It’s weird to be conscious of having lost touch with reality. It’s oddly humorous, in a sinister, macabre way. I know, because I didn’t wake or come to. I am still awake. That’s how I know. Whatever it is, it happened to me two days ago, in the middle of the night, and when it finally left, there was no snap back to reality. I didn’t wake up. I didn’t come to. I just kept staring at the little crack in the door that lights up when the sun rises early in the morning. You remember it, right? The crack of dawn? I stared at that crack for three hours, waiting mindlessly, and then the light came. And you know what’s funny, too? I just got out of bed and started my day. No hesitation. No panic. Just automated functioning, like it was any other day.

I’m not an idiot, Sophia. I know I’ve lost touch with reality. There, I said it. But I lost it after what happened. Because of it. They will try to convince you that it was a psychotic hallucination, or a delirium of sorts. Whatever they say, do not believe them! I wasn’t mad until after it happened. Believe me. You have to believe me! If I had any other option but to tell you, I would have gladly left you in the dark, but there is protection in knowledge. I fear that you will find it, or it you. The best I have to offer is a warning, which I hope will be enough to save your sanity where mine couldn’t be. It is better to know what lurks in the dark.

I’m sure that what I saw was real. That’s what frightens me most. If something like this, something impossible, made its way into my reality, what’s to say it won’t make its way into yours? Knowing that what I experienced is incompatible with reality makes it all the more terrifying. I only wish it were a figment of my imagination. The mind is powerful. If it conjures up a spectre, and that hallucination touches you and you feel it, it will affect you so that, to you, the spectre was real. But this, whatever it was, isn’t that. It entered my reality, Sophia. It was not created by it, but entered my reality. It violated it. It showed me reality’s illusory nature. We think we know the world around us, but we are lying to ourselves. The world is devoid of everything but matter. Meaning and value are bestowed, not inherent.

It’s coming for me. I know it is. I can feel it in my chest. It is that indistinct sense of lacking that leaves you feeling hollow on a lonely, anhedonic night. That second drink that will give you the cathartic release you are looking for. That growing, starving void beneath your sternum, weaning itself on the tattered remains of your energy. It consumes me. It breathes my air through my lungs. It’s the essence of depression that you think you have found the words to pin down to, but haven’t.

I can feel its empty talons hook onto my clavicles, ready to break free and consume me. I hardly dared to look back, but I did. Aren’t I brave, Sophia? Ha! Perhaps I’m just an idiot, after all. I really thought—thought? I hoped!—that by writing it all down, I might stumble upon a reason not to go through with it by accident. That another way out would reveal itself to me. But the more I reflect on this, the more futile it seems to resist what I know needs to be done. Still, I’m glad it’s out in the open now. Perhaps, with this precaution, it won’t sneak up on you and you’ll be able to protect yourself. Your sanity has kept me up at night.

In looking over my shoulder, peering deep into my past, I saw its presence in hindsight. I could see it in my shadow, watching, learning, consuming—an intelligence with no conscience. Do you remember her, Sophia? The woman you loathed? It loved her, but it loved the obfuscated void I fell into without her more. I know it touched me there. Tested its limits. Tested to see whether it was time to reap the spoils of my agony, or whether waiting would increase the yield of my anguish. It had waited for so long. It had been patient, shown restraint in not striking sooner. It watched me walk on eggshells, dreading the sound of her coming home and berating me. It watched me grow cold, and my spirit wither. It watched me be forced to accept under the threat of a fight, even leered at my misery when I ‘owed’ her if I couldn’t. My eyes were pointed at my feet, but had I looked at my reflection in the window, I’m more than positive I would have seen it there. I should have when my friends couldn’t understand and brushed it off with a laugh.

Even when the world around me crumbled and I fell into the void, it knew it wasn’t yet time to strike. It played me like a fiddle. It led me astray, flooding my systems like cordyceps does ants. Little did I know it was honing its powers when it made me long for her. It emphasised to me that there was a sense of comfort in the stability she provided, one that it convinced me I needed, one that it convinced me trumped the pains. It made me nauseous. I was disgusted with myself. How could I not long for the good old days together, but instead for a life of daily suffering? Yet even then, when I was unsure whether my shattered sense of self or the collapsed something I had become without the framework of us was worse, it still did not strike.

Had I known how much worse it would get, I would have counted my blessings. How I long for the blissful ignorance of a deadening routine. Perhaps knowing what was to come would have saved me—that is my hope for you, Sophia. I can’t state that enough. But to my wretched self, even that state of half-dead suffering would be preferable to what has since come to me. I still long for the suffering I knew then, and I have never felt more repulsive. I am so overwhelmed. I’m exhausted, in need of a way out. I’m far beyond saving. I am a wreck that wishes it could just turn off again. Live life on autopilot.

Then came its most insidious ploy. It fetishised that conviction I had, that I needed the stability of someone else in my life at all costs. It lured me in with empty promises, and infected me with limerence under the guise of love. It located the antithesis of my anguish, and projected it onto someone I barely knew. Someone who unknowingly bore the weight of my induced neurosis. It knew they were just out of reach, and made me inflict upon myself a warped version of Tantalus’ hadal torture. My offense was unfairly ascribing fantasies to someone who could never live up to them, and I suffered under both consciousness thereof and the absence of reciprocation. The latter gives me comfort, now. At least they were unaffected by the contagious misery my hands might have spread.

