Chapter Text
Welcome to White Space.
You have been living here for as long as you can remember.
The muscles in Mari’s neck loosen as she eases into the dull, monotone background of White Space. She has been living here for as long as she can remember, and that’s fine with her.
There’s no wall here, but it doesn’t matter. It’s a dream, anyways – dimensions aren’t the same here. She leans her head back against the cool, hard surface, her hair cascading down her shoulders, down her back, across the floor. She needs to cut it soon, but she knows she never will. She never has.
Slowly sliding into a slumping position, Mari blindly reaches out on the ground to support herself. Her fingers brush against tissues sprouting from her tissue box, and she grips onto it.
She hasn’t used them in a while. Back then, when the memories were still fresh in her mind, she used to go through them at a breakneck speed, grabbing handfuls at a time to quench her grief. Now, they sit in her room coated with a thick layer of dust, and tears and hygiene are the last things on her mind.
This isn’t her room, though, so the tissues are just as white and pristine as the rest of the space.
Although, there isn’t much in the space to begin with. It’s a spartan, sanitized version of her room in the waking world, which is already empty enough as it is. Here, apart from the tissue box, all that’s left is her laptop, a stack of her old textbooks, and of course, Mewo.
Her laptop doesn’t see nearly as much use as it used to. Before, she used to use it for school, all of her notes and schedules and assignments neatly organized in their respective folders. But after Mari stopped attending school, stopped prepping for college, they sat there, unchanged and bloated on her desktop, as if taunting her of the past life that will never come to be. One night, in a fit of madness, she deleted them all. Every last file, the work that had consumed her life for almost two years.
Now, all she uses it for is journalling. When she had refused to see a therapist, her mother forced her into it, as if writing words on a paper would somehow cure the pain. She had tried - if only for her mother’s sake - but the sound of pencil against paper was unbearable.
It reminded her of him.
Scritch-scratch. Scritch-scratch. Scritch-scritch-scritch. Scratch-scratch-scratch.
A small boy with his knees folded against his chest, tongue slightly sticking out of his mouth, thoughtfully doodled on the notebook resting on his thighs.
“What have you got there, Sunny?” Mari cheerfully asks, leaning down to see.
Mari’s little brother silently holds out the notebook for her to see. It’s a picture of their friends on a picnic – Kel, Hero, Aubrey, Basil, Mari and Sunny, all curled up on a blanket. For an eleven-year-old, the art is shockingly good. Just like her, he’s always been a prodigy.
It’s not obvious in his blank expression, and she doubts most would notice, but she does. He’s proud of his work and wants to show it off to her.
“Wow, this is fantastic, Sunny! You’re going to be a famous artist one day, I know it!”
Mari ruffles his hair affectionately, and he responds with a rare smile, one that’s reserved just for her.
She crawls to the thick, bulky laptop now, opening it and typing in her entry. Her entries weren’t long, nor were they therapeutic like her mother had hoped. They were simply concise summaries of her day.
Here, in White Space, it’s either one or the other:
Today, I spent time in White Space. Everything was okay.
Today, I visited my friends. Everything was okay.
She wants to see them again tonight.
Today, I visited my friends. Everything was okay.
The heat from the laptop warms her lap. It feels nice.
Finally, there’s the textbooks. She doesn’t know why they’re here. Everything else here in White Space calms her, soothes her, helps her forget about everything. But the textbooks are just like the schoolwork that’s - was – on her computer. A reminder of her failures, and a tangible representation of the rift that had driven them apart.
They sit in the corner of the space now, dark and jarring. Ironically, most of them are psychology textbooks. Introduction to Psychology. Psychology: Frontiers and Applications. Educating Exceptional Children.
She isn’t blind to what’s happening. She sees herself in the pages that she had once spent sleepless nights poring over. It’s why she’s refused any psychological evaluations and counselling. It’s textbook stuff, literally.
She already knows what to expect. Clinical depression. Post-traumatic stress disorder. Medication. Therapy. She knows it won’t help. Nothing will help. And that’s the way she likes it. She doesn’t care enough to try, and a part of her doesn’t want anything to help, doesn’t want to risk forgetting him like she’s already starting to. So every night, she simply goes to bed early, diving deep into the comforts of White Space and the joy of Headspace.
There’s also a lightbulb dangling from the sky. There’s no roof above her, and the bulb is strung by a thick wire that stretches up farther than she can see. It’s not functional, and it wouldn’t even be helpful if it was – there’s not a spot of darkness in the space – so she doesn’t bother with it.
She knows it’s a dream, and yet it’s so vivid – nothing like what her usual dreams used to be like. Curiously, she always seems to forget her dreams in the waking world, and the waking world in Headspace, but here, in this blank, liminal void, she has an astute awareness of both.
It sort of reminds her of the backstage at the recitals she used to perform at. The middle ground between the stage on which she is brought to life, and the crowd from which she came from that would be the ones to judge.
With butterflies swirling around in her stomach, she would nervously pace back and forth, running through the piece in her head. Tempo. Fingerings. Rests. She would replay her past mistakes over and over again, until it was finally her time to perform. But once she stepped onto the stage, in front of the crowd of applauding families, all of her anxiety would disappear. Mari loved performing, and stage fright didn’t bother her as much as… as it did him.
Before… before…
No.
Mari drives the memory into the deepest recesses of her mind and instead focuses on something more positive. She wants to see her friends tonight. Sometimes, she’s content with the emptiness of White Space. It’s dull, but it’s comforting, a place where she can quietly sit or lie down and not have to do anything, think of anything. Headspace is fun, happy, but after she’s back it always feels like too much. Like one spoonful too much of a saccharine cake. It also means she has to see him. Sometimes, even the thought of him makes her want to hurl.
But today isn’t one of those times. She misses the others, too. It’s been a while since she’s visited Headspace.
Mari hauls herself off the ground, gives Mewo a quick pat, and reaches for the white, wooden door. Behind it is nothing, just more white as far as the eye can see, but she knows just one more step and she’ll be with them again, at least for the night.
Taking a quick breath, Mari steps beyond the frame and into her past.