Do you ever find a small, isolated place to get away from it all?

Everyone has their own habits to get by in life. Their own coping mechanisms to deal with an increasingly heavy, suffocating outside world. For a long time after an unfortunate series of events and losses shattered my sense of self in my freshman year of college, mine was any substance I could get my hands on. 

A whole bottle of whatever, a paper under the tongue, whatever pills strangers at college parties offered me. I convinced myself that being under the influence was the secret I’d always been looking for since I was young; a superpower that could take me far away from it all. The choking anxiety, the fear of abandonment, the crushing weight of the world, the thought that everyone hated me. I thought that with the right impairments, it was finally gone. It certainly felt that way at least.

In reality, that just led me down an endlessly darker path with zero self awareness for a few years. I won’t bore you with the details, this is just to explain how we got here. I pushed everyone away over the course of those years. My friends, my family. It got bad enough that I couldn’t deny myself as the common denominator in all my problems and failed relationships. I only knew how to make the worst of the best times. I felt the need to restart. Moved to a tiny studio apartment in a new city after I graduated college, found a work from home job, committed to therapy, got sober. I’ve spent the last few years slowly rebuilding myself up and discovering who I am in the midst of what’s left of my life, working my way up to venturing back outside the bubble I’ve created for myself while the world outside just feels crazier every day these last few years. The world itself feels like it’s fighting the hardest against my progress.

So I needed to find a new habit; a new escape. Another coping mechanism for when I felt like I was falling apart, something to help me surf the waves of my urges and distress. In the last few years, I’ve grown to really appreciate my solitude and quiet as a barrier between me and the rest of life. Call it weird, but at my lowest it feels comforting to just find a tight, small space I can barely fit into, and shut myself in for a nap. It feels like being safe and held, the space itself holding you in stasis and insulating you from the stress of it all for just a moment before you step back out to face it. It’s certainly better than what I used to turn to, and I live alone, so who cares?

Recently, I’ve been at the end of my rope. I can barely scrape by enough to pay rent and utilities, and almost nothing is left for food, or really anything else. Job pays shit but takes up all my time, and in the little time I do have for myself I feel so exhausted all I can do is rot in bed. So after I logged out of work for the night today – eyes sore, migraine coming on, hands cramped from another twelve hour shift at my desk – I emptied out a cardboard box in my closet just big enough for me to squeeze into and close.

I shut myself in the closet with the empty box, climbed in, folded myself in half, knees pressed to my chest, and folded the box flaps shut to seal myself in darkness. I took in the smell of dry cardboard, and bathed in the muffled world I created for myself. Everything else faded away. For the first time all week, I felt calm; my heartbeat slowed, and I drifted off.

I didn’t dream. Instead, I came back to consciousness some time later to a rising, sharp pressure in my eardrums. In the darkness, my mind still piecing together where I was, it reminded me of waking up with an ear infection as a kid. Back when my parents still took care of me.

My hazy memory came into focus, and I remembered climbing in for my nap in the box. Through the mounting pressure and pain in my ears, I could make out a low, jagged hum, which I grew increasingly aware of subtly vibrating through my skin. More off-putting, I couldn’t hear any of the usual sounds of my downtown apartment or any of its surroundings; no nightly helicopter on endless sleep depriving patrol, no sirens, no honking – nothing. I wondered if I was losing my hearing. My breaths felt like they weren’t taking in enough air, what little was coming into my lungs thick and humid; my limbs felt distant from my mind. Nothing felt right. I felt nauseous. I needed air.

I pushed out of the box and rose to my feet, immediately greeted by an intense feeling of vertigo. I wondered if I was getting sick or ate something nasty, and leaned on the closet doorknob for balance before turning it open to beeline for my bathroom. What I found on the other side of the door stopped me in my tracks, as my heart skipped a beat.

