Wash, rinse, repeat

Recently she had been going to sleep to white noise, to be more specific to the sound of an oscillating fan video on YouTube. In the summer months, she would just leave her fan on overnight, but in winter it seemed frivolous to her to sleep under a duvet and have a fan on. Her mother had always told her that if she slept with a fan on she would get sick, so four hours of oscillating fan sound was the key to getting to sleep on time. 

The only issue was getting up on time. She had overslept so many times, she’d had to set a cascading series of alarms to ensure that she woke up close to when she needed to. It would be embarrassing except for the fact that she worked from home and that made it very hard for anyone to know when she was late. So she was a bit of a slacker, so what?

It’s important to know this context to understand that when she woked up dazed and confused, it wasn’t atypical. The fact that it was dark was. Once she fell asleep she tended to stay asleep and there was no way that she would wake up before dawn. Had she slept all the way through the day into the next night? No, that would be insane. 

An eclipse maybe? She scrambled for a reason to justify why it was dark in what should be the middle of the day. Something in her resisted the urge to take the path of least resistance and just throw open her curtains and see. Something in her told her that she didn’t want to know. If she knew then she couldn’t unknow. 

So she pretended that nothing was wrong. On a normal day, she liked to work with her windows open, so she could see her garden. Today she pretended that she didn’t want to open her windows, instead, all the lights were turned on and music turned up high, to tune the silence out. 

She was suddenly glad that she didn’t have any pets, she dreaded the idea of having to go outside and feed them, call them inside. What they would look like, could look like, affected by whatever was outside. The darkness she could see through her curtains seemed heavier somehow then if it was just nighttime. It seemed to move as she moved, following her, it sounds insane but it felt like she was stalking her, hunting her. 

She spent the morning ignoring a lot of information. Ignoring the fact that the time displayed on her laptop made no sense, ignoring that all of the news and social media websites were down, and her coworkers weren’t responding to her emails. She had plenty of food and water in the house, along with all the other basic necessities. There would be no need for her to leave the house for the foreseeable future, she continued to ignore that whatever supplies she used would be magically regenerate itself the next day, but the taste was changed. More sour or tart or bitter somehow. She didn’t want to see it as some kind of metaphor for her life and how it was going downhill, but she had been a writer all her life and it sure as hell felt that way. 

And so she developed a distinctly unhealthy routine, wake up, pretend to work, sleep. She wasn’t sure how many days this went on for but she knew that she couldn’t hold on for much longer. She knew that it couldn’t get any worse. And then one day she got a phone call, or more specifically a Skype call. 

It was a young man, attractive with blonde hair that fell to just past his ears in a cute bob. He smiled frequently and laughed almost incessantly. He called her in the middle of an otherwise uneventful day when she got the message notification. She almost ignored it, she had become accustomed to existing in a bubble with no contact from the outside world, shouting into the world and receiving contact. You have to understand it almost hurt to see another person after being alone for so long. 

She fell in love almost instantly and they talked for hours about nothing and everything. They never talked about her situation, they talked about her job, and her hobbies, and her family. After months of torment, she finally felt like she could breathe again, like she could live again. 

It took several more months for her to realise that he never told her his name, and she never saw him looking anything but picture perfect. It was uncanny, no person could be that perfect and be real.

Later they talked about her dreams, her goals and much much later about her fears. They skirted around it at first but as they talked more and more it seemed that that was all they talked about. It became increasingly exhausting and the brief period of relief faded away and it took some time for her to realise that he never said this name, never revealed any personal details about himself. His face always looked the same, beautiful and unmoving and perfect. He looked like he was created just to torment and punish her. 

She grew to dread his calls and even the small joys of eating, sleeping and reading were denied to her. There was no part of her life which wasn’t tainted by the oppressive darkness outside and the increasingly dark conversations with the perfect nameless stranger. Eventually, she came to the conclusion that she had no other choice but go outside and see what it was that was ruining her life.

She opened the door and stepped outside.