It’s all the same. Nothing has changed. Same routine, same life, same familiar faces, waking up at the same time, taking the same bus, going to the same school, and living my teenage years. But something is off, something feels like it’s missing, I don’t know what it was, but it’s clearly important, and I need to find it back.
March 6. A day I’ll never forget. It was just supposed to be a simple procedure; anesthesia, a bit of laughing gas, and I wouldn’t have to worry about wisdom teeth in my adulthood. But as soon as that mask covered my face, everything became slow, then words started to slur, then darkness consumed me.
It was terrifying; no sense of self, no visual input. Just cold, lonely, darkness. A shuddering feeling started crashing over my body. Was this the end? Is this what death is like? Then I heard words, “The meaning of the universe? The first and last spoken words of the universe?” Just then, I head my name …“Daniel”. It sounded like a calling, like something was urging me to awake. Then it morphed almost into a question, as if wondering if it was too late.
3:02 am. I woke up in a pile of my own cold sweat clinging to my skin like hands of the dammed trying to drag me into the underworld. “What’s happening?”, I asked myself. As I looked around my dark room, everything was still as the night; the only sound echoing in the room was the fan blowing upward and the rapid pants of my labored breathing.
I felt hollow. Like nothing was real. Like reality was wrapping around me and ready to drag me to that “place” again. Tears well up in my eyes. As I prayed desperately, even I doubted the existence of God, that he would bring mercy to my soul, to let me live another day in the same peace that I didn’t take for granted before.
I wanted to scream, to cry, make some sound to release the intense emotions ravaging my shattered psyche. For a moment, I was afraid that I would die that very second. I would be surrounded by cold, lifeless silence and whatever creature was causing this episode. But just as I started to lose hope, my mother came to me again, cradling me tenderly in her arms as if I was still her little baby; not a dumb teenager being hunted by whatever creature came along from that void. From that Hell.
I was numb the rest of that day, barely eating, barely talking.
Nothing brought me
joy as it did before. Nothing. Not those stupid YouTube videos or the games I like my entire life. Just nothing.
I felt terrible. I felt like I owe an apology to someone, to something. I didn’t know why or who, but I felt like this was a punishment for something I did; something that deserved me to have my own personal Hell. “Cogito Ergo Sum,” I think, therefore, I am. That phrase was the only thing that brought me back to reality, and calm the feeling like a prisoner on my own skin. In that moment, I did not feel like I was controlling the body of someone else entirely.
But the same question echoed through my mind. “Is there something beyond the void, or is everything we have learned fake?”
