When life feels like death

Your second free story for December 2022 + audio note

The voiceover is my commentary on the story, not the story itself. It’s there for anyone interested in the background of this story.

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When life feels like death

I looked at the man in the bathroom mirror. He had my eyes, but the framing was all wrong. His nose was shorter, wider, and his hair was a touch too dark. It was subtle, like a spot-the-difference puzzle, but it was there.

He wasn’t me.

Whoever I was had perished and sank into the memory foam mattress on our bed. He had dissolved into a brown soup, or mist that embedded itself there before being blown away by my sudden arrival. He had turned into sand and I could feel his grit against my back. I had fallen out of space, I knew that much. I had seen it all, well, he had. My old self watched my new self fall down from the moon. He could see it out of the loft window. Looking back that part doesn’t make sense because the new me arrived from a different angle, congealing together like a cloud in reverse. Maybe it was a symbolic thing. Either way it explained to me and him that the orbs were finished. I wouldn’t be seeing any more of them. The transfer was over, they found the right universe out of multitudes and put me into his head.

I was plugged in.

Phillip died. And up rose Phillip.

A better one. More important, happier, smarter.

The old one died, whether symbolic or not, he went away someplace to die.

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Walking down the stairs was hard the first time. This new soul software was used to another house in another universe. It was like the gravity was too strong, but in reality the exhaustion of transfer and the new soul’s familiarity with another staircase had combined into a dizzying effect which nearly sent me flying into the wall. I turned right on the stairs and made it to the middle floor of the house, then shuffled my feet to the bathroom.

I don’t know what compelled me to go all that way. I had my own bathroom in the loft, with its own bigger, cleaner mirror.

I kept going, closing the door behind me, feeling repulsed by the linoleum on the floor. I didn’t remember my old house, but I knew our floor was different to this. The furniture was a darker brown, the ceilings higher.

I looked at the man in the bathroom mirror. He had my eyes, like I said, but his face was wrong. His stubble looked weird and his eyebrows were too tall, too thick. He was a stranger.

He wasn’t me.

But I was me.

I touched the mirror. No trickery. The reflection was me.

I went downstairs, remembering a story I wrote about some guy whose head fell open, whose brain flew out and merged with a small planet. I began to wonder if I was in one of those symbolic dreams that turns into stories. I could smell crumpets in the kitchen and I walked in.

Mum’s face was different.

I noticed now an exhausted feeling in my chest. The tops of my eyes felt warm, and the air was dry. I walked back to the hallway, stared in the gold-framed mirror and wondered just who the hell this new person was. His family were similar, but they weren’t the same.

Did he have the same ambitions that I did?

Did he share my talents?

Could we co-exist?

I went back upstairs and sat at my desk. I turned the computer on and watched something about simulation theory and some interview with David Bowie. I looked at the head split story and tried to remember the twists and turns but I couldn’t. It was all so unfamiliar.

I stayed up there all morning and most of the afternoon. By the evening I was too disturbed to look at anyone in the house. I had been abducted by aliens and in some mix up had been dropped back into the wrong house. But it wasn’t that simple, I had been dropped back into the wrong head too.

How could I get out of my own skull?

Whatever tech these aliens had, I didn’t.

I was dead. The old me was dead. There was a universe there bereft of me, a family confused by my sudden dissappearance. Or perhaps I left a body behind. But I felt a body destroyed as I woke up this morning. I displaced something, reduced it to a cloud of excited molecules.

Where did those molecules go?

Where did those thoughts go?

Where did I go?

I got back on the computer and wrote some of my second novel. Looking back, it wasn’t great, but it was necessary. The first wasn’t better, but it had a nostalgic simplicity to it. Things just happened in whatever order they came to mind. There was no structure. This second one had structure, but it felt forced. It was a beginner writer’s attempt to be an experienced novelist.

Maybe that’s why I did it. Maybe I tricked the aliens into dropping me in the wrong head because this universe was the one where my worldline intersected with the worldline of people who might help me succeed. All those random encounters that waited over a decade away, those were visible to my astral form and I cherry picked this particular universe to be reborn into.

