I’m guessing, if Anne is real, that I gained some more background knowledge of her world through osmosis or whatever while we were chatting.
I climb up the cement steps on the far side of campus central, totally lost in thought. I suppose it could be that these hallucinations aren't as incredible or intricate as they seem to me. Maybe the runes and designs are actually nonsense, Anne’s just an overly attractive imaginary friend, and my mind is working overtime to create patterns and intelligence out of the random feedback coming out of whatever’s broken in my brain.
I let out a huff of annoyance, grabbing the straps of my backpack for comfort as I reach the top of the stairs. How in the hell am I supposed to trust any part of my perceptions or thoughts when I can’t be sure that what I’m experiencing is actually reality?
I have a sneaking suspicion that this isn’t a problem I can solve alone, but I’m trying my damndest to ignore it. I know I could really benefit from having someone outside my own head to talk to, someone who won’t judge me, who I can bounce ideas off of without being laughed off or shoved into a psych ward. It’s just that the thought of burdening someone else with my weird mental issues terrifies me. I’ve been searching for a way to avoid it for the past three days. But at this point, I’m tired enough and scared enough that I might almost feel a tiny bit justified in asking for my needs.
My legs take me to the bus stop on autopilot as I deliberate over who I should bother with this. I’m still not desperate enough to go to my parents, maybe I could try some of my online gaming friends? Or I could make a reddit post about it with a throwaway account. Maybe some anonymous stranger can help me sort myself out without damaging my relationships with any of my friends! I kind of hate how excited I am by that prospect.
A few blocks later and I make it to the bus stop with several minutes to spare. I feel myself begin to relax, taking up a spot leaning against the granite wall separating the building behind me from the street. There’s only a few other people milling around waiting with me, though a steady stream of students still clogs the center of the wide sidewalk. I take out my phone automatically as I settle in to wait, wondering if I should bother getting out my ear buds or not.
I’m only just noticing that I have about a million notifications waiting for me, when someone bumps their shoulder against mine out of the blue. I squeak in shock, jumping away and turning to stare at the person who has so blatantly violated my personal space.
“Ah shit, sorry to scare you,” Matt says guiltily, rubbing the back of his neck. “Did you get my texts?”
KristenOfTheCoven
Hello all you beautiful people! Thank you SO MUCH for all your support and kind comments on this story! We the authors truly appreciate y'all, and welcome any and all feedback you have.
One thing we definitely want to request is that if you feel like any part of this story isn’t properly tagged with content warnings, please let us know either in our DMs or the comments!
Here's our little blurb on content warnings:
This story is centered on connection, growth, and love. It is our goal to make the reading of any potentially traumatic experiences completely optional for readers, so that anyone who wishes to can follow the story without having to be exposed to emotionally difficult experiences. There is no shame in not wanting to engage in heavy material, we get enough of this shit in our real life! We want to make it easier to enjoy the good things in the story without being hurt by the bad.
___________________ ღღ ___________________
Erick
¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯ •.¸ ¸.•¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯
[ - Friday Sept. 06 2019, 5pm, College - ]
Content Warnings: neurotypically ableist language, falling asleep in class
The bell rings, startling me out of a vivid dream. Instinct keeps my body still as my mind struggles to get up to speed. Eventually I feel more or less awake, and do my best to blend in with the rest of the class by gathering up my notes and pens. This had been the final course of the day, and also the third one I’d fallen asleep in during lecture. Thankfully, again, nobody seems to have noticed my drowsiness.
End cw: falling asleep in class
With my backpack packed, I move to join the flow of other students exiting the room. After the discrete math test this morning, all of my classes had been relatively quiet and easy. Both in terms of subjects covered and hallucinations suffered. I’ve been counting my lucky stars that I haven’t made a fool of myself yet in front of anyone other than Matt.
I make it into the hallway and get swept away in the river of people rushing to escape the computer science building’s cramped corridors. I briefly consider checking my phone to see if Matt replied to me while I was asleep, but decide against it. I’d been checking it religiously once I woke up enough to remember that I’d frantically sent him a bunch of messages last night, most just some variation of “i can’t stop looking at these memes Matt. please stop me”. He never got back to me, but that’s not entirely unusual, maybe last night he managed to get to sleep at a reasonable hour. And maybe today has been super busy for him. If he did reply, I figure, it can wait till I’m home. If he didn’t, well, then, confirming that will just make me spend the entire ride home finding even more ways to feel embarrassed about my lapse in judgement. I’d already sent a text telling him to ignore it all and flat out lied by blaming it on alcohol that I hadn’t drunk.
