Chapter 3.e – The Smoke
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Acceptance of the Self

Book 1: Attunement of the Hearts

Chapter 3.e - The Smoke

___________________ ღ♥ღ ___________________

 Erick

¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯ •.¸ ¸.• ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯

 

[ - Friday Sept. 06 2019, 6am, Erick's house - ]

 

It’s 6am on a Friday morning and I feel like death.

 

I’m staring at a spot on the bathroom’s pale green peeling wallpaper, firmly avoiding looking into the mirror as I brush my teeth. It's not exactly that I hate my reflection or anything, it’s just that, on the one hand, when I looked in the mirror last night I had another hallucination of a completely different face looking back at me. And on the other hand, it’s been causing me increasingly more pain to look at my body at this time. Which is in no way, shape, or form related to the fact that I've been glued to my phone and computer the past two days researching everything I can find about transgender topics. I got about six hours of sleep combined the last three nights, because I just couldn’t force myself to sleep when there were so many vitally important unanswered questions bouncing around my head, like “how do I know if I’m trans?” and “what is a cat girl?”. 

 

Turns out that subreddit Matt had linked me to was my start to a very fraught journey down a path of nearly unbridled curiosity. I browsed through it for hours and hours that first Tuesday night after D&D. To my neverending surprise and worry, there happen to be a lot of things I relate to in the trans girl meme community.

 

I fight back a yawn as I finish brushing, and spit the toothpaste out into the round porcelain sink. Unfortunately, I have school at 8am today, and my brain won’t let me ignore that obligation. I turn on the water, clean my blue toothbrush, and rinse out my mouth with a feral gulp from the faucet. Alas, despite the fact that I’m still grappling with some of the most important questions of my existence, I need to push it all to the back of my mind and get my ass to the university. I'm running on less than four hours of sleep; I don't have the brain cells necessary to multitask.

 

CW: Parental Abuse

 

I start to run through my limited options for a quick breakfast before I have to book it, washing my hands and trying to psyche myself up to face my parents downstairs. I figure that I need to be prepared to convince them I'm bright eyed and bushy tailed this morning, or they might take away my phone or computer or something for ‘distracting me from my duties’ last night.

 

End CW

 

As crap as my folks are though, part of me still feels like I need to tell them what’s going on with me. Not about the gender stuff of course, I still don’t think I’m actually trans, and even if I am, that conversation with my folks is a loooong way down the road. No, I need to decide now whether or not to confide in them about the other insane thing that’s been obstructing my ability to function like a normal human. 

 

Spookily, almost like I’ve summoned it by thinking about it, I feel a twinge in my mind, as if a muscle I’m not usually conscious of is flexing. I start to feel... more. Like there’s suddenly more sensory input that my mind has access to, more room for my thoughts to breathe.

 

Ah, fuck, I think resignedly. Of course it wouldn’t leave me in peace for more than thirty minutes after I woke up. It feels like time slows down ever so slightly for the world around me as my perceptions speed up.

 

Almost unsurprisingly, the next breath I take is filled with the reek of wood smoke, and the front of my body heats up as if I’m standing before a roaring bonfire. I try to move away from the heat, but the hotness stays fixed to my front, as if there’s an invisible fireball floating a few feet ahead of my body that follows and rotates with me. 

 

I briefly worry about the fire alarm going off, but at this point I’m about ninety nine percent sure this is another hallucination localized entirely within my own brain. I must have had seven or so ‘episodes’ like this so far, starting with that rowdy crowd on Tuesday night. Each event has been prefaced by that odd boost in mental acuity, and I’m beginning to recognize that there’s somewhat of a continuity to the aberrations in my senses. Like, yesterday after school I‘d had visions of an almost medieval-looking bedroom overlaying my own room as I cleaned it, and I’d briefly experienced getting into that room’s bed last night when I finally went to sleep. I’d also noticed that the pale Polish skin of my arms was far darker in those visions, which matched the bronze-colored skin of the woman I’d seen in the mirror last night.

 

All in all, I still have no idea what the hell is happening to me. A normal person would’ve probably gone to a psychiatrist or something by now, but... I haven’t. 

