In the Midst #1

 

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!