Chapter Text
It was just like any other morning, you remember. It only stuck out to you because you were having a bad hair day. It didn't happen often; you made sure to put your hair into curlers or blow dry it or whatever you felt like doing that night, but today was certainly one of Those Days. That day, your hair stuck out at odd angles, some strands curled up tight and others completely straight. You pulled the comb through it countless times, put gel on, hair sprayed it, but to no avail. With a sigh, you patted it down as best you could and left the house. No one really made any comments about it, so it wasn’t like it was a devastating event.
It wasn’t until a week later that you noticed the colours around you were... brighter somehow. It felt like someone had turned the saturation up on a picture, except it was in real life. It was disorienting, dizzying even, when you stumbled home that night, squinting at the neon lights as they pierced your eyes.
Then, it was only a couple days until things changed again. A strange feeling washed over you one day, that, upon waking, everything felt so unreal. Like you were watching the world through a pane of glass, with everyone’s muffled words just barely getting through to you. It didn’t scare you, necessarily, but it worried you. Maybe even made you panic a bit. But, you got used to it, working around the feeling of a barrier between you and the “real” world. You didn’t realise that you had already begun to lose it back then, putting things into categories: yourself against the world; unreality versus reality.
During a walk in the neighbourhood, something began to stand out to you. This was different from the vividness of the colours that strained your eyes so, but instead… you felt yourself drawn to the doors. It didn’t matter whose doors they were, or what they led to, but… just the concept of the doors themselves. as you passed, you felt a physical pull from each house’s door, beckoning you inside. It didn’t make sense, you know it didn’t— these houses did not belong to you. Why would you want to go inside? you turned back, walking home a little faster, trying to resist the urge to walk up to one of the doors closest to you and yank it open. As you reached home, you put your hand around the knob. It felt slightly warm, as if there were a hand ghosting over it just a few minutes ago. It didn’t make sense. You lived alone. Robbers, maybe?
When you turned the handle and stepped inside, bracing yourself for missing valuables— you saw a man. No, not a man— he was much too tall to be considered a man, and yet, you couldn’t focus on him— it was as if your brain could not comprehend his existence. He smiled, the corners of his grin extending past his face and ending at a sharp angle.
“Oh god,” you breathed, and stepped back in shock and horror, slamming your door shut.
A knock on the door snapped you out of your reverie. You opened the door you just walked through, and saw the man again. At least, you thought it was the same man. You weren’t quite sure— your eyes still hurt whenever you tried to look straight at him.
“Knock-knock,” he said in a high, mocking voice, smiling that same smile.
You tried to scream. To call for help, to tell him to leave. Instead, you grinned, and said, “Don’t you know it’s polite to ring the doorbell?”
You looked down at the doorbell. There wasn’t one. You could’ve sworn there was one, wasn’t there?
“My apologies,” said the man, cutting off your thoughts. “Just dropping in for a... visit.”
He swung the door shut again without an explanation, and the minute he disappeared, your head cleared again, as if a fog were lifted from it. Desperate for answers, you grabbed the handle and pulled.
You blinked, the haze and confusion wrapping around your mind again. It took a terrible strain on your eyes to comprehend what you saw. A long hallway stretched down what was supposed to be your threshold. Shapes and lights and colours blinded you and cut you at every edge. You felt like screaming again, but you weren’t in pain. It was just that your mind couldn’t comprehend it all. And suddenly, that feeling of wholeness returned again— all this time, in the real world, you were a fish out of water, struggling to breathe, to stay afloat. Now, this was real, these doors, these hallways, these rooms. It was easier to make sense of it now, the concept of one-dimensional rooms and the number of colours and qualities and the twenty-seventh letter. You could see so much more of the world, and you had so much more potential here than in your past life. That was all it felt like now, a former life pressed under a picture frame, one observable through that very glass you once felt trapped under. No one knew it better than you did at this very moment, and you were now desperate to show everyone else the same truths, even if it meant harming them. They would heal, you reasoned to yourself. And then, they would be just as free as you were.
A woman walks up to you, her afro wild and jutting out at the edges. Just like the man-who-wasn’t-a-man, this was a woman-who-wasn’t-a-woman, and you looked up at her as she towered over you.
“Oh, darling,” she exclaimed. “You look wonderful.”
With a sharp-fingered hand, she brought a mirror up to your face.
When you caught a glimpse of yourself in the mirror, you were barely shocked. Your hair was long and winding and vibrant, wrapped around your limbs. Your eyes focused and unfocused but your mind was clear, and you could see them in the pupils, those spirals, constantly turning without end. Your hands seemed longer, sharper somehow (could hands be sharp?), and so were your teeth. Your mouth, askew, constantly changing shape, widened with a vicious smile. Your limbs twisted at odd angles, some too long to be human, but you felt no pain. In fact, you felt better than ever before.