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The Reality Filter cover

You can view a photo album of the setting of this novel

Feature: THE REALITY FILTER

Subtitle: An exploration of the human mind’s ability to reject one reality and create another

Genre: Literary fiction, psychological fiction

BJ Note: This is a small segment, because it is a novel I’m very intent on publishing, so I’m not at liberty to reveal too much. This is the novel I wrote in a weekend, in reference to my Novel-in-a-Weekend blog posts. I don’t really know how I feel about it. The concept changed so much from when I started writing it until now, after many many rewrites (9 times scrapping and completely redoing in the first chapter alone). Now that I can call it finished though, I’m heading back into edits, so we’ll see where it takes me this time.

 

SEGMENT: THE REALITY FILTER

 

 THE REALITY FILTER

 

April 27th.  The End.

It was one of those things.  Those things you hear about and you think “Man, I’m lucky that wasn’t me.”

 

Let me tell you a story about what it’s like being trapped in your mind. 

 

It was like switching off a poorly placed light hanging from the ceiling in the middle of a room, before you leave it.  The door is closed, and now you’re left in complete darkness, with your arms outstretched before you, fumbling around in what you believe is the right direction.  But which way is the door now?  When you reach a wall, your palms are flat against it, and you’ve traced them along all four walls in a square before you realize that the door was only ever there when you could see it.  It never quite occurs to you that you should have just turned the light back on when you had the chance, but now you’re too far away to ever find it if you go back.

 

It was like hearing the voice you had buried with the body you dumped in the graveyard, the tale-tell heart that resonates:

 

“It’s so hot.

 

What have you done to me?

 

They’re laughing at me.  I can see their smiles glint in the darkness, and suddenly I can’t tell where the sky is, and where the bottom of the earth could be as I imagine I’m falling.  And I feel nothing, I don’t move, I don’t make a sound.  I know you’re coming.  I know you’ll show me.

 

But I’m lonely.

 

I can’t tell up or down, side to side.  All I feel is the choking heat, the dew falling from the ceiling, and I can’t even breathe, I can’t call out.  I can’t reach for someone to save me.  The world is barren, and I’m the only one left.  The only one who knows.  Are you laughing like they are?  I can smell the sulphur in the air, and I can feel you.  I know you’re close.  I know you’ll find me.

 

Where are you?

 

Why did you bury me away?”

 

That feeling like waking up in a dream, and then waking up again.

 

April 28th.

I think I just did it again…

 

The pictures were real.  They lay before me while I could compare them to my inspiration, her blood running through the cracks in the floor, the kitchen knife that clattered against it and echoed through my head. Mid-swallow, mouth dry, stricken. The air felt parched and squeezed all around me.  And yet I realize that my body is acting on impulse, how it knew it was supposed to, but really, I felt nothing towards what I was seeing in front of me, her body lifeless on the floor in the apartment the same as in the pictures.  It was like I couldn’t see it at all, didn’t believe she was lying there, like I was separate from everything and could blink and make it all disappear.  My fingers are cold, and they move against my mind, numbing, massaging in a message written backwards, like in a mirror, never meant to be deciphered.  And there she was before me, like the photographs of a beauty so devastating.  So strangely alluring.  So painful that I was losing myself to it and it was hypnotizing.  She had it all within an innocence on a childish face, captured in those photographs as if they were the only thing to prove she existed.  She wasn’t real, I was saying to myself out loud now, she lived only in those photographs, marked with the stain of my artistry.  My fingerprints.  My entire being.  I could say she didn’t exist all I wanted, but the truth was that her body was right there on the floor in front of me, and my hand was on the knife in her chest.  The blood ran so thickly from her around the pictures, I could see it framed them, and the paper was too coarse to be penetrated by it.  It was repelled, I thought, because those photographs and that blood were both vessels for her tired soul.

 

I remembered her, that girl I had met and thought so ghostly in her environment, four years ago.  Four years; it seems so short a time when I say it like this out loud.  I was fifteen, turning sixteen in less than a year.  Sixteen; remembering that age hurts me.  I had been wandering past the train tracks with the shadowbox camera tucked under my arm, adorned in those Victorian clothes from the trunk when I met her.  I had finally grown into the knickers that summer, and I was finally tall enough that the bow tie didn’t end up tucked into the waistband of them.  She was made of loneliness and a blue heart, and her skirt was a size too big, but her face shone when she saw me, to the point I thought she looked ridiculous to be so at peace within her world of poverty.  Her dressed up demeanor and my Victorian clothes matched like children make-believing they were the king and queen of the world where no grown-ups were allowed, but with her next to me, we could have been the fool and the knave of the entire kingdom. Created in that valley at the bottom of that hill, the more fortunate looked down upon on the lesser that had bound together to create a community made of trailers and houses that would fall at the vibration of a loud noise.  But I could never admit to my longing to live her life.  I could never admit I would trade the tall house decorated divinely at the top of the hill for this existence under the watchful eye of it in the valley.  I could never admit I found such beauty here, where the weeds grew in between the train tracks, and the dust was an inch thick over everything that lay motionless.  

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