It wasn’t supposed to go this way.
At first, I just wanted a place to go when I was stressed. We all need a little break now and then. Then a pocket dimension just fell in my lap, and of course, I had to try it. At first, it was perfect. Any time I was nervous about a test, or needed time away from other people, or even just wanted to take a nap in the middle of the day, I could.
Time didn’t pass in the real world, so what difference did it make? I could study as long as I needed to, take hours getting ready every day, or sometimes just hide for hours and hours. No one could bother me because they didn’t even know I was there! Eventually, I even managed to bring things in with me: my phone, my laptop, a few pillows for a bed. It was great!
I guess I might have overused it a little bit. Sometimes I’d come here mid-conversation and stay so long that I would completely forget what we were even talking about when I came back. At first, people thought it was funny. They joked that I had the memory of a goldfish; some people were even treating me better because they thought I was just stressed out. No one got mad at me back then.
Then they noticed my test scores. It helped that I could just pop out of the room and look up the answer whenever I didn’t know something. Essay questions were easy when I could spend hours working on them until they were perfect. At first, they all thought I had to be cheating, which I was, but not in any way they could know about. I had to have notes stashed somewhere to copy off my neighbors, or buy the tests online before they ever came up in class. They obviously didn’t find anything, but it did come out that another girl was copying off of me somehow.
I wonder if she ever noticed anything strange, staring at me like that.
Probably not.
Then they decided I must be ignoring them. If I could memorize all that, why couldn’t I keep track of a simple conversation? If I constantly forgot plans, it must be because I just didn’t care.
Of course, I couldn’t tell them what was actually going on. It’s not like they would have believed me anyway. And God, was I really that pathetic? Who wants to admit they can’t get through a basic conversation without wanting to run away and hide? Who wants to admit they can’t learn anything unless they literally have infinite time?
It’s a good thing I like my own company. No one’s really wanted to hang out with me for a while, but that’s okay. People are exhausting. Every interaction is a minefield, and really, I’m better off on my own. It’s not like I cut them off entirely. I can still talk to people if I want, I just prefer not to. The best part of my day is when I can hide in here. No one can find me. No one can talk to me. No one even knows I’m gone. Here in the quiet darkness, the only thing in the universe is me.
In here, I don’t have to care about how worried my mom seems, or how scared my dad is. What do they have to be scared of anyway? I’m not missing out on anything. At least not anything important. I just get more time to process everything. I don’t seem to age in here, so I’m even getting a longer life out of it.
Maybe I could even live forever if I wanted.
It would be kind of nice to just move on and start over. Go somewhere no one knows me, or even just outlive everyone else until there’s nothing left.
That sounds nice. No expectations, no more pressure, no one worried about me anymore. Free to do anything I wanted. Free to hide forever.
There’s just one problem with that. One little catch in the dream I was given. Sooner or later, I need to go back. I’ve never tested how long I can stay here. Maybe I really could just disappear forever if I was really determined, but if I ever do go back, everything will be exactly how it was before. No one will age a second past when I left. No one will move a single inch until I want them to. The world waits for no one, no one but me, and everyone else has to wait too.
So that’s the thing: no matter what I do, I can’t hide forever. Sooner or later, I have to go back, and every time I do, I have to drop right back into that awkward conversation, that impossible test, that empty house that can never seem to stay that way. Nothing has moved, everyone else is still the same, and I’ll still be me. I’ll still just be a scared teenager with no idea how to fix any of it besides running away or hiding, praying this time it really will go away.
But of course I can’t be that lucky.
I tried, I really did. I don’t get hungry when I’m in here, even if hours or days go by. I can sleep if I want, but I don’t really need it. Water isn’t a concern, and I never even need to use the bathroom unless I bring food or water in here. Even if I did need it, I could just bring in a bucket or something, and this place goes on forever, so I could always just walk away if I really needed to.
I tried bringing books in here, but that only lasts for so long before it gets boring. My phone and laptop are great, and the internet even works, but nothing ever moves forward in here. Sooner or later, you finish every book, every fanfiction, every YouTube video you can think to find. Every show ends eventually.
So what do you do when you finish all of them?
See, what no one tells you about eternity is that it really does mean forever. That might sound obvious, but you don’t get it until you’ve really been there. It’s easy to think about a long time, it’s easy to imagine a year, even a decade, but not eternity. Not forever. An endless void where everything stays completely still is only fun as long as you don’t run out of things to look for.