The first thing I noticed was the blinding, iridescent glow that penetrated my third-story apartment from all the windows on all sides. It lit up every dark nook and cranny of my apartment, seemingly even through the solid walls, floor and ceiling. Looking into the iridescence outside sent searing pain through my eyes and head, as it swirled and mixed in slow motion like oil on water. The light bathed the room beyond comprehension in oversaturated hues, straining my eyes no matter where I averted them. All shadows were eliminated, giving the room a flat and perspective-less appearance that increased my nausea tenfold on sight. My legs grew weak, and I abandoned my run to the bathroom in favor of sitting down on my bed I could barely make out to get myself together. Before this, I thought this might just be the worst migraine aura of my life, after too long in front of the screen. This is when I discovered the second discrepancy.

I collapsed backwards onto the bed, expecting the soft give of my mattress. Instead my spine slammed into a jagged, unyielding surface, driving the wind right out of my lungs. I shot up onto my feet, held myself hunched over on my knees, and shut my eyes as I winced in pain. After a moment of recovery, I opened my eyes and waited for them to adjust so I could make out what was on my bed. As things slowly came into some semblance of focus, with great strain and squinted eyes, I looked back at my bed and saw the source of my pain: my bed was in a state of crystallization.

Fused with the cheap particle board of my bed frame, the mattress itself and everything on top of it, were pockets of what looked like the inside of a geode. Staring long enough, I could see them slowly growing to eventually take over my entire bed. I forced myself to look around the rest of my apartment, hands cupped around my face in a useless attempt to shield my eyes, and noticed everything outside of my closet was in a state of crystallization. It all sparkled in dazzling pockets of gemstone, the shine off of them from the totalitarian light threatening to blind me. In the air, fine black particles lazily floated around.

My mind raced. I tried to convince myself it was a dream, but the pain felt too real, too present. I hobbled around the small space, inspecting my transformed home. I slid my hand along the ferns I kept by my kitchen window, finding them entirely crystalline. They let out an unsettling tonal hum as my fingers grazed the surface. The pressure in my ears was growing, and the low frequency creating the only background sound grew more oppressive. I began to feel it vibrate in my teeth.

Surveying the room, I put all of my energy into ignoring my growing nausea and disorientation. My legs felt weak and my mind too slow to keep up with the situation, and I needed to find a safe place to rest before I collapsed where I stood. Suddenly, I felt a deep silence fall along the room, like I had stepped into a vacuum chamber. The black particles filling the air came to a sudden stop, as if held in place. The low hum in the room disappeared, but it wasn’t much of a relief; I could feel something new. The hairs on my neck stood tall, a chill over my body. I knew I was being watched.

I felt it, an omnipresent stare pressing ice into my backside from the kitchen window now behind me. Everything inside of me did not want to know what it was, and yet I forced myself, slowly turning to greet my observer. Outside the window, in breathtaking contrast to the blinding light that burned at every inch of me, was an absence of light. It was a void, or a black hole; unending and infinite. The longer I stared, the more my eyes adjusted and it took shape: half obscured behind the top of the window, hanging upside down in utter stillness, was a face. Deep, impossibly far inside the endless depths of the face, were a pair of pulsating eyes, studying me before its next move. I was frozen.

It felt like an eternity locked in an unwilling staring contest with the void, unsure what to do as my brain shut down, before the presence made the first move. It began to slide through space towards me, friction-less and seeming to ignore reality itself as it phased through my kitchen window and wall. As it moved through the structure of my apartment, an unbearably loud white noise rang out everywhere at once, violently cutting and restarting at random. The pain in my skull somehow intensified, and I felt blood dribble out my ears. The void moved at an agonizingly slow pace, every centimeter sending my nervous system further into overdrive, screaming at me to run. With it drawing closer, more of the abyss’ form revealed itself: emaciated, long fingers reached through my walls, unfathomably larger than the sliver of face I partially saw before. Finally, the terror overrode my body’s shutdown, and I scrambled away towards my apartment door.

I moved much faster now, letting adrenaline take over to shut out the woozy feeling in my body and pain in my head from the blinding light and grating noise. I pushed through suspended particles in the air that began to move up and down, in a raspy rhythm, like the room itself let go of its breath and began to breathe in labor alongside me. Reaching the entrance on the opposite side of my apartment, feet dodging the crystal spikes ever growing outward, I ripped the chain latch off the door. Not daring to look behind me, but feeling the void’s increasingly icy stare burn into my back as it made its slow approach, I turned the knob, stepped back, and flung the door open towards myself.

