Your dead alarm clock sits on your bedside table for a week.
It looks good with that faint coat of dust.
Eventually, you admit to yourself that yes, you do need an alarm just like everyone else, and that you've gotten too good at muting your phone's ringer. All three of them.
Four days later, the box arrives at your front door, shipped from the sterile depths of some God-knows-where Amazon warehouse. You slice open the packing tape with your folding tape and withdraw your prize:
A classic analog alarm clock. Silver and cool. With the hammer and bells and everything.
You smile to yourself as you wind it up.
No more blue LEDs.
0-0-0-0-0-0
'The recovery process is sometimes best thought of as a management process.'
You throw the book across the room.
0-0-0-0-0-0
It's a matter of reinforcement, now. You try to find joy—well, not joy, that's excessive, how about just contentment—in the most banal of things. Clipping your nails (the damn things grow too fast). Brushing your teeth (and flossing too, when you feel like cutting up your gums). The most inane of the mundane.
Because that way, if you ever feel that urge to REGRESS—you can bargain with yourself, say that you'll lose all those moments. All those fucking stupid pointless bullshit moments you value anyway.
You haven't REGRESSED, so you like to think it works.
0-0-0-0-0-0
After too many months, you try your hand at masturbating again.
It feels like labor.
But you load up what used to be your usual free porn sites, sit down, endure the buffering, and work at yourself.
You don't like the way you smell. You're not sure why. You keep washing your hands. You should get stronger soap.
Three times a day. Sometimes four. Sometimes five. Sometimes— no, well, not really. Five and a half.
... It feels distant. Your teeth grind, your lungs constrict, you get a dull headache, but there's no... point. Just muscles and nerves, dutifully responding to fingers. Blood flowing out of habit.
You flick through the genres. Hardcore. Bondage. S&M. Roleplay. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. You feel like a zoologist watching mammals fuck without finesse.
... You see a panel for alt lesbian videos. Your throat tightens. You close the tab.
0-0-0-0-0-0
You try videogames again.
But something about being able to save and load and restart makes you… ill at ease.
So you stop.
0-0-0-0-0-0
November 13th, 2013. You stopped at exactly four red lights. Each light was red for a multiple of seven; fourteen seconds the first time, twenty one seconds the second time, twenty eight seconds the third time, thirty five seconds the fourth time.
November 14th, 2013. You encountered three pair of shoes corresponding to the primary colors. Red shoes. Green shoes. Yellow shoes. You idly wondered why you stare at the ground so much. There isn't much to see.
November 15th, 2013. You observed five different birds shit on five different cars, but all on the relatively same part of the car. Upper left side of the hood.
November—
Nov—
It is November 20th, and you are struggling.
You can remember every single day since that day in vivid, uncomfortable detail. You could write a best-fucking-seller about what you did last Saturday, and you didn't do jack shit last Saturday. When you look at anything you've seen before your brain overlays what it looked like yesterday, the day before, the day before that, the week before. Everything is—you are walking through a kaleidoscope of everything being exactly the same.
0-0-0-0-0-0
You only have two eyes.
You keep telling yourself that.
0-0-0-0-0-0
The same salinity.
The same pH.
Sodium chloride.
You can feel it. Feel it. Fifty one times a minute you feel it.
And it feels you.
0-0-0-0-0-0
Whenever you hear a siren near your home, you tense.
You shouldn't. There's no need.
But you do.
0-0-0-0-0-0
You hold your folding knife in front of your face, studying the worn plastic grip.
This is fine. This is fine.
You flick it open. You gently press the point of the blade into the web between forefinger and thumb, where the skin is taut and thin.
You watch a tiny nebula of red emerge, just for a moment, and settle back into the knitwork of your skin.
You take a slow breath.
That's right. Take it easy. You still bleed forward.
0-0-0-0-0-0
The migraines. The Goddamn migraines.
They move... downward. At an angle. Starting from the front, moving to the back on a sharp grade.
0-0-0-0-0-0
You sit on your bed, kicking your heels.
She picks up. "Uh— hello?"
"Sarah," you say.
"Oh— hey." You hear rustling on her end. "What is it? Are you okay?"
"Yeah. I just, uh, wanted to remind you that you have an early shift this morning."
Silence.
"I didn't— you know. I just had a feeling. I was already up, and I had a feeling."
"Okay," she says, and you know that if she was right there her eyes would be drilling right through you.
0-0-0-0-0-0
It's cold.
You don't feel it. You just know: it's cold.
You sit in the ash, cross-legged, hands clawed rigid against your knees. On the horizon, there is a city... somewhere. Without the usual massive pillar of smoke, it's hard to tell.
And, of course, there sits the dog.
