Work Text:
Statement of Richard Litsbacker, regarding the periodical loss of his sight and hearing. Original statement given March 26, 2008. Statement recorded on April 13, 2025.
I’ve never been the kind of person who likes being alone by themselves. Introversion does not come naturally to me. In some sense it all boils down to when my mother left me alone in a mall for four hours but I’m just parroting what the psychiatrist said to me. I don’t do well with professing my thoughts. It’s funny. I’m so closed off, but I need all these people surrounding me, telling me that I’m doing good, giving me approval. But I couldn’t ever do that back to them. And they don’t really do it to me either, now. I guess it is because of… all this, but I can’t help but feel like somewhere, something’s choosing for me to be like this. Hand-picking me to be their little doll, separated and alone.
Thanks for writing all of this down, by the way. I know it’s kind of obvious that it’s hard for me to write, but I can do it, given the right equipment. I guess… this isn't the kind of thing that I can find it in myself to both tell and record. I’m surprised you’re still here, is all. Mostly, they leave because they think I’ve lied to them, or I’m fak– well. It’s odd to think some people don’t disappear.
It all happened when I was about fifteen… so in 1994. I was in the mall. My mom and my sister were shopping for… shoes, or makeup, or something like that. My dad was out of town, and usually I would’ve been allowed to stay home, but I had recently been failing some tests, and my mom being the helicopter parent she is, would not think of letting her son stay alone in her own house. Something about trust, and her not knowing if I would call my friends over and throw some kind of… well, a rager, I guess– given that she thought my friends were a bad influence Ïon me and were making me fail my classes.
Nonetheless I sullenly accompanied them to their outing. It was as much torture as could be expected, I suppose, but… it’s all a bit hazy now. Effects, I suppose, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
It was late by the time they finished up their obsession with the perfect shoe. It was a weekend, though, so there were many people there, walking around, acting like everything was perfectly joyful and pretty. It shook me to the core. I felt so - so isolated. Here was everyone else on the entire planet, maybe, shoved into this tiny shopping mall in the middle of nowhere at all, and not a single one of them seemed to be feeling sad, upset, like I was. I felt like I was the only person in the entire world who could possibly be feeling annoyed or depressed. Maybe it was my angsty teenage brain but I’m sure of it. At that moment, no one else knew how I felt. I was alone .
That was just where it started.
In my teenage emotions, I had become buried in tearing apart a napkin I had taken earlier. The paper was now tiny shreds in my hands, falling onto the floor like bird feathers. Scooping up the litter and walking to the trash can, I realised my family was not in sight. I turned around and looked for my mother. We were in some craft store or something, and I was looking through all the gift cards and scissors and books and all of the random crap you find in such a place, and I was looking and really looking.
She wasn’t there. I looked for her, and found no one. My sister was gone as well. I went to the cashier’s register to ask if I could go on the loudspeaker for my mom, and there was no one there either. I wouldn’t say I’m a particularly attached person, at least I was not at that age. But there was something about how alone I was feeling. It felt abnormal. I could put the loss of people in the store off as just them being in some other place that I couldn’t see from where I was, but something there was more unsettling than that. I felt like I did once as a child, walking back onto the school campus for some recital - that chilling feeling grasping at the back of your head. A place that is supposed to be filled with people incorrectly empty. Too large, too quiet and too loud at the same time. I rushed around, clambering through the aisles of colorful paper and happy cards saying “For the greatest father there ever was,” or “When you’re getting old, you’ll know it.” I was usually amused by such cards, but now they just felt ridiculous, a reminder of how everyone I could see and probably everyone else as well was gone.
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when everything else went away. It was a slow, gradual change, as normal as growing taller every year, when you look back at some photo of you as a child and you can’t exactly place when you changed from that self to this one, but something is surely, irrevocably changed. I looked around and I saw nothing. I honestly don’t know if I was even looking around. There was just… nothing .
Blindness, in my case, at least, is hard to explain. It’s not like when you close your eyes and it’s all dark, no light. It’s just – nothing. Emptiness. The void.
I stumbled around for some time. I don’t know how long. No one was there to tell me the ticking of the hours. The mall was so quiet. I couldn’t see, couldn’t hear anything. It was like the entire world had switched off at a beat.
After some time - hours? Days? Weeks? I heard the sound of movement. I had curled up at that point, squeezed my eyes closed, (at least I think they were closed) and when I heard the rustle of a bag hitting someone’s legs I sat up and gasped in shock. I could hear other people, and, what’s more, I could see them too! It was so bright, all the fading sunlight and fluorescent lights and loud laughter. I was so happy. I don’t think I’d ever been happier, too, and that was isolating in its own right. Who else would ever understand the joy of once again being able to hear a child crying, to see a bench covered in trash? In that beautiful moment, I realised that whatever foul thing had got its hold on me, covered my eyes and ears, that thing – it had severed my ties on the human world. I thought it had just shown me what horrid things it could do, show me how detached I was. I thought that I would never recover.
That was true. Two weeks later, as I was finally getting over it, telling myself it was alright, that there were still people all around me, it happened again. And then again, a month later. It didn’t remove people from my surroundings after that first time, though. I just… blank. No ability to see, hear, smell, touch, taste. Just the lack of everything.
And the thing is, everyone else is there. I just black out, in the most literal sense, and can’t do anything to communicate with them until it all comes back to me. And they leave. They all leave , they think I’m ignoring them but I’m truly not. I can’t tell them how I miss them because then they ask why I ever ignored them. Who would believe a person like me, constantly zoning out? Forgetting everyone around them? This thing, this entity that has ensnared me, I think it finds joy in making me lose everyone. In making me be alone. The worst part? I’m beginning to– to enjoy it too.
I tell people I’m blind and hard of hearing, now. It feels disgusting at some deep, human level within me, lying to these strangers about my disabled-ness, if that’s a thing. I’m not, I’m actually fine, but– when they find out, when they eventually realise it's all a lie… when they back away, grimacing? It feeds something, something deep inside me. It’s some strange, demented form of happiness, getting closer to an imitation of human joy. I don’t feel really human anymore, though. Think we’re enough of a social species that because of what's happened to me, I don’t really count anymore. Yeah, maybe I used to like people being around me. Still do. The best part is the peace when you get rid of them. When you get rid of it all. When you’re all alone.