Whoever I left behind had just catapulted all his ambition out of his head and into this one. He had killed his dream in one world so it could be reborn in the next.

I wonder if these frayed universed will ever knit all the way back together. My thread and his are fused now because I remember him, but what others have come and gone that I don’t recall? How many other deaths can the soul persist through without noticing some profound change?

That evening I went downstairs and ate a slice of tomato. The night before I had hated tomatoes.

The end.

What did you think?

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Parts of this story written in bold were added upon my re-read before posting. Everything else is unedited and was written as a first draft directly into Substack. It isn’t currently saved on my computer. It exists only here, and wherever you decide to astral project it.

(Upon reading this back, I noticed I accidentally have invented the word ‘universed’ again. It’s a word that came up in a False Vacuum poem once, but ultimately the poem wasn’t decent enough to fit in the collection.)

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Backstory.

This story was written in one session before being posted to Substack. I have not edited it. It was inspired by a comment I saw about astral projection and depression that reminded me of a very real fear I went through as a teenager. After a particularly bad migraine attack I woke up and couldn’t recognise my face, or my mother’s, and I struggled to come to terms with my new voice. It took me a few hours to realise it was just a very weird, bad migraine, but the feelings associated with it have inspired a lot of stories.

Another migraine attack years later put me in Southport hospital, and I awoke from that one squeamish, when I wasn’t the night before. I was checked for drugs, drink, substances, everything, and even had electrodes put on my chest and head, but they found nothing.

They checked my head and found nothing.

Looking forward to someone at The Fancy Newspaper quoting that in a book review in 2023.

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I shared this story in its current state as a statement. I don’t want to only show you the highlights, but the works in progress. In fact, every work on this substack is a work in progress, this one is just closer to its origin point than the rest because it is the very first draft.

I’ve had the same approach to social media for a while. When I first started my instagram (now used mainly for comedy, though there is a second one just for my books) my intention was to cut through the bullshit, to do the opposite of what I felt everyone else was feeling pressured to do. I shared first drafts with my audience, I offered writing advice, and I wasn’t afraid of letting my audience know when I made a mistake or ruined a story by overengineering it, or when I ruined a poem by overediting it.

I didn’t mind if people found me through those first drafts either. I knew they needed work but I hated the idea that social media was just a place to put the finished product, the edited selfie, the chiselled poem, the rehearsed skit. I hated that and I still do. I saw too many aspiring artists and writers comparing their behind-the-scenes with everyone else’s highlights reel.

So I decided to be different.

That said,

When I imagined my audience, I imagined an aspiring writer who might otherwise have just seen the highlights of my career. I have shown the ups and downs because I wanted to be realistic, because I knew back in 2019 that my audience would be bigger one day, that one or perhaps two people would be inspired by watching the journey in real-time. The low points are inevitable, it seems only reasonable to help people prepare for them.

And I was right. I had a few people contact me to say I inspired them to not give up on writing. One person, who later became one of my best friends, got back into writing because he saw the ins and outs of my process.

It’s good to be weird.

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Train ticket?

Thanks for reading this. If you want to support me further, you can share this post with your friends, subscribe (if you aren’t already) or throw some coins my way. The minimum payment on Ko-Fi is £3 and it’s a one-off unless you decide to make it a subscription. You can also browse my commissions and buy a drawing of David Bowie as a spider if you like, or David Bowie as a lawnmower (David Mowie). Or even, get this… David Bowie… as a snowman (David Snowie). I can also draw aliens, or Daleks saying naughty things to each other. I imagine none of you are surprised by this.

I plan to use all donations towards improving my talk show, train tickets to gigs, and publishing things. That’s why my current goal is ‘a good camera’.

My train ticket to my weekly radio show is £6.90 at the time of writing, but if you are familiar with the UK government you can reasonably expect they are whittling away at that decimal place like a rat eating the wire of a life support machine. That could turn into a joke. Is it good enough to turn into a joke?

Tired of talking about money now. Dislike it. See you at the next story!