"You're still here," you utter. "And I'm still here."
It looks at you.
"So there's still something we need to do." We. When you say we, you say it like you're saying I. Hard and closed and clipped.
And then you feel the coldness; tiny bites making clean neat shallow holes in your skin and revealing the glistening white-red-white dermis underneath, sensitive and sore and exposed.
You know this feeling.
You lift you head up to a still, silent sky.
Rain.
0-0-0-0-0-0
The day you brutalized Kyle in his own home, the day you lowered yourself to less than an animal, you thought something had changed in you.
No, you hadn't changed.
The world changed. You simply noticed.
0-0-0-0-0-0
Sarah runs her nails over your scalp. It tingles. You shiver.
You remember reading something— something— about the symbolic nature of haircuts and the reclamation of control in one of your PTSD books. You think. Sarah's fingers just make you want to close your eyes.
"Lean back a little," she says.
You lean back into her touch, closing you eyes. Sarah wraps your hair between her fingers, tugging just a bit. And then— snip.
Snip.
Snipsnipsnip.
"Uh, maybe you should slow down back there," you say, trying to roll your eyes back a little farther into your head. Not much success, there.
"Relax." She scritches you behind the ear, as if you were some great hairless simian dog.
"Can I have a mirror?"
Snip. "Not yet."
"… You've done this before, right?"
"Oh, sure. I had to give Caleb a few haircuts. He always thought I did a good job."
You try to sigh, but end up sputtering with a mouthful of trimmings. Sarah mercifully pulls the scissors away from your ear before she succumbs to laughter.
0-0-0-0-0-0
She asks if you want to keep any of your locks of hair. As a memento.
You say no, that's stupid.
She keeps one for you anyway. Says you'll want it eventually.
You doubt it.
0-0-0-0-0-0
You sit outside Kurt's house for hours.
You haven't been in there for... ever since... ever since that. But now is the time.
You went back to Damien's house and went through everything again—carefully removing any trace of yourself. It was easy, somehow. The house you had considered your second home, in a way, a house you had your own fucking front door key for. But now it was an alien land. Terra incognita. You turned the lights on in different ways, trying to recreate how the rooms were supposed to look. But... no.
But Kurt's house... still looks like home. And that makes it so much worse.
0-0-0-0-0-0
Your eyes travel over the paper. Your sclerae must be black from sucking up the ink.
Sleepwalking. You've been sleepwalking ever since it started and they never told you.
Fuck.
"Fuck," you hiss through gritted teeth.
You flip through the pages. Your fingers trace over Kurt's flowing, looping script— "you write like a girl in gradeschool," you'd say—and then Damien's harsher, more cutting scrawl. It's disorganized.
Keep away from stairs.
Turns on faucets, shower, fills bathtub.
Stands under fire alarm. Looks at fire alarm.
Took fire extinguisher off the rack. Couldn't get it to work, thank God.
Keeps opening windows. Just stands in front of them.
Something about a city. Downtown?
City? Landmarks?
And then one page... with only four fevered words, massive and underlined.
WHAT IS THE DOG?
0-0-0-0-0-0
"Wait, wait."
"What?"
"Let the water cool a bit before you pour it."
You squint at Sarah.
"Tannins react with the water at one hundred seventy—"
"I can't believe you memorize these things." You set your kettle back down on the stove, and sit with her at the counter. Sarah pulls at your hair a bit, straightening a few loose strands.
"Patience is a virtue," she says, lifting a finger sagely.
"But I want the tea now."
"Who, you?" She's looking through your drawers, now. You point to the one with the cooking thermometers.
"I'd rather get it over with."
She pats you on the back, and reaches over to hit a few buttons on your watch. Setting the timer, specifically.
"Two minute steep," she says to your incredulous expression.
0-0-0-0-0-0
Sarah is at work.
Cass is at home. Aaron is with her. He sent you a text saying "OCCUPIED" with a picture of Cass' apartment's doorknob, which translates to "hey we're having sex, please don't intrude, really, not that we don't like you but we're not into that kind of thing."
You appreciate the gesture.
Now you just need to find something to do.
So you sit on the floor of your living room for a while.
That's good too.
0-0-0-0-0-0
You've never been one of those types to 'hate' cities, the same way people 'hate' spiders or snakes. But having premonitions of a city getting annihilated-by-fire over and over and over and over again is enough to make anyone wary of sidewalks and stoplights.
So you take up hiking.
Kind of.
It's enough. It keeps you... preoccupied. Wandering between the trees and shrubs. Getting a bit sweaty. Roughing up your hands and knees and elbows. Forgetting.
You sit down, look at the dirt beneath your muddied boots.
