In
the Midst - #1
The fantasy of running away is a nice
one…until you realize you never really wanted to run away. You just
wanted somewhere to escape to every now and then.
I’ve been stuck in this…place for nearly
two months. And no matter how hard I’ve searched for a way out, I can’t find
one. It’s as if this place doesn’t want to let me go.
I say “place”. Perhaps I should say world.
Place is too small for what I’m living in. But if I admit it’s a world, then
does that mean I’m forever lost? That there’s no hope of finding home or family
or anyone ever again?
Nearly everywhere is a place designed for
humans. Neighborhoods of cookie-cutter houses, malls, grocery stores, restaurants,
offices, schools, playgrounds, pools (lots and lots of pools). Any and every
kind of building or place you could imagine. Everywhere you go, there’s intent
behind it. Someone had to have built everything. But in two months of
wandering, I have yet to meet anyone else.
And that lack of people makes every doorway
and every hall feel ominous. Like maybe even if there isn’t a person around the
corner, something else is waiting and watching. Something I can’t begin
to imagine.
It’s to the point where I avoid going
inside most buildings. The only ones I step into are grocery stores for food
and the Pink Mall to sleep. You might think it strange, sleeping in a mall, but
if you set foot in one of the empty houses, you’d understand. With no life and
no furnishing whatsoever, you get the feeling that something else is
inside. Something else will find you sleeping and –
It’s creepy not just because everywhere is
barren. Everywhere is familiar. I remember places like this from the
late 90s and early 2000s when I was a kid. Rigid carpets, peachy-beige walls,
warm lighting that throws lots of shadows, glossy sheens, wacky colors. Even
this notebook I’m writing in is straight from childhood. It’s the same Lisa
Frank journal my older sister had – two hugging penguins with bright purple and
orange accents.
It’s like I’ve been left behind in a
strange bubble where the past never stopped existing. It’s just abandoned like
a stage when a show is over and for some reason, I’m the only actor left.
I can’t keep thinking about this right
now.
Another day in the world of nothing and
nowhere.
I know there’s no one to read any of this
except me. But I can’t lose my mind. I need to at least imagine the hope that
someone out there will see this. That someone out there can find me.
I haven’t done much exploring lately, but
I’ve been constructing a map of sorts. Naming places. I’ve even started a list.
Pink Mall = explored
Daisy Hill (suburb) = unexplored
Sweet Tomato (grocery store) =
explored
White Collar Avenue (business
district) = unexplored
Waterworks (park) = unexplored
Familiar School #1 = partially
explored
These are just a handful. And as you can
see, mostly unexplored. I’ll admit I’m a terrible coward, but…even if there
isn’t anyone around, I can’t shake the feeling that I’m being watched. I can’t
ignore that feeling, however irrational or paranoid it seems.
I realize I’ve said nothing about how I
got here. “How” is a question I really can’t answer because I don’t know how.
The last time I was in the real world, I
was alone in my apartment. I remember it was almost 3 AM because I’d stayed up
late again to finish homework. Around that time, I went to brush my teeth and
when I looked out the bathroom window, I saw someone high tailing it from my
car. I ran out to check, but nothing looked damaged or broken into. Shrugging the
incident off, I went back to the main door of my apartment complex.
When I opened it, nothing was the same.
Ahead lay a dim hallway with beige walls
and dirty carpeting. The only light came from a bulb at the end that kept
flickering.
Thinking the all-nighters were getting to
me, I closed the door and opened it again. I blinked. I pinched myself. Nothing
changed.
When I turned around, the parking lot was
gone. There was only open road and open fields. All darkness except for a few
lamps.
Now I was properly scared. Inches away
from hyperventilating. But I didn’t want to lose reason. You’re tired and
stressed, I told myself. You’re not in your right mind. The last thing you
should do is freak out.
With no other options present, I started
walking down the road. Alone and vulnerable in the middle of the night, in the
middle of nowhere. The quiet out there was unnerving – not even a faint whistle
of wind to cut through the darkness.
About 20 minutes later, I finally saw a
gathering of lights in the distance. A town. Surely there’d be someone to help.
My feet dragged as exhaustion kicked in. I don’t remember closing my eyes for
the last time. I only know I woke up later in a playground on a grey foggy
morning (Pinwheel Playground = explored).
From that day on I kept track of my time
here by leaving tally marks at the Sweet Tomato every time I came for food.
That and the watch I got for my birthday last year are the only things keeping
me grounded.