In an instant, I took in the great oily maw that now found itself beyond the threshold. I should’ve been looking out across a musty hallway at my neighbor’s door across from mine.  Instead, I faced an endless cavern full of the iridescent shine, like a flash-bang to my eyes. Dotted across the open view were shredded and misaligned pieces of my apartment building, suspended in the air and seemingly all following their own idea of gravity. Some sideways, upside down, stretched, compressed, and all throbbing with the motions of the particles that hung in the air.

The vertigo became all-consuming, and my legs buckled. I fell backwards into my apartment, clattering on the crystalline floor as pain shot through my body on collision. Stunned for a brief moment, I sat back up and faced my kitchen. More of the entity was visible now, its undulating eyes halfway through my window intersecting my now crystalline plants. In front of it, a massive hand that couldn’t fit in the confines of the room moved towards me at a glacial pace, clipping through my walls and ceiling. An outstretched, oversized finger led in front, reaching for me.

I didn’t know what else to do, except turn back to my coping mechanism. It’s funny how your brain tries to come to terms with a reality that breaks your mind. I made my way as fast as I could back to my closet, hugging the wall to keep as far away from the finger as possible, and shut myself inside. Somehow, it was still dark; shielded from the invasive light just outside the door. The white noise tore at my ears as I folded myself back inside the box, pain searing through my entire body. Shutting the flaps and sealing myself back inside, I squeezed my eyes shut and pressed my face into my knees, begging for my own life back for the first time in years.

I waited there, suspended in horror, for god knows how long. Unable to process a single thought outside of the white noise driving into my skull, I eventually spaced out. At some point, I realized the noise and pain were gone; replaced with the familiar muffled sounds of the city beyond my apartment. I don’t know if I fell asleep and woke back up – I don’t know how I could’ve – or I “woke up”, or reality simply snapped back into place. But as soon as I was conscious of my body feeling normal again, no pressure or nausea, I finally dared to open my eyes. Emerging from the box one more time into my closet, much more slowly and cautiously this time, I opened the door back to my apartment. It was normal.

It really was just a nightmare after all. A disturbingly real-feeling one, but just a nightmare. After blankly staring around my mundane apartment for a few minutes, catching my breath and returning back to reality, I wondered how long I was knocked out, and how badly I screwed over my sleep schedule this time. I reached for my pocket, where I’m sure I had my phone when I took my box nap, only to feel it missing.

An awful thought tugged at my mind, still rattled by the dream. I’m pretty sure, when I fell backwards from the sight of the broken reality beyond my apartment door in the iridescent world, I felt something slip out of my pocket. That detail feels too real, too specific and coherent for a dream. It barely registered to me at the time, in my focus on escape, but now it’s all I can think about. That, and one other thing.

After exhausting myself tearing my home apart, searching for the phone I know I had before I got in the box, I finally tried an idea I dreaded. I raised my hands, slowly feeling up my neck towards my ears. As my fingers ran over my skin, I felt streams of dried blood coming from either ear. It can only mean one of two things: that was not a dream, and somehow I stepped out of my reality momentarily, possibly catching the attention of the void itself, and leaving my phone there. Or, something is terribly wrong with my health while my mind conjures up insane fever dreams to make sense of it.

Unfortunately, I don’t think it was a dream. I’ve been sitting here in my apartment in a haze since I confirmed the blood running from my ears. All the while, a feeling of being watched grows in the back of my mind. I’m scared to tell anyone in my building, this would come off as insane – and maybe it is. I don’t need to subject my neighbors to that. I can’t use my phone to call for help, or find my way around my new city I’ve barely put in the time to memorize, rarely leaving my apartment these days. I’m dead broke, don’t have anyone left in my life to ask for help, and can’t possibly afford a new phone on my own.

So here I am, writing to you all on my work computer a little past midnight. What do I do? I went to check my phone’s location on the Find My iPhone app, and it shows it slowly moving from my apartment door to the box in my closet. Is that thing coming for me no matter what I do? I’m trying to psyche myself up to re-enter the box, and see if it takes me back there. Maybe I can try to grab my phone, get in and out, and call for help. Or at least a mental evaluation. None of this is making sense.