When you look back up, you have to blink, because a cloud must have passed over—
You blink again. Squint. No cloud passed over the sun because there's no sun, and an audience of stellar eyes looks down upon you.
... Did you fall asleep?
0-0-0-0-0-0
If Aaron ever noticed that you tend to avoid headshots in Call of Duty, he doesn't mention it.
Problem is that Aaron notices a lot. But he doesn't say anything.
0-0-0-0-0-0
It's easier to sleep at Sarah and Cass' apartment, somehow.
Maybe it's the alcohol, or the fatigue of watching bizarre 80's movies and constantly running commentary.
Or maybe it's just knowing you're not alone when your eyes finally close.
0-0-0-0-0-0
Your home looks presentable, now. Not HGTV or anything, but whatever.
No more clothes strewn about or dishes in the sink or books scattered across tables.
… You still keep it rather dark, though. Maybe one light or two.
Does it smell weird, though? You can't tell. Maybe you should open some more windows.
0-0-0-0-0-0
You lay your head on the bar counter. It's probably crawling with every STD ever, but... it's cool against your cheek.
"I got it," you say.
"You always get it," Aaron complains.
You roll onto your ear and lock onto him with one swimming eye. "I said I got it."
"You always pay. Like, the last three times, man." He looks... something. "I mean, shit, I must owe you a hundred by now."
You still.
0-0-0-0-0-0
There's a running joke.
Whenever you four are all at a restaurant, you're always the last to decide. Always. Because you always have to one-up what everyone else gets.
You let them believe that. If you tell them you struggle to read because the letters crawl like insects across the menu, well, they wouldn't respond well.
But out of your periphery you see Sarah watching as your eyes dart back and forth, struggling to catch the living ink.
0-0-0-0-0-0
You watch the ash fall through your fingers.
It... Feels a little bit like skin, somehow.
0-0-0-0-0-0
The first time you accidently come across a news story about Arcadia Bay, you slam Alt-F4 so hard you almost fling your keyboard off your desk.
Come on.
Look.
So you look.
… Just an update about the success of the cleanup, reconstruction. Ordinary post-disaster reporting. Nothing else. Nothing.
… You avoid local news sites, for a while.
0-0-0-0-0-0
Aaron isn't drunk.
He looks it, sure, but he isn't.
He reaches for his keys, but he ends up groping at the back of your hand.
"The fuck, man?"
"Crash here."
"Man, 'm fine. I can drive."
"I know you can drive. But the bars just closed thirty minutes ago and the roads are full of assholes that can't drive."
Aaron tries to stare you down. And, you know, the funny thing is—he probably could, if he didn't smell like hops.
"Fine," he grumbles.
The next morning there's live coverage on a five-car pileup on the highway. No survivors.
Aaron can't seem to make eye contact with you.
0-0-0-0-0-0
"What time is it?"
"You have a clock on your phone."
"You have a watch."
You roll your eyes. "Killin' me, Aaron."
0-0-0-0-0-0
"What time is it?"
Cass looks over. "You have an appointment or something?"
"Well, no, I just—"
"Because this is the third time you've asked in the past fifteen minutes."
Oh.
0-0-0-0-0-0
Looking at you looking at it looking at you looking at it.
It doesn't blink. Neither do you.
"My eyes are open," you utter. But you can't know if you're seeing.
0-0-0-0-0-0
When you were a young kid, you didn't like time.
Didn't fit together just right. So you made your own time.
A hundred seconds to a minute. A hundred minutes to an hour. A hundred hours to a day. A hundred days to a month. A hundred months to a year.
A perfect sequence of ones and zeroes. Nothing out of place.
You would smirk to yourself when people talked about being "out of time," because—little did they know—you had given birth to your own.
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Sixty seconds to one minute.
Sixty minutes to one hour.
Just... start there. Start small. Build back up.
0-0-0-0-0-0
There was a plan, of course. One you hid from Damien and Kurt, not well enough that they didn't suspect.
Hit your head really hard. Just enough for a hairline crack, if not less. Go to the hospital. Get x-rays, an MRI. See if anything is unusual with your brain.
But what if they find nothing? Or, more worryingly... what if they find something? Who will know? Would someone recognize your brain? Is it... shaped differently, now?
... What if hitting it that hard made it go away?
Or made it worse?
You held a power drill to your temple, once. In the beginning. Staring in the mirror, tears starting to sting your eyes.
You couldn't do it then, when you were brave.
You definitely can't do it now.
0-0-0-0-0-0
Your phone vibrates.
You blink, rub at your eyes, look at the number onscreen. Don't recognize it.
What the hell. You feel daring today. "Hello?"
"Hey—it's, uh, it's me. Ellen."
Damien's sister.
You feel something in you extinguish.