Pretending To Be Myself

I have been waking up everyday pretending to be me for nearly four decades.

It was an evening in August of 1984 that the world blinked. I was standing at the screen door, an oldies song was playing on the radio, the setting sun making a silhouette of the houses and woods across the street. The scent of late summer barbecue drifting by mixing with that hint on the breeze that it would soon be autumn. My family was sitting out on the front porch talking with neighbors and listening to the schools marching band practice as the custodians made certain that the sound system and lights were in working order for the beginning of East Texas football season. I stood there taking it all in.

I’d been in a bad mood all day and had been taking it out on everyone as only a budding teenager can. I remember that it dawned on me how much of an ass I was being, that I’d been making mountains out of mole hills (about what I don’t remember), and I needed to apologize to my family for being such a pill that day.

I had gotten up from where I’d been sulking and made my way to the front door that was opened to let any stray breeze in. My Mom and Dad sitting with my brother and sister on the porch steps, laughing about something. I reached for the handle of the screen door... and the front door was shut. My Mom was in the kitchen cooking breakfast singing along to the same oldies song.

I went outside, the sun was coming up, a large part of the woods that had been standing the night before were down, cut up and smoldering. To say I had trouble parsing what the heck just happen is a bit of an understatement.

From my perspective I had a justifiable full blown panic attack. From my Mom’s perspective it looked like her teenage daughter went outside and had a hissy-fit in the front yard for no apparent reason.

I was left with a pervasive feeling that I needed to remember something important. Two months later I briefly killed myself with an overdose of phenobarbital. Three decades later I started to remember what had happened during the blink.

I have three sets of memories from inside that blink.

The last memory from the first set is from the spirit of the original inhabitant of this body. She went out on the porch, apologized, and had been sitting there a few minutes when there was a streak of strange greenish fire in the night sky that descended into the far side of the woods. The men decided to go investigate, thinking that the fire was a small airplane and the pilot, if alive, might need help. At the very least they needed to see if the fire was heading their way. The last thing she recalled of being alive was of being cooked and eaten by a winged, lovecraftian abomination. Her soul basically said “Yeah, fuck this I’m done.”

The last few memories from the second set is from the soul that was placed in this body. She was three years older than the original soul at this point on her version of a similar time line. Her Dad had stayed in the military. He recently retired, settling his family in this small East Texas town not to far from where he’d grown up. That morning she had witnessed the sky rip open and a darkness with teeth had poured through devouring everything in its path.

At first everyone had thought it had just missed their little town. Soon they discovered that the sun didn’t move from it’s place in the sky and it was growing dimmer. There was a lake nearby but the water didn’t replenish. It took ten years for them to exhaust the stop gap solutions they could come up with locally. By that point she had a nine year old son.

They found an old airship and set off hoping to find other people who might have found a way to escape. Instead they ran into what became an increasingly more hellish landscape. It took them almost a day to realize that they been steadily flying over what remain of the Atlantic Ocean, deep pits of brackish water interspersed long tracts of a foul smelling broken wasteland.

They got to the other side and the landscape no longer resembled anything normal. There were flowers standing fifteen to twenty feet tall. Through misfortune they soon found that the nectar was now acid that could eat through an adult in moments. What looked like a weeping woman from a distance turned out to be a writhing mass of roots surrounding a maw of jagged teeth. She witnessed the airship taken away by wasps the size of woolly mammoths, the rest of her family still inside. All she could do was keep running after them. She was the last left as she stumbled to the edge of a wall of water as tall as the ocean.

There was a slight shimmer, like the wall of water was being held back by a soap bubble. Trembling she reached out a hand and touched it. She could not tell afterwards if the bubble had burst swamping her with water or if it had sucked her in. Either way she was drowning. She felt more than saw that some thing was near her. It was immense, malevolent and only interested in her the way a human might be with an insect crawling at the edge of their awareness. Near her a window opened up a hand reached through grabbing, pulling, tearing.

She vaguely remembers being given a choice to move on to whatever version of the afterlife she believed in or continue living in a version of her younger self, her memories suppressed by the spirit of the original soul.

The third set of memories is from the woman who walked the soul of a child to their rest and pulled another soul from the abyss to take the child's place. She is the chief of a freelance multiverse maintenance crew that works primarily for the Department of Fate. Part of their job is to patch holes in reality where things have broken through (or been let in because some people are dumbasses) or to salvage what they can and block those sections off.

Her crew often end up in those sections of the multiverse that others consider the badlands. Too close to realities that have nuked themselves back to the stone age, or poked holes in the fabric of their reality letting loose abominations from outside, or worse invited those things in.

She had suspected that those who championed the forces of chaos had infiltrated the organization that the department of fate was a part of. There by circumventing that department and making her job more difficult if not down right impossible.

The abominations breaking through shouldn’t have happened in either reality at all. So getting authorization to copy a slice of an adjacent reality and patch over the child's reality which could still be saved was tedious but doable. The problem came with only being allowed the standard thirty nine years to either side of the event. In most cases seventy-eight years is usually enough to keep everything stable. In this case, however, one end was anchored near the end of the Second World War and the other end was anchored in the beginning of a New Age. She wanted to extend either side by at least three years, preferably nine, even then she was concerned that the patch would fail. The bureaucrats denied her request.

What she chose to do wasn’t technically illegal. After all finding places for souls whose realities have been displaced was part of her job. That also meant making sure their memories lined up with the new reality as closely as possible. She’d modify what she had to though most people took care of any weird hiccups or glitches on their own. The ‘I thought I had on a different shirt, pair of pants, why am I wearing a wool cap it’s summer… ‘ or ‘I swear I had my watch on, the t.v. was on another station, I thought the rosebush was by that window...’ generally closely followed by variations of the ‘silly me my mind is playing tricks on me.’

Downloading a copy of her own memories into the gap created by the age difference in the soul and the spirit would definitely get her pulled before a review panel to explain herself if they ever found out. Her gut feeling though was that the patch wasn’t going to hold and if that were the case then her construct would start breaking down before hand. More than likely said construct would have a history of mental illness. At least one, probably more, stays in a mental health facility of some kind. A history of physical maladies that no amount of testing could find a source for leading to most believing it’s ‘all in her head’ and technically they’d be right.

There was the possibility that she’d start trying to remember too early and end up creating a new personality to encompass the separation… I did.

When I overdosed I was near enough to death to crossover. Instead I chose to come back. The Being at that gate allowed me to see what I could have chosen. It was an in-between place that was hellish though not hell. It looked like a version of earth that was dirty and broken. Most of its denizens survived in a state of despondency and despair not realizing that it was their belief that this was all that ever was or would be that kept them there. They were their own perfect jailers.

I wandered this place for a long time. Years or decades, maybe millennia, there is no way to know. Much like after the blink of two months before I was bereft of this knowledge between one heartbeat and the next. Spending decades attempting to put the pieces of a fractured psyche back together. Only to realized that I’m working with the pieces of at least three different puzzles. That the “real me” is an impostor of myself.

The truth is I will never be completely well. My internal reality will never completely match the external reality of the world. Mostly I’m okay with that. As long as I’m “that crazy bitch” no one else actually gets eaten by monsters. Seems a win/win in my book.