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When Lloyd came to, foreign words were coming out of his mouth. He was talking to a bunch of ghosts, sitting at a wooden table in a mostly dark room illuminated by a single bright light. The blackness as his consciousness faded in and out, and the blinding light that made him see coloured blobs, were contrasting each other and causing his eyes to ache. Those same eyes were moving against his will. He tried to see where was, tried to make sure his body was still intact, but his muscles twisted the other way and lingered on the blurry green phantoms. There was a bowl of food on the table that remained untouched thus far.
Through the haze and the loud ringing in his ears, Lloyd could make out a sentence coming from his mouth:
“Oh, the boy’s back.”
Was… he being addressed? Lloyd sunk. He couldn’t even be on the brink of passing out without his thoughts being observed. The anxiety that was twisting his stomach mixed with another, foreign emotion. He was amused by the pathetic squirming of the boy inside his body.
“You can go back to sleep, Lloyd,” he said. “I promise I won’t do anything scary while you’re out, or tell any of your dirty little secrets. Although, if your friends come in the way again, I’ll see to it that they’ll regret it.”
Ugly laughs surrounded Lloyd. His thoughts became mushy for a second, but then his vision cleared up again. Another joke was made about him, but the words slipped from his mind before he could understand them. He tried not to think, because the presence of another in his mind made the worst, most unwanted images appear.
“Ugh, no seriously. Can you pass out already? I don’t wanna see that.”
In a way, Lloyd wanted to. He would’ve given anything to make it stop. Anything just to get the shadow out of his head and retreat to some dark corner where nobody could see him. Thinking about all the things he could do in this body made Lloyd’s head hurt, and he didn’t know whether it would be worse to have him do all those things while Lloyd was unaware, or to have to see, feel and hear all those things happening.
He lifted up his chopsticks and started eating, finally. Smelling the food made Lloyd realize how utterly empty his stomach was, to the point that it was sucking itself in. But the way that the piece of chicken felt like plastic on his tongue told him that nothing would make it down his throat without coming back up immediately. The sauce burned the insides of his mouth without tasting like anything. A lukewarm lump passed through Lloyd’s insides.
Somehow he seemed to be enjoying the meal, but his enthusiasm got lost in translation. The food felt so slimy and watery that it was hard to even look at it, but Lloyd couldn’t close his eyes or look away. It was almost as if tears were welling up in his eyes, but even that couldn’t escape past him.
By the time that every last piece had sunk down the throat of the shared body, the room was starting to feel like a sauna. He took off a layer of clothes and complained something, then stood up. Rolling down Lloyd’s face was a drop of sweat that he could hardly say was his. He shivered. Truthfully, his whole body had become a hollow shell that he was trapped inside of. It was a cage hanging over a busy town. On the streets of that town were his friends, but he couldn’t meet their eyes or make out expressions from their blurry faces. He could only tell they were walking away again.
Lloyd’s legs were tired, but they kept walking like nothing was wrong. The steps were confident in theory, but to Lloyd the steps felt just a little too short and every time he thought he understood the rhythm he forgot it again.
Where they were going, Lloyd wasn’t sure, but he would rather have stayed behind.