/ Awoken by a Lamp /
.
.
During my last semester at a college I was assaulted by a football player for walking where he was trying to drive and while unconscious on the ground I lived a totally different life. There I met a wonderful young lady, she made my heart skip and my face red, I pursued her for months and dispatched a few jerk boyfriends before I finally won her over. After two years we got married and almost immediately she bore me a daughter. I had a great job and my wife didn’t have to work outside of the house. When our daughter was two, my wife bore me a son. My son was the joy of my life, I would walk into his room every morning before I left for work and doted on him and my daughter.
One day while sitting on the couch I noticed that the perspective of the lamp was odd, like inverted. It was still in 3D, but… just.. wrong. It was a square lamp base, red with gold trim on 4 legs and a white square shade.
Hours passed and I was transfixed, I couldn’t look away from it. I stayed up all night staring at it. The next morning I didn’t go to work. Something was just not right about that lamp. Gradually I stopped eating and leave the couch only to use the bathroom at first. Soon I even stopped that too as I wasn’t eating nor drinking. I stared at the fucking lamp for 3 days before my wife got really worried, so she had someone come and try to talk to me. By this time my cognizance was breaking up and my wife was freaking out. She took the kids to her mother’s house just before I had my epiphany:
• The lamp is not real. The house is not real!
♦ My wife, my kids… none of that is real!
× The last 10 years of my life are not fucking real!
Then lamp started to grow wider and deeper, but it was still inverted dimensions.
It took up my entire perspective and all I could see was red, I heard voices, screams, all kinds of weird noises and I became aware of pain…
A fucking shit ton of pain.
The first words I said were:
I’m missing teeth.
.
… and opened my eyes.
I was laying on my back on the sidewalk surrounded by people that I didn’t know. Lots were freaking out and I was completely confused. At some point a cop scooped me up, dragged/walked me across the sidewalk and grass and threw me face down in the back of a cop car. I was taken to the hospital by the cop, seems he didn’t want to wait for the ambulance to arrive. Then I went through CT scans and shit… and through about 3 years of horrid depression. I was grieving the loss of my wife and children and dealing with the knowledge that they never existed. I was scared that I was going insane as I would cry myself to sleep hoping I would see her in my dreams.
I never have.
But sometimes I see my son, usually just a glimpse out of my peripheral vision.
He is perpetually 5 years old and I can never hear what he says…
