How To Function

You are reading someone's reply on a social media post. Your eyes flick to their name, then continue reading while thinking on their name. Growing up together. The last time you saw them. Possibly one day you think you may be a better friend and call them, sometime. You agree with their reply, and go to "like" it. You pause, and suddenly feel blank.

You feel you can hear a vibration, like a bug diving by your ear or someone whispering on the phone. You cannot decide if it's internal or external, and it's too indistinct to decide immediately if that's what you heard. Unconsciously you look to "that side" of your brain with your eyes turning to their corners. Your attention seems to follow that vibration as it passes you by. "What was that?" you ask the random thought.

In response you feel a familiar tugging at your mind, like a thread attached to your soul. You're a trapdoor spider, resisting the urge to spring out of your hiding place. It might be a trick of some kind. A bored, four dimensional thing toying with you, perhaps. You remain stoic on every level while feeling the twang of that string, vibrating like a musical instrument.

For just a brief moment, your thoughts follow that disturbance to the other end. And see something you never want to. Quickly you look away.

Too late.

Though you have experienced this before, unbidden knowledge of someone's misfortune, you immediately put this in a remote place of your mind and close the door. You then will the door to disappear, receding again to the safety of your core. You don't want to know, and it might not be true. How would you tell someone, anyway? You avoid that person for days, pretending to forget. Out of sight, out of mind.

For those next, several days, you begin having morbid thoughts about similar events. These thoughts are unwelcome, but there. Like, "I wonder what it's like to have that happen?" or "How would this happen?" and then watching it happen in the mind's eye. Brief glimpses of this dark, alternate universe. You shake these tendrils loose, these oppressive harpies.

Then one day you sit down for a coffee (or whatever you do), and as though in a trance your mind dislocates. You hear, see, and experience a remote reality, in a shadowy dream world. Almost tangible. No vantage is spared as you experience the event in ghastly detail. Right down to the level of physical science.

A disappointed feeling overtakes you. There you contemplate in silence, where atoms hold all things together in unity without permission. The pulse of information and energy jumps across the galactic disk to you where you translate the vibrations into sad, little words.

Now you sit again in your own body in your own chair, and you feel you can hear an ambulance, though in your heart you know three counties is too far away to hear. You feel the need to call their loved ones, but you don't. You might be accused, somehow. Even if proven not to be there, it will be said you are a witch, and that you made it happen. It's probably just your imagination, anyway.

This is why you don't form relationships. This is why you hide yourself. Why you don't speak of it. You will be seen as mental, diabolical, lazy, or cruel. Already they talk about how you don't react, and say that life is like a movie to you. And maybe all of these things are true.

What do you do?