A cold November evening. 2012
Amie wandered into the dusk woods alone.
She needed time to collect her thoughts. This was the fourth relationship that had ended in disaster.
They all had seemed like nice men. But give them some time and they would reveal their true identity: They were monsters.
Amie sat against her favorite tree. Its branches were long and low. It was the perfect climbing tree. She would sit on a low branch sometimes and enjoy the quiet, but today she didn't feel like climbing.
She rested her head against her knees. The tears came without warning.
It was like no one loved her, as if the whole world hated her.
Nothing seemed real anymore. Everything she had known to be truth was now a lie.
The world felt to her like a web of lies and she was caught right in the middle. She was the prey and everyone else was the spider.
Everyone seemed so happy with their lives. Everything was perfect for them.
It was like the world was a game. Everyone but her knew how to play.
Imagine being trapped in a game where you don't comprehend the rules, clumsily trying to understand how to make it through. But you can't, you can't progress.
That is how Amie felt. In fact life could be so closely compared to a game that she wondered if that's all it really was.
Amie suddenly felt tired. She needed to rest. Sleep was calling to her.
Her last thoughts before entering into the dark abyss of sleep were: If this is a game, I won't play.
. . .
Her dream was strange. She was floating across a landscape of rolling hills. In the distance were mountains. She needed to get to them for some reason but there were two glass walls blocking her path.
As she floated toward the first she reached out and pushed it. It ripped like fabric. Then she was at the next wall. She tried to rip through it but it was not as easy as the first.
Something wanted her to stay away. Flashes of purple flew across her vision. She refused to wake up. Then she was through. She was on the other side heading toward the mountains. She was free.
She had broken through barriers of reality and game.
. . .
Amie awoke in a room filled with thousands of beds. Each held a sleeping person, wires trailing from their heads into a massive glowing pillar in the center of the room.
A faint hum is all that is heard in the dark lonely room.
She sat up and ripped the wires off her head. She noticed a few empty beds. Only about one-hundred.
One-hundred out of over seven-billion people awake from the game of life, and she was one of them.
She could see herself back in the game somehow, back in the midnight woods of Mississippi.
She was just an empty template for a character now: Faceless, colorless, genderless. She wore a default uniform – a black tuxedo. She was unnaturally tall and very Slender.
But the game didn't matter anymore. Amie was now free.
She noticed a door leading to a bright world. What lay beyond?
She turned back to face the center pillar, the image of her game self still in her mind. She spoke to it.
"I was hated my whole life. I was pushed away and shown no mercy. Do the same. Haunt them. Show no mercy."
She turned and walked to the door. Once opened she stepped outside into a beautiful landscape. She took a breath of the fresh air of reality and smiled.
In the back of her mind, before the image faded, she saw herself in the game again. The image contorted and fuzzed up like a TV without a signal.
Long tentacles began to stretch out from behind the being, reaching out to grab something.
Then it was gone. The connection faded forever. Another monster born.