a dream deferred

I don't really know where to start. I'm going to try writing it all down, but it's going to take more than one entry.

I was in the labyrinth. The Slender Man was standing there, Agnes was clutching my arm, the rain was coming down, there was a sudden bright light...

...and I opened my eyes. I was in a room. Instinctively, I knew this was my room, even though I had never seen it before. The bed I was laying in was unknown to me and there was a book on the floor that I didn't remember reading (but it was mine, I just knew). There were penciled drawings in neat stacks on the dresser and above the dresser there was a window, barred.

I got up and went to the door. It was unlocked. I walked down a white, tiled hallway, my shoeless feet almost slipping once or twice. Eventually, I reached a sort of common area where people were milling about, playing board games, or watching television.

There was a door on the other end of the room. There was an orderly looking person sitting on a chair next to it. As I walked to the door, the man said, "Everything okay today, Mr. Lowe?"

I paused. Clearly this person knew who I was. Perhaps it was better to just get straight to the point. "Not really," I said. "Where am I and how did I get here?"

The orderly looked at me with a rue smile and said, "I guess we'd better get Dr. Gallagher here. He can explain everything to you." The orderly then led me to a chair on the other side of the room and condescendingly said, "Why don't we just sit here and wait for the doctor, okay?"

"Okay," I said. Perhaps I had had a brain injury in the labyrinth and they had brought me here while I healed.

After about ten minutes, a young man in a white lab coat walked towards me. The orderly whispered something into his ear and the man (whom I assumed to be Dr. Gallagher) nodded. Then he sat down across from me.

"Tav," he said, "do you remember who you are?"

"Yeah," I said. "I'm not a complete amnesiac. I just don't remember how I got here or where here is. So, if you could tell me, that would be a great help."

"Alright," the doctor said. "I'm Dr. Gallagher and you're at the Ashfield Psychiatric Clinic. Your parents brought you here around three months ago."

I slowly processed this information. "...three months ago? It's already June?"

The doctor raised his eyebrow at that and said, "No, it's still March. You've been here since January."

"That's impossible," I said. "I've been going to work and...doing other stuff. I've never even been in this place before."

"This 'other stuff,'" the doctor said, "would that be encountering the Slender Man and the Cold Boy?"

I swallowed. "So you've read my blog. So what?"

"I've more than read your blog, Tav," the doctor said, "I helped you create it."

And he began to explain. He explained how my parents had admitted me for clinical depression. He explained how I had refused to take any of the medication, so he tried treating me through other means. He explained how he encouraged me to create a blog, to make it into a story, a story where I could resolve my problems.

"The Slender Man was something that really interested you," he said. "And I thought it might help for you to personify your problems like that. To make them into a physical form, so you could defeat them. But I was wrong, Tav. I didn't understand. You chose the Slender Man because in his stories, he's never beaten. You literally chose an invincible foe to represent your problems.

"I thought you were getting better when you introduced Agnes and the Cold Boy, because these were new elements, elements that you controlled. Here was a new monster you could defeat." Dr. Gallagher sighed. "Sadly, I don't think that worked either. The metaphor of the Cold Boy – the 'coldness' that you feel – that hasn't gone away has it? I think you need to accept the medication now, Tav."

I hadn't said anything throughout his explanation. Finally, I looked him in the eye and said, "This isn't real. This isn't true. My life isn't just fiction."

"Of course not," the doctor said. "You just made parts of it up. Surely you remember writing it, don't you?"

"Of course I wrote it," I said. "I wrote it down because it happened."

The doctor sighed again and then stood up. "Come on, I want to show you something." I stood up and followed him. We walked down the hall to another room, this one set up with several tables with computer monitors on them. "This is our computer lab. We allow some of the patients here access so they can email family members. Look." He opened up a window and typed into the URL – and my blog came up.

"Look at the URL," he said. "Nihilartikelling." He pronounced it nigh-hill-art-ick-elling. "Do you know what that means? You must because you decided on it." I didn't say anything so he changed the website to Wikipedia. "Let's just look it up, shall we?" He typed in the work and the page changed – to a new page called "Fictitious entry."

"It's German," the doctor said. "For 'nothing article.' It's a fake article writers would put into dictionaries or encyclopedias to catch copyright thefts. So nihilartikelling would be the process of making fake entries." He turned to me. "It was your little joke, Tav. You made it all up."

I have to stop here. I have to get my thoughts in order. They're all jumbled up now and untangling them is getting harder and harder.

I'll trying writing more tomorrow.