I finally make it to the glass exit doors of the building, and push through them into the cool autumn air. The sky is a clear, crisp blue, and the sound of birdsong fills the air.
I’ve got about ten minutes until the bus is scheduled to leave, and I quicken my pace. I shove my hands into the front pocket of my thick orange hoodie and make a beeline for the central campus courtyard, and beyond that, my ride home. The bus stops a few blocks past campus central, and I always get there as early as I can in fear of the bus driver leaving early. It’s only happened once this semester, but it sucked enough that I’ve made a point to arrive early ever since.
I keep my head down and try to walk as quickly as possible through the throngs of people walking and talking along the paved path. Most of the classes at this school are held in standardized time blocks, so right now there’s an entire horde of students coming from and going to pretty much every building in at least a four block radius around me.
Sometimes Matt and I see each other in this mess on Fridays, since we both get done with all our classes at the same time. But the odds of running into him without coordinating it are quite slim, since his last philosophy course is several blocks away. I tell myself I don’t want to see him anyway, but my heart’s not in it. I don’t want to admit it, but I’m terrified of his silence today. I’m afraid he’s been taking his time trying to figure out how to respond to my texts, and I’m not sure which scenario is scarier: that he’ll tell me the texts I sent aren’t the kinds of texts a normal cis boy would send, or that my obsession with trans femme research is bordering on creepy and I’m really taking this whole thing too seriously. He was only trying to send me memes, after all!
I move on autopilot along the edge of one of the many stone-lined paths stretching across the giant grassy field in the middle of campus, lost in my spiraling thoughts. There are huge streams of people crisscrossing this area, and the places where two or more paths cross each other are chaotic clusterfucks. Thankfully it’s the middle of the semester, so most people know how to navigate the mess by now. I’m so used to it I barely notice anything besides when I need to swerve out of someone’s way.
I do notice, however, when the world around me starts to slow down. It feels like the space between each beat of my heart grows a little longer than the last. I’m suddenly intimately aware of the slap!ing sound my ragged shoes make against the ground, as well as the sweet scent of freshly mown grass hanging in the air. I try to just keep walking through the crowds as I normally do, but every step seems to take just a little longer. I feel myself becoming more, my perceptions expanding and sharpening until I have access to so much more sensory information than a few moments ago. The faint warmth of the sun beats against my skin from its position half-hidden behind the buildings ahead, and the background noise of all the moving, talking, and laughing people around me grows almost deafening.
My eyes catch a flash of deep purple ahead in the crowd, and it tickles at something in my brain. I need to go towards it, now.
I move faster through the throngs to catch up to whatever’s drawing my attention like a paperclip to a magnet. And then, I see her.
I stop in the middle of the pathway, and stare. The kid behind me curses as they narrowly avoid knocking me over; I don’t even register that I’m in the way.
Standing a little off to the right of the pathway ahead stands a tall, muscular, bronze-skinned woman decked out in full brown leather-looking armor. It’s her, the same person I’d seen in the bathroom mirror. She looks like she could snap me over her knee without breaking a sweat, and I’m not even sure I would mind.
She has an odd look in her emerald green eyes, gazing around at the crowd, then up at the buildings lining the courtyard. There's a little violet cape covering her right shoulder that flutters slightly as she turns to inspect the people closest to her. As if to highlight the fact that this is not a woman to fuck with, I catch a glimpse of a whole ass sword just casually sheathed at her hip.
She looks a little uneasy, her right hand hovers near the polished silver metal of the sword hilt. I notice suddenly that no one else seems to be taking any notice of her at all. There is a badass looking woman of color in medieval cosplay standing within hugging distance of a stream of students at a college in a liberal as hell city, and not one single person so much as bats an eye at her. It’s absolutely surreal.
As if sensing my attention, she turns her piercing green gaze my way. Our eyes meet, and I feel a sudden wave of vertigo and nausea.
For a brief moment, I’m standing on the grass beside the path, staring at a thin black-haired kid with a blank expression on their face. My eyes narrow, scanning the person’s bright orange clothing and complete lack of weaponry. No, no this isn’t right. I think, They look nothing like a helpful spirit or legendary warrior! Why in all the stars would we be bonded with someone if none of us know the reason?