I was scared once I realized this all
wasn’t an insomnia-induced hallucination. Still, I had a sliver of hope of
finding a way out in that first month. Or at the very least, of finding anyone
else. It was the only thing that kept me wandering the streets, knocking on
doors, and peering through windows.
But the longer I spent walking through the
stillness…
Hearing in the quiet a near-imperceptible
hiss …
Seeing things out of the corner of my eye…
Seeing no end to this emptiness…
The longer I’m here, the closer I tip-toe
to the edge of my own sanity. This place which months ago was the kind of place
my mind would have gladly run to in darker moments…
This is why I’ve started writing. I know I
could just talk to myself to deal with my reality. But this world makes you
feel like anything you say will be lost. That eventually your existence will lose
all context, just like these buildings made for people that have no people.
I’ve already lost the real world. I don’t
want to lose anything more.
AUTHOR’S
NOTE
This first In the Midst author’s note is
going to be a bit of a long one, so lock in!
The origins of this story came from my
fascination with the internet aesthetic of dreamcore. It’s better explained
through visuals (the medium it fits best with), but I’ll try explaining it here.
Dreamcore is an aesthetic inspired by the surreal imagery and vibes of dreams, with
a tendency of utilizing visuals from the early internet, 90s, and early 2000s.
It blends nostalgic imagery like neighborhoods and childhood items with strange
things like random eyes, mushrooms, empty liminal spaces, and people with TVs,
stuffed animals, eyes, or flowers for heads. Even music fit into this aesthetic.
It grew quite popular in the early days of the pandemic (specifically 2021
& 2022).
To me, it had a big impact. Being a kid
with only a few memories of the late 90s and who grew up in the early 2000s (in
the U.S.), a lot of the imagery was truly nostalgic for me. But the thing, too,
was that the strangeness of the aesthetic felt very much like where my mind
would go as a child. One feature in dreamcore that especially hearkened back to
an irrational childhood anxiety I had is silhouette people. Within dreamcore
(and its predecessor/originator weirdcore), sometimes people in photos will be
completely blacked out so that they look like shadow people. As a kid, I always
had the strange anxiety that I would see some shadowy person like that around a
corner or in the hall outside my bedroom. To see that realized in a world like
the one I grew up in felt uncanny, but it also made my inner child feel seen.
While some internet creators have tried
incorporating worldbuilding into the look of dreamcore, not much has been done with
it story-wise. Some people have written dreamcore-inspired stories on
fanfiction websites. You could argue that The Backrooms is the clearest
offshoot of dreamcore. In my opinion, it leans a little too much into horror
for that. To me, true dreamcore exists on that fine line between familiarity
and nightmares. So many things were like that in childhood – anything sweet
could turn frightening or strange and you’d never expect it nor be able to
explain the how or why of it. Dreamcore succeeds when it gives just enough of
the uncanny to give you the chills without quite making you want to leave.
The more I took in the aesthetic, the more
I wanted to create a story involving the components of it all. And having
memories correlating with the eras most often association with dreamcore, I
could lend some of my own uncanny childhood insights. So in 2023, I decided to
create a dreamcore-inspired series that I originally published on Tumblr called
In the Midst. I handwrote every draft before providing minimal editing later. I’ve
left them unaltered since their original creation and now that I’ve deleted my
Tumblr, this is the only place you’ll be able to find them.
One thing with dreamcore that I often felt
was a sense of yearning, as well as a sense that the memories I yearned for
were eaten up, made nonexistent. When you look at the comment section of lots
of dreamcore videos, a lot of people express similar feelings: either people my
age relate to their own childhoods or younger people express a sense of anemoia
(a longing for something they never experienced). I let that feeling guide the
first lines and the motivation of the unnamed narrator who loses herself in a nostalgic
and empty world.
This was one of the few projects I’ve done
where I went in with absolutely no plans and no brainstorming. I made things up
as I went and chased the vibe rather than the point of the story – I figured
that both fit dreamcore better and allowed more for the protagonist’s interior
thoughts to have more of an impact. Because something I quickly realized in experimenting
with dreamcore story ideas is that you have to be careful with plot. There’s
one other dreamcore story I worked on that was supposed to be a dramatized
podcast (too huge a project for my abilities), and while that story did have
more in terms of plot, I still left a lot of the hows and whys of worldbuilding
mysterious on purpose. It was one of the few ways I knew I could potentially recreate
the feeling that dreamcore visuals gave.
This first entry is just a very general
beginning to the story, so I’ll save narrative insights for upcoming
installments!
