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Your name is John Egbert and your father’s cakes make you sad.
You’re not sure why, or when it started. You remember perfectly well that when you were younger you’d get terribly excited every time he got into one of his baking frenzies. He’d let you help, if you asked. At first, he put you on mixing duty, first with a whisk, then with an electric mixer. When you were a little older he started teaching you how to frost and decorate the confections. The first time you ever frosted a cake all on your own, it looked unapologetically terrible. But he was so, so proud of you.
During that time, even when it was your birthday and you were sick to death of cake by noon, you never disliked it. Even when you got old enough to think baking any more than one cake for a single holiday was kind of dumb, it didn’t come even close to making you sad.
Though the tears with the first bite don’t set in until your thirteenth birthday, it’s not the first time you’ve felt this strange.
When you were six years old and just starting formal schooling, you thought you could fly.
You stood on top of the jungle gym, balanced on the very top rungs where not even the sixth graders were brave enough to climb, and you looked up at the sky. The wind coiled around you like an embrace as you stretched your arms out and leapt into its comforting folds.
You must have imagined how long you seemed to be kept afloat because it was clearly not a gentle landing when you woke up in the hospital with two missing teeth and a broken arm. Your father took you out of elementary school, you suppose he assumed it wasn’t any good for you. You went back the next year, to a different place with a different jungle gym. It was alright. It wasn’t like the school was what had made you think you could leap off of high places and land in one piece anyway.
No, that was just you.
When you were eleven or twelve you started having strange dreams. Each one started out the same- you were sitting at your computer late at night, and started messaging your friends. turntechGodhead. tentacleTherapist. gardenGnostic. You’d never even seen their faces but you were closer to them than to anyone else you’d ever met, even your dad. Talking to TG, TT, GG, you laughed so hard your stomach hurt.
When you woke after a dream like this, you were lying in your bed with tears on your cheeks that you didn’t remember crying. Your computer was turned off and there were no records of chat logs from the previous night. No chums in your chumroll with those handles. You looked them up on pesterchum itself, but apparently those chumhandles didn’t even exist.
You told your dad about it once. He looked at you strangely and asked if you were alright.
The second you wake up on your thirteenth birthday, something feels wrong but you don’t know what. Nothing is out of place save for the presents your dad has left on your side table overnight, but that shouldn’t feel wrong, should it? You go through the motions of opening the packages and eating far too much cake far too early in the morning, avoiding your dad in one of his baking frenzies. On about the third slice of cake you realize you’re crying, and at that same moment you also realize that you feel- well, that you know- that there is something missing, something horribly, undeniably missing, like a hole in your gut.
You slip outside to check the mail even though you’re not sure why. Bills and a menswear catalog. You leave the papers in the mailbox. What did you expect? Presents? Cards? If there’s one thing you can say about yourself, it’s that you, John Egbert, don’t have anyone to send you cards or presents. It’s not that you’re hated or bullied or anything. You’re not even disliked. People like you, you’re sure they do, they think you’re funny- you have a group you sit with at lunch who laugh at your jokes- but they all have others. You’re just an acquaintance, a background character, not all that important to anyone. You don’t blame them, really. You know better than anyone that your humor is just at surface level.
Sometimes you just
feel
so
empty
and you can’t find any reasoning as to why. You find yourself staring into space and looking solemn while one of your supposed friends repeats your name ten times, your mind filling with images that seem to have come from nowhere. People you’ve never met. Red and green and purple, the same colors from your dreams of nonexistent internet friends, swirling through eyes and fingers and grins.
You come across the symptoms of depression online and wonder if you have something like that. Some of the stuff- apathy, feeling empty, messed up eating and sleeping patterns, seem to be spot-on, but none of the rest fits. Depressed people don’t have anything extra to fill the void, no imaginary friends with whole lives behind them. Honestly, it’s not even that you’re apathetic. You’re just sometimes- always- somewhere else.
Somewhere else is lost in ruby eyes and drifting through the air and, about a year after you turn thirteen, people with grey skin and orange horns and eyes like an animal’s.
You just don’t know how you feel about any of this. You don’t know how you should feel.
As high school passes you buy, you have less and less interaction with your peers. You used to be super into magic tricks and pranks and practical jokes but now it just feels like you’re drifting. Once in a while, someone stops you with a hey John tell me a joke and sometimes you do and sometimes you stare listlessly until they get uncomfortable and hurry away. Around the beginning of senior year everyone seems to be talking about college and what colleges are you thinking about John? And even your dad asks even though he does his best not to pressure you but after the fifth or sixth I don’t know and the tenth I haven’t decided or I haven’t given it much thought you start crying one day and whisper that you don’t know if you can do it.
You hate yourself because on a different day this might have been the thing you dreaded saying the most and in hindsight you don’t even think you really mean it. It’s not that you don’t want to go to college, you just don’t feel like you would survive the experience.