You may think you can just rewatch things, reread your favorite books, make your own entertainment when all of that runs out, and you’d be right. You can do that for a while. We all have movies we could watch over and over without getting bored. We all forget the plots of old books and get to experience them all over again.
The problem is, sooner or later, you stop forgetting. Sooner or later, you remember everything, and all it can do is bore you. You stop thinking of new stories to tell yourself, new people to imagine, new worlds to explore. Eventually, even your own thoughts start to repeat. Nothing comes to mind that you haven’t already thought, and nothing to do but sit with it. Every memory is a movie you’ve seen a million times until even thinking of it makes you feel sick.
No one wants to live forever.
But knowing that doesn’t fix anything, because you’re still here, in the void, hiding away from the world.
And the worst part is that it doesn’t stop.
It.
Never.
Stops.
You get bored and want to go back, but you can’t bring yourself to do it.
All you can do is stay in the void. Try to think of something, anything, to stay entertained, but you know there’s nothing left. All that you have feels like a cheap imitation of the real thing, and your boredom persists. Sometimes you scream, or cry, or talk to the air, anything to hear a sound. Your ears ring as you realize just how quiet it really is, and your head pounds, but it doesn’t matter because at least it’s something to fill the space. Your throat feels like it should hurt, but it just doesn’t, always feeling like it’s right on the edge as your breath refuses to run out and your lungs refuse to burn. For just a moment, you fill the space, you feel whole again, you feel like you’re as infinite as the void itself.
Then it’s gone. Because you aren’t eternal, not really. Sooner or later, you will stop. The sound disappears as quickly as it started, and a sense of shame fills your chest. Are you really so immature that you’re screaming like a toddler just because you’re bored?
Pathetic.
You can’t fill a space that goes on forever. The sound doesn’t even echo as it vanishes into the air. For once, you’re very, very grateful that no one else is here to see what a mess you’ve become.
So you wait.
You try to sleep. You try to dissociate. Anything to get away from this horrible place that you were so stupid to dream of.
Because sooner or later, you wake up, you come back, and still, it persists. So you sit in your boredom as it gives way to exhaustion, then misery, then anger, then grief, then nothing. You go numb, and it persists.
Every so often, something in you breaks.
You regret what you did, but it’s too late now. You wish you could just go back home and forget this whole thing, but of course, you made sure you couldn’t do that anymore.
Is it better or worse to know you could stop this if you were just brave enough to go home and face your consequences?
I used to think it would be better to just be trapped for good. Then I thought it was better to have the tools to fix things. At least then there’s a little emotion, something to think about, something to feel. Even if it’s bad, it’s better than nothing.
Now I don’t think it matters; the emotion is nice when you have it, but eventually it fades away, too. In the face of eternity, everything fades eventually.
I don’t know what’s going to happen to me when I go back. Truthfully, I barely remember what I did in the first place. I think my mom was sitting at the kitchen table, but I can’t even guess why. That’s what I wanted, I think. To be so far from what happened that I don’t even know what it was. I just knew I needed to hide, and the longer I spent in here, the more I just couldn’t force myself to go back.
I don’t even know who I was out there, not anymore. I must be older now than my body back home. How could I go back to being a teenager again after spending so much time in the void? How could I give up my endless freedom for the suffocating structure they trapped me in before? How could I keep myself from running back to hide the next time something happens?
No one out there knows me anymore. I don’t remember how to pretend for them either. I don’t even know if I’m really human anymore. How could I be? What human spends years and years, and dear God, how long have I been in here?!
Sorry.
What human spends so much time in an empty void, hiding from their problems?
The worst part is knowing that I’m going to go back one day. I know I will. The void persists, on and on, unchanging and eternal, but for all my faults, I’m still human, and I can’t. One day, it will all be too much, and I’m going to break.
Still, I’ll never be the same person.
And worse, I know, even after everything, I’ll still come back.
Sooner or later, I’ll need to be in the real world again, but by the same token, once I’m out there, I’ll want to come back here.
Sooner or later, I will break.
And there’s nothing I can do about it.
I’m stuck.
Trapped in a cycle I can’t force myself to break.
Even as I break again and again, even as I go back and forth and only make myself worse, I know I won’t be able to stop. As I lose more and more of who I could have been, my future evaporates, and so does my past; the cycle persists.
I’ll go back soon, when I work up the strength, but I know it won’t be the same.
Everyone avoids me now, even my parents. They’ll punish me for whatever it was that I did this time, and sooner or later I’ll hide again, but at least something will move forward, even if it’s only a little.
No matter how many times I run, sooner or later I have to go back.
The cycle will persist, and so will I.