paradox

"A neurotic is a man who builds a castle in the air. A psychotic is a man who lives in it. A psychiatrist is the man who collects the rent." ~Jerome Lawrence There's something wrong. Elisa wakes up in a foggy detachment from reality, with no idea what's going on. From there it only gets worse. It's almost as if she just, broke.

• Fiction
• Horror
• Short story
• Drama

								
What did I do? I thought to myself as I awoke.  I groggily blinked as the ceiling slowly came into focus.  
	I glanced over to where my bed was, on the other side of my room. I had fallen asleep on the floor again. My back was stiff and my neck ached from the floor pressing into my shoulder blades. 
	Ever since I was young I’ve had a habit of lying on the floor and staring into the abyss of the ceiling when there were too many thoughts racing through my mind. Often I’d lose track of time, letting my brain run itself to exhaustion.
	Then I’d fall asleep on the floor, which often led to back aches and headaches the following morning. This morning was no exception. 
	I sighed as I made my way downstairs. My mom was already in the kitchen, making breakfast like she always does. 
	My head was pounding and I needed some ibuprofen, but it’s always been a rule in our house that you have to ask before taking medications of any kind. My mom’s a nurse and she’s always afraid that something will happen to me or my sister  like things that happen to her patients. 
	“Morning.” I yawned, rubbing my eyes. I have nearly perfect vision, so why was everything still blurry? 
	You know when you’ve just wiped your bathroom mirror and it immediately fogs again, but for a split moment you can still kind of see? That’s how I was seeing everything.
	“Good morning, are you okay?” She asked, turning towards me. 
	“I fell asleep on the floor again.” I mumbled slowly. “Ibuprofen?” I asked. 
	She nodded, grabbing the bottle from the locked medicine cabinet. She shook out  two pills and handed them to me with a glass of water from the sink. I downed them, stuck out my tongue to prove that I had swallowed them, then trudged into the living room. 
	I didn’t need to be at work for another few hours, so I hoped my headache would fade before then.
	I turned my attention to the TV to keep my thoughts from wandering too far. My dad was watching the morning news broadcast, on channel seven.  I trained my focus onto one particularly bright spot of the morning’s weather broadcast and tried to unfocus and refocus my eyes. I still couldn’t shake the foggy vision. 
	A quiet whisper brought me out of my attempts. I turned towards the direction it came from, but there was no one there. 
	Then I heard the whisper again. I whipped my head to the other side, still nothing. 
	I shook my head as if clearing an Etch-A-Sketch. I watched the news with my dad in silence, unable to shake the weird feeling I had.
	After a few more anchors had spoken, my dad rose from his chair. He was a tall man and had given me his brunette hair and brown eyes. 
	“I’m off to work, are you going to need a ride to work?” I snapped out of my thoughts and shook my head. 
	“Uh, no. No, I’ll be okay. Thanks.” I had the reply clear in my head, but the foggy lens had slipped into my mind and was now clouding my ability to use my fine motor skills as well. 
	“Alright. Have a good day.” He kissed me on the forehead, I saw him approach me, yet I never felt the contact. I heard him tell my mom goodbye, I heard the door click shut. 
	I heard the car start, its engine vrooming to life. I saw from the window his silver Corolla peel out of the driveway and grow smaller as it drove off into the distance. 
	My dad was an accountant, who worked in a large glass office in the middle of the city. It was the largest building in the entire city with huge glass windows, brown carpets, and large metal cubicles. 
	I ran the image of his office through my mind like a cassette on replay. One that would skip, scratch, then start from the beginning. 
	I felt my phone buzz in my pocket, my alarm alerting me to get ready for work. 
	I left the house and walked down the road to the small ice cream shop I’d worked at for two years, like I always did. I clocked in and greeted my boss and coworkers like I always did. I tied my green apron around my waist like I always did. So why did everything feel so different?


	I rubbed my eyes with the palms of my hands. I’d left my makeup bag untouched today, I wasn’t a huge fan of wearing makeup anyways. Usually mascara and chapstick did it for me, but today brushing my teeth was difficult, so I found it in my best interest to not put a spiky stick in my eyes. 
	“Hey Elly!” A curly haired brunette ran up to me and threw her arms around me. Her name was Isabella Lombardi, she’d been my best friend since we were five. 
	“You’ll never believe what my professor said to me the other day.” She scoffed, crossing her arms across her chest. Her usually glittering blue eyes were now darkened to almost a blue tinted gray in anger. 
	I tried to ignore the foggy lens as I leaned on the counter. “The same one that always gives you trouble?” I asked, focusing on a spot on the shoulder of her shirt. If I kept my focus there, I could ignore the blur. 
	It was as if my entire body, inside and out, was distorted. 
	I was so busy thinking about what was happening to me I missed the first part of Izzy’s story. 
	“And then he said that if I didn’t have what it takes to be a biochemist I should just leave his class right now.” She fumed. Her arms were tightly crossed against her chest,  her knuckles white as they grasped the sleeves of her pale blue cardigan. 
	She huffed, a stray curl blowing away from her forehead. “I just can’t believe he would have the guts to say something like that to a student.” She looked more defeated than angry now, and I felt bad for not really paying attention. 
	“Aren’t you one of the best students in the class?” Putting my reply into a coherent sentence was hard, even though I could easily conjure it in my mind, getting it out in word form was a struggle. 
	“Yes!” She threw her hands in the air in exasperation, almost taking my head off in the process. 
	My reaction time was delayed, however, by the time I moved back, her hands had already returned to her sides. 
	“You okay?” She asked, reaching her hand out towards my arm. I flinched away, then instantly felt guilty for it. 
	“Yeah, there’s something weird going on with me today. I’m just  bit out of it.” I knew my sentence wasn’t nearly as coherent that time, which made me question whether or not I should go home.
	“Do you need to go home?” Our boss asked, walking past our station. 
	I shook my head, my vision lagging behind my movement. “No. I’m okay.” Stacy nodded, continuing on her way. 
	“Are you sure you’re okay Elle?” Izzy asked, her brows furrowed in confusion. I nodded, albeit slowly, but I still nodded. 
	We made it through the, thankfully, slow day. As Izzy and I were walking home together I heard the whispers again. This time I couldn’t identify the direction that they were coming from, so I tried to ignore them and listened to Izzy ramble on about the rude customer she’d dealt with earlier.  
	“Then that lady called me a fat bitch as if she didn’t waddle back out the door!” Izzy fumed, then giggled. She found herself hilarious sometimes. I did too. 

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