Your dad takes the words as an I just don’t think it’s really my thing and he’s kind and accepting and understanding as always like you knew he would be. It’s not him you’re worried about, he’s never anything but caring. It’s you.
You’ve been having these periods of depersonalization, you think, but it’s strange. It’s as if it’s the opposite of depersonalization- suddenly, you’re acting like a normal person, laughing and joking, but somewhere in your mind you’re terrified because you obviously don’t have control over these actions and you don’t know what’s going on. You’re like some alternate version of yourself who’s happier and brighter and doesn’t wake up crying from a dream because you had to kiss a friend’s corpse to bring her back to life and you can still feel her cold lips and her blood on your skin.
She’s one of the friends whom you’ve never met.
You somehow manage to graduate high school though when you get your diploma you can’t remember anything about how your grades were doing from one day to the next and while all of your supposed friends prepare for their brilliant, varied lives ahead you get a job working at the bookstore.
You get fired after a month because it’s been taking more and more repetitions of a customer’s “excuse me” before you’re jolted out of your book. You weren’t reading it, you were staring at its pages blankly and wondering if it’s possible to fall in love with someone who only exists in your dreams.
You get another job as an usher at the movie theater and try your utmost to concentrate and you’re lucky that a lot of the time the work is sitting alone in the lobby or, on a quieter day, in the back of a theater waiting for the film to end so you can clean up but your father still insists you see a therapist because he’s worried about you, John, you haven’t been yourself.
He doesn’t say for how long you haven’t been yourself, and you’re not sure he knows. You’re not sure you know, either. You’re not even sure who “yourself” is, or ever was.
Was is will be. You’ve been getting your tenses mixed up and you think it’s got something to do with the fact that you feel like you’re living in the wrong alternate timeline.
It’s about a year before you finally move out. You could keep living with your dad, you know that, and part of you is worried about what might happen to you living on your own but you just feel like a burden otherwise. Your dad does so much already, he shouldn’t have to care for you for the rest of your sorry life when really, no matter what he says on the contrary, he only signed on for eighteen years of this. Plus, you go to see a therapist every week now like he wanted and you’re taking medication that’s supposed to help you. So that means everything’s okay, right?
Except for the words depersonalization and dissociative disorder keep coming up and the thing is, though it makes sense based on everything you know about what’s wrong with you, it doesn’t really fit at all. The idea that something legitimately medical is causing all of your problems doesn’t seem real to you, maybe because a lot of these aforementioned problems are, by definition, not real.
You miss people who don’t exist.
One weekend you’re out of town to go to a co-worker’s wedding and you’re wandering the cramped streets when you notice a small library that seems to have been swamped with people. ‘Famed author R. Lalonde signing today’ read the signs out front and though you’re sure you’ve never heard of R. Lalonde something draws you closer- maybe it’s the illustrations of grey-skinned people with candy-corn horns on some of the posters, or the purple flourishing lettering of the author’s name that bring to mind eyes and hair and a brightly-colored garment that somehow manages to be elegant despite the fact that it’s orange pajamas.
You push your way in somehow, through the crush of adoring fans, but as soon as you catch a glimpse of the author’s face through the crowd something turns in your stomach and you have to scramble out of the library again to vomit in the street.
She made eye contact with you for a moment and the eyes and hair are all too real and all too wrong and from the purple moon choker around her neck you could swear you’d seen her before.
More than seen. Known, touched, loved. As much as you loved the rest of the dearest friends from your dreams, and the look of fleeting panic and sudden pain in her eyes didn’t help.
For a while after that unfortunate episode, everything seems okay. Well, more okay than it could have been. More okay than it has been, sometimes. You push R. Lalonde out of your thoughts because all she does is make you nauseous and sad and you go through all the motions- work, therapy, caring for yourself and all the smaller grueling tasks that that entails. You feel that you’ve gotten remarkably good at acting like a real person again- casual banter with people at work, even some jokes. Apparently you’re doing even better than you thought since some of your co-workers have encouraged you to try out standup comedy, and every time they mention it you get a happy little flutter in your chest. Yeah, that was something you’d wanted to do when you were a kid. Everything’s sucked for so long but you’re turning it around. Maybe your therapist is right, maybe this is a medical problem, maybe
Every time you let yourself think that there’s an underlying feeling of dread that has more than a little to do with the fact that the dreams keep coming and sometimes they’re the worst yet.
But one day you wake up from a particularly mild one and actually feel like yourself again, not a version unstuck from reality. You get dressed and smile at yourself in the mirror as you’re adjusting your silly bow tie and you think once again that maybe you can turn this all around.
And you do.
