Mind (Complete five-hundred pages)

Day 9 Saturday, September 9, 2017

I trudged through the water to the living room. No noise. Not a heartbeat.

I went to check the girl's room. Listened close. Cracked open her door. Nothing. She was sound asleep in the dark when I heard her shuffle and rise up. "What is it?" She said. I had woken her. I was surprised she could be so lifeless when the whole house was knee deep in water. Then again the bed top was high and dry. I said nothing and stepped away.

I listened to hear for a stranger. A trespasser. A man who should have been dead in a coffin or alive and still on Earth. I checked the kitchen. I checked the living room. My room. The bathrooms. Even stepped out to the farmhouse attached around back where all the crops laid. Still no movement. No undead corpse with a gun.

I walked back to the living room, and stopped. I was lost in thought. I questioned myself. My surroundings. This place. I didn't know where I was anymore. I couldn't tell the difference between a minute and an hour ago. Time seemed to melt upon itself like a snake bent up in knots. I looked up as though to envision the stars above. Then I remembered the stars reflected in the watery ground outside. Were the stars up or were they down? Was I on Earth or on Mars? Was there a girl here or was I alone? I couldn't trust myself. I couldn't trust my own mind. I couldn't feel my own body anymore as my mind lifted me out of it, circling around like a ghost, traversing the universe in search of where and when I truly existed. Where could I be? When was I? No one could help me. My mind was a maze of infinite space.

My search cut short as I heard tha creak of the guestroom door. My mental work cut as I saw the lights turn on. I was looking dow. My body at the center of he flooded living room. My felegs under the surface of the clear water.

"Why aren't you sleeping?" She asked.

I looked at the water for sometime. I felt the urge to hide my confusion. I said something else that was the least of my worries. Something that really wasn't on my mind. I didn't want to pledge my insanity. She was a stranger. She couldn't help me. So I just said, still staring down, chin in hand, "I don't know what I'm going to do about this water."

There was silence. I could sense her thinking. Then she said it. Something that truly horrified me. With no remorse, quite blankly, she said, "What water?"

My eyes shut hard. I knew it. I wasn't when and where I thought I was. I was scared. Horrified. But then I thought to myself another possiblity. My eyes turned. My face lifted. I looked to her. That girl with the beautiful face. So innocent looking. But now I had terror in me. Maybe I was wrong to distrust myself. I'd known myself longer than I'd known anyone. I studied her body, tried to decipher the microexpressions of her face, tried to reel in the light of her eyes and find the truth in them. I couldn't find anything. And so I suspected. . . that she was lying.

I said, "You can't see this water? All this water all around us?"

She looks. Almost smiles but it breaks out of serious concern. Possibly feigned. "What water?" She repeated.

I just stared at her. Real hard. I then dipped down as demonstation and swirled my hand around the rippling surface. "You don't see this? You don't feel this?"

"What are you doing?" She said.

I considered splashing her endlessly until she drank it. See if she got wet. Splash her until she drowned in her lies. But no. I suspected this for a long time. Ever since the day I landed here and started digging graves, I questioned my reality. If I splashed her and she flinched or got wet, that wouldn't prove she was a lyer. That only prove that she was as real as the water I was splashing her with. If I were hallucinating with one, then I was hallucinating the other. And I didn't want to fight her. Real or not. She was my only companion.