A blink later and I’m slam dunked back into my body. I stagger a little off the path and onto the grass, only barely managing to stay on my feet. What the FUCK, I shout internally. The feeling of disorientation and displacement is akin to getting jolted awake out of a nice nap by an irate teacher.
To my surprise, the woman looks taken aback, and her thoughts, which I can still faintly feel, stutter to a halt at my exclamation. She thinks in a language I’ve never heard before in my life, yet I understand exactly what she means by it. They can hear me? she seems to ask herself, emotions of confusion and awe warring in the background.
Oh, shit, I think, realizing she can probably read my mind as well as I can read hers. Uhhh, sorry? I hazard.
I’m torn. Part of me wants to try and converse with her, but the rest of me just wants to ignore her and go scream into the sky. I mean, come on, even my delusions are disappointed in me! Am I literally incapable of even imagining myself being worth something?
I feel a cautious pulse of calm wash through my thoughts. That’s not what I meant, a voice says in my head, which causes me to flinch and look around wildly to see who’s whispering in my ear. A guy walking past me on the path gives me a raised eyebrow, but otherwise no one seems to be paying attention.
You are no doubt worth many things, the mind voice continues, I am only disappointed that this meeting has brought me no closer to understanding the nature of our connection.
My anger quickly dissipates as I analyze the thoughts and emotions radiating off of the woman before me. It feels sort of like the abstract concepts she’s thinking about are bumping up against my mind and I’m translating them into english, rather than her ‘saying’ words to me in whatever her native tongue is called.
It’s Amaranthine, her mind voice chimes in, and this time the intrusive thoughts of her communication are actually an image of the phrase in her language. Like she sent me a mental text or some shit.
Great, cool, I think irately, Are any of my thoughts private now?
The warrior lady shrugs. I assume you will learn to shield yourself from me in time, she quips.
I narrow my eyes, quite tired of being about two hundred steps behind in understanding what the fuck is going on in my own head. And just who the hell are you? I think loudly. I cross my arms and draw myself up to my full five feet ten inches of height, glaring at her.
She smiles slightly, mirroring me by crossing her arms across her chest and remaining like seven feet tall.
“I am called Aniahla Tahana,” she says out loud in lilting Amaranthine, “but you may call me Anne, spirited one. I like your fire.”
Her voice is low and mellow, but it carries clearly to me through the rest of the noise around us. I do not acknowledge the burst of joy I feel at her compliment. I’m too busy eyeing the people who are walking right past her without any indication they’d heard her speak. Fuck this is weird.
Thanks, Anne, I reply in thought after a second. I don’t feel like drawing any more unwanted attention by talking aloud. When I look back at her, she has a look of concentration on her face.
Who, are you? she asks tentatively, and this time her thoughts come across in English. I know my language had previously been just as alien to her as Amaranthine had been to me, and I sense this is an attempt to placate me by making things a tiny bit more normal for my poor monkey brain. It only slightly works.
My name is, uh, Erick, I reply, and I don’t believe I’d have been able to hide the uncertainty pouring out of my brain if I’d tried. It wasn’t like I didn’t like my name anymore, that would be silly. I just feel extremely uncomfortable hearing it applied to me in any context.
Hello, uh, Erick, she thinks, giving me a mischievous smile. For a brief moment, I get the sense she knows more about my emotions than I do.
She doesn’t say anything about it though. Instead she continues: It is, truly, a pleasure to meet you. Her sincerity washes over me, like she’s intentionally pushing the sensation my way.
Great, I grumble. Now my hallucination is taking pity on me.
Anne’s head tilts suddenly, her expression more serious than she’s been this whole conversation. I feel a flicker of fear run through my head, or is it through her head? Distantly, I hear someone shouting aloud in Amaranthine. Anne’s eyes widen in alarm.
I have to go Erick, I will contact you again soon. She closes her eyes, and I can feel her retreating as her thoughts grow more distant.
Hey wait a seco- I start, but she disappears: just vanishes before my eyes without any change to the rest of the world. My heightened perceptions begin to dull down to their normal settings, and I’m left just standing beside the busy path, staring at an empty space in the air.
Fuck.