It’s at an outing with some of your co-workers who you’re actually becoming kind of close with even though half of them are still in high school with big dreams that it all comes crashing down around you because there’s a girl who looks just like the one with the green text from your dreams except for this girl is smiling and laughing and lightly punching the shoulders of the people she’s with and the girl you know has been possessed and then crushed to death.
That was chronicled in sharp detail by one of the more recent nightmares that you don’t want to think about.
Suddenly before you know it you’re sliding out of the diner booth and walking over to the girl whose name should be Jade in your eyes and that’s what’s on your lips as you grab her arm and hey what the hell and don’t touch my girlfriend you creep how old even are you and the boy uttering those acid-filled words should be Dave except his skin and hair are too dark and he’s pulling the girl away from you and you think you’re apologizing but you’re not sure and one of your friends comes to ask you what you’re doing do you know them and you murmur another apology and something about the girl looking like someone you used to know.
Your friends are planning to go to the park after dinner but you make some excuse to walk home instead, going around the block the long way so you don’t have to walk with them. You don’t take the bus even though you could because you’re hoping the cold air will clear your head and keep you feeling like you from this universe and not some other one where you’ve died more times, because you can feel that earlier clarity quickly slipping away.
You walk right by your apartment and keep going for two blocks before you realize what’s happened enough to turn back. When you finally get inside you drink a glass of ice water and take your pills and go straight to sleep because oh god maybe if you do what you’re supposed to you’ll feel better in the morning.
In your dream you can feel your friends’ hands on your skin and it’s you and them against the world, against the game (whatever that means) like always but this dream feels different seems different is different. The others felt like memories from another life, this just feels like a dream, like what normal kids with normal friends should have except they can wake up and hold their friends’ hands for real this time. For one thing, the boy with the red eyes and pale face is there. Dave. After a while, after some transition you don’t remember, it’s just the two of you. And you don’t think you ever actually met him face-to-face in the continuous narrative your dreams usually follow. For another thing, the place you’re in seems far too mundane- a park near your father’s house where you used to play as a child.
It’s not flying or fighting for your lives in this park where you’d certainly take someone you loved, it’s just the two of you sitting on the swings, hands easily intertwined, talking and laughing about things you know you won’t remember later when you wake up but you will remember his lips on yours and the exact temperature of his skin and you’re waking up in the dark shivering and crying because you’re never going to see him like that like you want like you wish because he isn’t real and oh god
You finish shaking and maybe, hopefully a walk will clear your head so you pull on a red hoodie that you can pretend is borrowed and jeans you think are clean and check the clock on your phone before you leave. 4:13 am. You don’t have to be at work until noon, taking a walk and coming back for a few extra hours of sleep should be fine, doable, not advisable but is anything you do, really?
You walk with your head down, your senses muffled by the hoodie and the blackness and you aren’t scared. On a different day, maybe even a few hours earlier you would have been jumpy at delusions of criminals and shadowy imps and dog people less based in reality but you feel weirdly grounded despite the residual painful thrill that the dream gave you.
You don’t feel like yourself but you don’t feel like that listless washed-out persona you usually wear either- you feel like you, but not you. You, but with a few more layers. You from your dreams, but not your dreamself. Somehow, that word has a different connotation and you’re not sure what it is. You could be a hero on this bridge so far above turbulent, icy waters at 4am.
You realize standing there as you comprehend that you’ve just had that thought that you must have been walking much longer than you noticed- the bridge is nearly 4 miles from your apartment but you don’t mind. It’s still dark so it must still be early and something about the wind whipping through your fingers and hair is making you feel invincible. You take off your glasses and drop them somewhere, not caring in this moment, and you lean out slightly over the railing and close your eyes, letting the gusts brush over your eyelids. You’ve stepped up onto the railing without realizing and it holds up your torso too so you almost feel like you’re floating, like you could in your dreams in those stupid blue pajamas that you think signify something close to superpowers.
And you stand there, eyes still closed, arms outstretched to let the wind tell you how to feel. A smile plays across your face but your expression doesn’t matter in the dark because nothing does except for the fact that you could almost imagine your friends floating beside you, ready to take on the final boss of whatever game you’re playing or, alternatively, to lift you gently down so you can huddle together and grieve the end of the world. For a moment it’s as if you really do have the powers you think, some day in some time, you were meant to, and you’re backlit by the streetlamps illuminating the bridge as if you’re the one giving off all the light.
Finally, you open your eyes and for a moment your thoughts are alive and all of your friends are there. Dave is holding one of your hands, Jade holding the other as Rose clasps onto her extending the chain that you wish with all your heart you could be a link in. Someone is laughing and you think it might be you.
You, laughing hysterically with tears in your eyes as you stand on the railing of the barren bridge and let the wind whip at you.
That’s what the security camera footage will show when your Dad calmly asks to see it but as far ad you’re concerned, the four of you are there and real and so alive like nothing less than young gods, and together you fly.