The Intrusion

Thirty-Seven

(Friday, March 23, 2018)

[Jordan]

The mirror.

It's in the mirror.

I stand in my living room, staring myself down. The sun just set, and I haven't slept in days. I've had brief moments where I've nodded off, but that's it. Every time I nod off, the shadow comes.

And then I shake myself, and I wake up.

I thought the sleep deprivation I experienced from all-nighters in college was bad, but this is something new. What I'm experiencing now has a mind of its own. What I'm experiencing now isn't natural. I'm losing it.

Deep black-and-blue bags hang under my eyes like I've been punched in the face. Red capillaries run like spiderwebs from my irises to the extents of my eyelids.

I'm so tired. So, so, tired.

I need to sleep. I need to. It's all I want. All I think about is sleep.

But I can't sleep.

Have you ever gotten to that point where you are so tired that the only thing you can think about is how much you want to sleep, but you are thinking about it so hard that just the thought of sleep itself keeps you awake?

It's self-inflicted torture.

I'm smiling at myself in the mirror.

I'm giggling.

Everything is funny, and everything is horrifying. It's funny how horrifying everything is, and it's horrifying how funny everything is.

I touch the mirror, making contact with my own hand.

There's only a quarter inch of glass between me and myself. I could reach through it. I tap on the glass with my fingertip, another smile creeping across my face. The grin reaches my eyes, and I cry tears of frustration and ecstasy and terror all at once.

There is something behind the mirror. I know it. There is something beyond that glass that I just can't see because my mind's replaced it with something that makes sense, blocking my vision. Blocking the truth. I can't see what's really there.

I tap on the glass again—knock-knock-knock—and a smile so broad that I can see the hemispheres of my cheeks spreads across my face.

And then something shatters.

Not the glass, not the mirror. Something in my mind—some fracture in the fabric of my head—of my soul. The mirror undulates and melts. I've been turned upside-down and my equilibrium is off. I picture that little green bubble in the tube of my father's level covered in sawdust that we used when we built that treehouse in my backyard when I was six. The bubble drifts from the center all the way to one side, crashing into the end of the cylinder like the gel in a lava lamp. It bursts, and the entire chamber floods with turbulence.

It takes everything in me not to fall when gravity itself has given up and decided it doesn't care which way it pulls anymore.

I'm tumbling.

I'm tumbling and falling. I look in the mirror again.

Everything is different.

It's still my apartment. The layout is still the same. All the furniture is in the same place, but something is wrong.

It's the ash.

Everything is covered in this fine, grey ash.

And it's melting. Everything around me is melting.