A Self-Study Within A Broken Mind

“Hi, Lila,” I said. To catch up, the story had been going inside my brain without you. I needed to find a way to communicate with Lila, so I popped a board that displays my words in the library. From then we discussed being able to free myself from Tarne, the child she gave birth to, which was actually me. For the best part of a week I had been stopping by to create something, any little thing with creationism that I could muster. At first, it was a tower atop the library and a flying vehicle that docked there much like my dream. Due to that creating a very real migraine in my reality, I stopped creating things until Lila dragged me in from a dream and told me that I had to keep trying, no matter how small. Next I created a thumbtack, then a nail, then a ball, then I brought forth a car into the library. Lastly, Lila asked me if I was ok, and not wanting to worry her I told her I was. The message displayed as green light on the message board, making her turn to see it. She did not repl...

I had been trying really hard to have something else going on during my nights, to avoid coming back there again. I had no control over my body, no freedom of creationism I often escaped into. I was no longer a god of a tiny universe left behind following Rebecca’s escape. Whenever I came back now, I would be a passenger to the child named Tarne, a girl that I wanted to be deep down. Maybe that kept me coming back, the possibility to feel that I was born correctly. In reality, I bought female yoga underwear, and whenever I felt I deserved to, I would clean my body with perfumed soap and wear the pink softness. They were a prize I have not felt worthy of lately. I kept them sealed in an airtight plastic bag to keep brand new and fresh. I knew if they somehow got dirty, I could not possibly bring them to the laundry. They lived one life for a person hidden away within a fake world inside his head. I arrived as Tarne again to a sight I did not expect. Lila was entirely naked, legs spread ...

Two days later, I came back feeling bad about how I left. I had moments like these with Finn and Rebecca, but they were not… real? There was no proof that Lila was real either, but could I really invent a whole society with different bodies that looked human enough. Rebecca and Finn were both humans, at least at the start. I was not sure what Lila was. The library was empty. I also looked through the garden, and scanned the outside with creationism, bright lights bursting in all directions of the dark. No matter how much light went into the endless, the only parts that illuminated were the invisible vines that allowed my creationism. I imagined that the vines were veins instead and let the light fill them to the brim. As the brightly glowing gas expanded further and further in that dark, I created an endless lift to push me outside the cluster so I could see how far it reached. The further the panel of metal took me, the more contrast I saw of vines and darkness, until the gas reached ...

“Hey,” I said appearing in the wooden enclosure. “You’re late,” Lila said. “Two days late.” “Yeah, I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s been a bit difficult to sleep lately with the heat. The situation in the city I live in is draining, but there was a nice thunderstorm last night that gave way to some cooling.” She was sitting on the couch in her child body, making me wonder whether the teen one was a way to cope. “How do you know about Faust?” She asked. “WHAT do you know about him?” I changed my view to see the transparent vines fill up the room. She was unaware of them, but they gave me power I once had with Rebecca. “Nothing,” I said. “You were mumbling out in the dark. Something about deserving being here? Wanna talk about that?” She looked away while pulling her legs up onto the green couch. “Not really,” she said, but I had a feeling she would anyway. “He was a friend back in my world.” “Was?” “We were playing around in this place adults tell us not to. Like an abandoned factory. It’s har...

“Hey,” I said, appearing weeks later past the fumbling of the device update and a mishap of a keyboard messing up quotations. The first part took an hour, while the keyboard took just ten minutes. I had been avoiding coming back, but did not prepare an excuse for being away. Lila sat in the corner of the room, eyes closed. For a moment, I thought she was sleeping, but when I came up to her, she leapt into the air and pushed off my back as I turned in recoil to land gracefully on the table of the room. “You’re late,” she said. “I’ve been doing some mental exercises. Without new stories to entertain me, the sentence feels like a real downer.” “Isn’t it supposed to feel like that?” I asked. “And that’s the first time you used the word 'sentence' to describe it. Anything you want to fess up to?” I studied her child form as it aged to a woman. She bunched up her shirt to reveal the triangle opening positioned perfectly over her lower back where the branched spine opened up. Her type...

I came back two days later, three if you count that it was almost two in the morning. I was in a different mindset following a mass layoff due to the virus affecting all businesses. I did not want the night to end because the next few days would not be easy. The essential jobs were likely to be the only form of income, but a lot of people would be unemployed until the virus died down. At the very least, I did not want to worry Lila about the things happening in my reality. I would get by somehow. As I entered the room under the library, I found her sleeping there on the couch. Maybe since I provided my day-night cycle, she aligned to it. I did not want to wake her. Her face looked so calm and I wanted to keep it that way. Rather than leave for the night, I went upstairs to see if the alchemy-magical circle she made in the floor had any success over the days I had been away. It became apparent that it did not capture the person in question, as the drawn strands of wood curved into a lot...

I have been reluctant to come back for obvious reasons. Lila wanted me to talk about myself, give a recount of my life so far, however little of it was lived. I feared it. Much like with letting Finnelgamin know all the things in my head and be vocal about it, and letting Rebecca in to know me as I was in my reality, this was another instance of keeping things secret from someone I… No. I did not create her. I created the world that was connected to that spawn chamber. Lila was there already, put there from her world. I was still curious about the details. Maybe I could distract her with questions about her life instead. “Hey, Lila,” I said, at the top stair of the spiral opening to the bottom room. She was on the couch in the library, sitting in reverse. Her legs were slung over the top of the backrest, while her head hung upside down where the legs would bend at the knees. Her hands stretched out to the ceiling of the library. It took me a minute to realize what she was doing. Her ey...

I returned to the small wooden room in the untethered space on Tuesday of the saddest St. Patrick’s Day under the heel of a pandemic of a virus in the reality I occupied. Had it been a normal day, I would have been at work the day before, and thus had a moment to speak to Lila at the tea shop I frequented. In light of this seclusion imposed on me, I had been away for another two days. Writing, and even using the writing device strained me at home. I had to explain that to her. I once stepped into the box to find the spiral staircase from before there, but ended up deleting that brief visit from record. I started writing it in the middle of the night at a hotel in Limerick for difficulty falling asleep. The clickety keyboard I used created too much sound for a quiet visit to that untethered space in the middle of the night. “Lila?” I asked, wondering if I would have to use the locator on her already. The bigger the space around me, the harder it would be to find her. Much like with Rebe...