That hadn’t been like the other times when our perceptions diverged and we slowly grew apart. It had been too sudden, too smooth. Does she know how to control this craziness somehow? And also, hey what the fuck? What did any of this even mean? Am I being visited by a warrior goddess? Had I accidentally matched with someone on spirit-mind mingle?
It takes me a couple seconds to realize I’m still standing there in the grass like an idiot. I start walking again, easing my way back into the flow of people on my left. I don't have any answers for the hundred or so more questions I've uncovered in the past few minutes. But it seems clear that the delusions I’m experiencing are getting more complex. And that, whatever magic- and sword-filled land the girl in my visions is from, it’s a far cry from the society I live in.
Of course, I still don’t even know whether or not I believe there's something supernatural going on in my head. I hadn’t been of one mind about it before that whole face to face encounter, and now I’m even more confused. The possibility that I’m suffering a slow psychotic breakdown makes just as much sense to some parts of me as stumbling into the existence of telepathy and magic ass-backwards does to other parts. Though, admittedly, the psychosis supporters aren’t super sure where the brain is pulling some of the more bizarre stuff from. Like that "teleportation sigil" I had helped with? That seemed impressively complex if it was created from the meaningless garbage chaos of my short circuiting brain. And I've definitely never just invented a whole new language of runes and sounds that make sense and are consistent before, either.
As I think about the sigil, I realize I actually know more about it than I had thought. I know how each line in the overall design works to guide the flow of power from the magic user who activates it towards the nearest Leyline, which is batshit crazy because I have no fucking clue what a ‘Leyline’ is. I’m guessing, if Anne is real, that I gained some more background knowledge of her world through osmosis or whatever while we were chatting.
I climb up the cement steps on the far side of campus central, totally lost in thought. I suppose it could be that these hallucinations aren't as incredible or intricate as they seem to me. Maybe the runes and designs are actually nonsense, Anne’s just an overly attractive imaginary friend, and my mind is working overtime to create patterns and intelligence out of the random feedback coming out of whatever’s broken in my brain.
I let out a huff of annoyance, grabbing the straps of my backpack for comfort as I reach the top of the stairs. How in the hell am I supposed to trust any part of my perceptions or thoughts when I can’t be sure that what I’m experiencing is actually reality?
I have a sneaking suspicion that this isn’t a problem I can solve alone, but I’m trying my damndest to ignore it. I know I could really benefit from having someone outside my own head to talk to, someone who won’t judge me, who I can bounce ideas off of without being laughed off or shoved into a psych ward. It’s just that the thought of burdening someone else with my weird mental issues terrifies me. I’ve been searching for a way to avoid it for the past three days. But at this point, I’m tired enough and scared enough that I might almost feel a tiny bit justified in asking for my needs.
My legs take me to the bus stop on autopilot as I deliberate over who I should bother with this. I’m still not desperate enough to go to my parents, maybe I could try some of my online gaming friends? Or I could make a reddit post about it with a throwaway account. Maybe some anonymous stranger can help me sort myself out without damaging my relationships with any of my friends! I kind of hate how excited I am by that prospect.
A few blocks later and I make it to the bus stop with several minutes to spare. I feel myself begin to relax, taking up a spot leaning against the granite wall separating the building behind me from the street. There’s only a few other people milling around waiting with me, though a steady stream of students still clogs the center of the wide sidewalk. I take out my phone automatically as I settle in to wait, wondering if I should bother getting out my ear buds or not.
I’m only just noticing that I have about a million notifications waiting for me, when someone bumps their shoulder against mine out of the blue. I squeak in shock, jumping away and turning to stare at the person who has so blatantly violated my personal space.
“Ah shit, sorry to scare you,” Matt says guiltily, rubbing the back of his neck. “Did you get my texts?”
KristenOfTheCoven
Hello all you beautiful people! Thank you SO MUCH for all your support and kind comments on this story! We the authors truly appreciate y'all, and welcome any and all feedback you have.
One thing we definitely want to request is that if you feel like any part of this story isn’t properly tagged with content warnings, please let us know either in our DMs or the comments!
Here's our little blurb on content warnings:
This story is centered on connection, growth, and love. It is our goal to make the reading of any potentially traumatic experiences completely optional for readers, so that anyone who wishes to can follow the story without having to be exposed to emotionally difficult experiences. There is no shame in not wanting to engage in heavy material, we get enough of this shit in our real life! We want to make it easier to enjoy the good things in the story without being hurt by the bad.
