Reality, Really.

| By Lauren Taglienti |

[Image by Mo Eid]

I die with a swift shot to my head from their gun. Someone had just broken into my house, ran up the stairs, kicked down my bedroom door, and pointed their gun in my face. Before I knew what was happening, they shot me. Dead. Really.

I float downstairs and get myself some leftovers from the fridge when someone fidgets with the lock at my front door. My body drifts back upstairs as I float above my body, watching my corporeal self move.

I sit at my desk and remember being in the botanical gardens in Grand Cayman. Ancient orchids and iguanas surrounded me. I was in a prehistoric scene just waiting for a T-Rex to walk through the lake. I am encircled by rare species of palm trees. Really.

I look at the fossil on my desk that I found on a beach. It was only made because a fern was connected so long to the piece of coral. Connected so long that it left an imprint. The fossil had time. The fossil has time.

My body goes downstairs, and I follow shortly behind. We slip into my car. I drive and drive and drive and drive and drive. And then the car in front of me slows down and then I crash into the car and my car flips over theirs and it all plays out in slow motion, my pulse and all, and then I drive home. Really.

My family asks where I was when I got home, and I said it doesn’t matter, that I was only gone for a bit. They said I’ve been gone for a couple days. Two days—where did I find that time? Two days had gone by in an instant.

I don’t have time. My time is running out. They told me I’ll be dead soon. Cancer. Cancer. Cancer. Cancer. Can— why do doctors even bother talking after a diagnosis? Nobody listens to them after they metamorphosize into an undertaker. We don’t have time to listen. We’re going to die soon.

False diagnosis. Sadists shouldn’t be allowed to be doctors. They always lie to me. Sonogram, cancer. Sonogram, no cancer. Sonogram, cancer. Sonogram, no cancer. Lies. All lies. None of it is true. None of it is real.

And I don’t have time to write this essay. I have to go help people. I have to go save everyone because I can’t save myself. I have to show them that I can’t save myself and neither can they, but maybe we can save each other. But that doesn’t work either.

***

Gears rumble outside my house. I peek out my window to see the source of the noise. A truck. The truck says “Experience a Greener World.” A turf company. Turf. Synthetic. Manmade. Fake grass. Not real. But it’s greener? And greener is better? Better than the real thing? Better than real grass? But it looks like real grass. So the fake grass becomes real and better than the real grass? That’s what the truck says.

That’s what the news says. The news tells me that the world is scary. I don’t want to go outside. People are dying. People are killing. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to be killed. I don’t want to face all the terrible people in the world because all there is in the world is terrible people. That’s what they tell me. They say that change is scary and then show a dead person being lifted into an ambulance. Nightcrawler is a fictional movie. But it’s real.

I don’t have time for this. I don’t have time. Do you understand me? We’re running out of time. We have to get married now. We have to have kids now. I have to graduate now. I have to work now. I have to move out now. I have to get my Master’s now. I have to get my Doctorate now. I have to make my first million now. I have to be perfect now. I have to do it all right now. Now. Now. Now. Now. Now.

***

When’s the baby due? they say. I look down at my stomach and see a bulbous bulge swelling from it. That’s not a baby I say. Endometriosis. They cower in fear of insinuating that I’m fat, but they don’t understand. Being fat is fine. But this isn’t that. This is my uterus building a bridge to the umbilical cord from whence it came to tear itself out of the enclosure it’s in. It’s covered in disease, and it wants to break free. You’ll never have children, the doctors say. But what do those sadists know.

You know nothing about me. You make these assumptions and spin them to complete the narrative and the role you want me to play in it. But you don’t know me, no matter how much you think you do. And you never will. Only I know me, and what do I know?

***

A bat flies into my house, and nobody’s home. I dive under my kitchen table to protect myself from it. It squeaks and hops among the valences, hiding from me. My aunt comes over. She says there’s no bat.

Grimes felt restrained by her identity as Grimes, so she killed Grimes and became c. Now, though, she is Grimes once more. If Grimes killed Grimes, then how can Grimes now be Grimes? She resurrected herself. She beat the undertaker. How much Grimes would Grimes kill if Grimes could kill Grimes forever?

You believe that you think and therefore you are, but you aren’t. You’re still thinking. Right now you’re thinking about me. What I think. What I say. What I do. If I’ll be hurt by what you’re thinking. And none of it matters because you’re just hypothesizing. Descartes still remembered language when meditating so he didn’t even accurately complete his meditations. He wouldn’t be able to think without language, so he couldn’t possibly erase it from his mind. You just can’t erase some things that you know. And you don’t know them from birth. Why would you believe that your thoughts make you real?

***

I walk through the courtyard at my school. I hear my name being called. I expect to see the guy I reported for sexually harassing me. He probably has a gun. Or maybe a knife. Or maybe it’s someone he hired to kill me. Frantic. I look around. I look up at the buildings around me. No one in the courtyard. No one in the windows.

There is a war in my backyard. People with guns firing at others over the fence. They’re coming for me. Who they really want is me. I could be anyone they want me to be. And they wouldn’t know who I am. Really.

I’m still me. I’m showing who I want you to see. You still don’t know me. The sharp lines on my eyelid and the third eye drawn on my forehead are just part of my character. Snakes slither out of that third eye.

I see myself outside my window. I’m covered in blood. It’s me from the future coming to visit. Except it’s a future that’s now the past. I’ve resurrected. Really.

But I am not a god. I don’t decide who lives. Nor who dies. I only take the past and turn it into the future from the present. 

***

You’re looking at my character now. Your gaze burns. I am on fire. But it’s just a gaze. So I’m not on fire, but I’m still burning.

And I’m burning my essay. My precious essay. Lifetimes of thoughts being burned. My thoughts aren’t who I am. So I’m still here.

I need you to know me. I need you to know who I am. Past. Present. Future. I need you to know because if you don’t know then I’m not real. And I need you to tell everyone because if somebody forgets, then I won’t be real. I don’t want to die when I’m dead. 

I check to make sure that the stove and oven are off. I wouldn’t want to burn down my house again. I’ve seen it happen before. Just last night, it burned down in flames while my body was sleeping inside. Really.

I go to my bedroom and prepare to sleep. But it’s too late to sleep and I don’t have time for it. I need to be doing something. Like making my first million. Or making my dreams my reality. Something. Anything. Anything to keep me from my subconscious.

The simulation is in progress. It won’t take that long. Because we don’t have much time. Like a sci-fi roller-coaster. A twitch of the third eye. A car crash. Less than a millisecond in the grand scheme of the construct. It doesn’t have to be linear, and some of us don’t want it to be, but we follow it as such anyway. 

Past. Present. Future.

But what if some of us don’t experience time linearly like that? What if some people experience time as varying permutations of Past-Present-Future. What if time flows in and out of these temporalities? Time functions this way for me.

I couldn’t think at some points in time. I didn’t have a language to think with. It felt like I didn’t exist. I didn’t feel real. Now I can think. But everything still feels like a simulation.

Fantastical. Otherworldly. 

Unreal.