When it became clear to me that it would never work out, that I had fallen victim to an illusory fantasy I falsely believed invoked, but that my own faculties had certainly produced—that’s when it finally struck. Its goal had been accomplished. It knew it. It had built me up to break me down and I fell right through the shabby scaffolding of its empty promises. Broken-hearted and utterly crestfallen, I fell back onto my bed around midnight, and stared languidly at the ceiling. I was envious of a non-existent me who did get to leave it behind. Envious of an unreality wherein all was good. My limbs felt heavy, infused by lead. My whole body did. A neutral emptiness possessed me—one that gradually degenerated.

Tears ran down the stone-cold wasteland between their cradle and my dried-up lips, frantically fleeing from whatever lurked inside. A stampede of tears. That’s how it felt. They ran away from the emergent crawling out of me. Not a fibre in my being felt compelled to wait around and discover the identity of the lurking horror.

And yet, I failed to lift a finger. Something restrained me. A heavy weight from within exerted an external force upon me; a force that strained to hard I could hear its attempts to cave in my chest through the subtle cracking of my ribs. The pressure mounted, until it crushed my sternum like a hydraulic press. From the loathsome bog of my mangled chest, I watched the void from within boil up like a black viscous sludge. I accepted then that God was dead, for if he allowed such abhorrence, I’d rather not imagine him alive. I clenched my jaw to bite through the pain, and opened my eyes wider than ever before.

I caught my reflection in the glass of the overhead lighting, but hardly looked at the black-boiling bog where my chest had been. It was secondary. Right above the absence of my nose, now but two slits unadorned with skin, I beheld the void at its purest. If eyes are portals to the soul, there was no soul left to be saved. Embedded within browless sockets that once held my eyes now rested two black holes, condemned to an insatiable hunger never to be stilled, and to bear the torturous weight of a nothingness of infinite density. I knew in an instant that its hunger became fixed on devouring my consciousness. I should never have met their gaze.

Blood panicked through my veins as I gasped for just one more breath. I could hear the surge, but not myself. Without air, there was no sound when I screamed, only a dizzyingly heaving dread with no way out. Please, I begged, make it stop. Anything. Anyone. I can’t go on like this. I started to twitch. I suffered the horrors of tetanoid muscle contractions, only for them to let go as if nothing happened. It was a cosmic puppet master—my cosmic puppet master—and pulled upon the threads from which I dangled like a loathsome insect being held over the fire. I convulsed. Violently. My arms flailed about like tentacles, and my legs kicked without direction, slamming into my bedframe and walls until I was as black and blue as the abyssopelagic depths.

But it was not done. It convinced me that I was inflicting this upon myself. That I was the perpetrator of this crime against reality, and that I was but the victim of my own volition. It convinced me that I was able to cease the horror at any point, if I wished to. I still can’t be sure that I wasn’t the perpetrator, such is its grip on me. When I tried to stop my convulsions, I did. Just long enough to convince me of my agency. The second I stopped trying, the convulsions resumed as if uninterrupted. I had gathered enough evidence for my weak, failing mind. It was fake. I was faking it. I cried out. Once more, soundlessly, in vain.

Lying there, writhing and bawling and choking, something shifted off of me. A layer of skin, blackened as if burned by the fire of a dying star, tore off in one clean slice, suspending itself in the air around me like a nebulous afterimage of my convulsing body. It orbited me. It enveloped me. Something like feelers sprouted from every granule of the weird form as I tried to compose myself, but there was nothing I could do. Through a hole in the tenebrous cocoon it had spun around me, I saw those eyes like black holes, from which not even light might escape, sprout similar feelers. Impossible appendages of the void, reaching from beyond reason and meaning. From these feelers came tendrilous threads which hooked themselves into what was left of my skin with worm-like claws. They dug into me. Slithered and crawled into every single pore with no regard for the excruciating torture they inflicted upon me.

There was no loss of consciousness, no matter how hard or sincerely I begged. All I felt, I was forced to feel. The cocoon spun around me like a mycelial web of ineffable depression, sending a cadaverous air of noxious horror to rage down my throat and char the depths of my lungs. Sinuous appendages rummaged through my aching vessels, emerging from sites I before thought impermeable. I couldn’t look away. My eyelids were gone, consumed by those eyes like black holes. The cocoon of horror that enveloped me was the totality of my new reality. A vast cosmos of infinite meaninglessness and horror beyond comprehension; a thousand times more horrible than any salvia-induced nightmare. The more I looked for answers, the more I felt my eyes melt into a sludge of promethean punishment. All I could discern was an incoherent, incomprehensible sense of contrast among the black-on-black void, and within it I stared into its millions of onyx eyes and talon-lined mouths. It was impossible. Ineffable. Inevitable…

Just how long it lasted, I can’t be sure. It felt like months; years, even! There was only nothingness. The absence of presence and the presence of absence. Then, as suddenly as it had appeared, it all collapsed back into me, and pretended never to have existed. I didn’t wake up. I didn’t come to. I just laid there, staring down my listless, alien body at the crack in the door and waited for a sign that dawn was coming. I didn’t know what I saw, then. I still don’t know now. But whatever I experienced was real. Utterly, harrowingly real.

I know it hungers for more. It will subject me to this nightmare again and again, devouring my sanity in an attempt to quench its eternal thirst. I have lost touch with reality. I am certain of it. If I am to detach completely, and be annihilated, let it be on my own terms. Know that you would do it too, Sophia. It is the merciful thing to do. Take care of yourself. Do not let it get to you. Know that I loved you for all my life. And if it ever does probe its heinous appendages into your mind, make sure to exorcise it before it opens its eyes like black holes…

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