 

I don’t know why I haven’t, to be honest. Something about the weirdness makes me hesitate to want it gone, which could indeed be even more reason to go to the doctor. But I just can’t bring myself to even want to. Maybe part of that’s because, other than the fears about what’s happening and why it’s happening, these experiences generally seem to improve my mood significantly afterwards. Plus, it’s a great distraction from the existential fears I feel surrounding my projected path living as a normal boy for the rest of my life. And, y’know, if I’ve been cursed or something and am slowly turning into the tough-looking latin american girl I saw in the mirror, well, that’d be kind of neat.

 

However, I do draw the line at dealing with this shit at 6am. I feel very uncomfortably warm now, and I really wish I had the option to step away from the invisible fire blazing before me. I grumble to myself as I put a steadying hand on the bathroom sink, and decide to run my hands under some cold water. It helps a bit, but I still feel like shit. Actually, I feel pretty damn angry, and I realize with surprise that the sensations of heat and smoke seem to be interwoven with the feeling of anger. The more I focus on the heat, the angrier I get. This does not incline me to want to linger in this episode of madness any longer than necessary, as I hate being angry. I’d already noticed a strange amount of emotional turbulence during the illusions, but this confirmed it. I had absolutely not felt angry before the smoke and fire, so the ‘intermingled perceptions-feelings’ theory wins out over the ‘it’s just coincidence!’ theory.

 

I focus on gripping the edge of the sink tightly, and begin taking deep breaths. As I pay more attention to the sensations of my bathroom, the smoke, fire, and anger all fade a little into the background. The fact that it works is really freaky, honestly, but it’s also intensely interesting to my nerdy soul. It does put a damper on my ‘slowly-turning-into-a-girl’ theory though, since it seems like the newcomer to my brain already has her own reality to live in. I’ve got all of my mental fingers crossed that my ‘being overwritten like an old operating system’ theory is wrong too.

 

I lurch off the sink and stumble into the hallway, fighting to keep my focus on the familiar smells and sounds of my parents’ home. I take care to stay focused on the texture of the waxed wooden floorboards beneath my bare feet as I walk stiffly towards my room. Each breath, each step forward, helps further dampen the perceptions of heat and smoke. 

 

When I’m finally dressed and ready to go, I make my way downstairs. I find that my parents have already left for their jobs, and I pour myself a quick bowl of shitty cereal and gulf it down. There hasn’t been a single peep from the strange channel of perception since I’d reached my room, so I hold out hope that I’ll be able to make it to school without any mental hazards to worry about.

 

--- 

 

[ - 8am, Chicago area - ]

 

CW: major test anxiety

 

Terror grips my heart in a vice as I leap off the public bus that’s brought me to campus. I’m fighting a losing battle to stop anxiety overtaking my mind, but it’s hard because I forgot I forgot I forgot I forgot.

 

It’s September sixth. It’s that Friday. The day of my discrete mathematics exam on the last five weeks of lessons. If I fuck this up, my parents are going to ground me for months. I had remembered as soon as I’d gotten on the bus, but by then I was already going to be just-barely-on-time in the best of circumstances. 

 

I sprint across campus faster than I’ve ever run in my life. I arrive at the classroom about 5 minutes late, heart pounding in my throat. The professor is sitting calmly at the desk in the front of the room, scrolling through his phone while the rest of the class is bent down working on one of the most important exams of this semester. The place is nearly silent, and my anxiety is such that I feel akin to a wanted criminal as I pad over to the teacher’s desk to pick up the exam, trading a stiff nod of recognition with him. Then I turn to face the room, and make a herculean effort to hold myself together as I make my way silently to the most remote corner. When I finally slide into the chair at the very edge of the rightmost table in the back, I let out the quietest sigh of relief. I also have a teeny little concentrated anxiety attack, as a treat.

 

It is not helping my mood that I had only about two hours of sleep last night, nor is the fact that I haven’t even thought about this class since Wednesday morning when I last had it. There’s been rather a lot on my mind since then. 

 

I hurriedly take out my little bag full of pencils and pens from my backpack, extract my calculator and turn it on, and get everything spread out neatly before me on the table. Then I stare at the exam before me for a few seconds, before putting my head in my hands and trying to psyche myself up for the ordeal to come.

 

This course is a requirement for my degree, and I really need to do well on this thing today. I’m already off to a phenomenal start: late, panicked, exhausted, and horribly distracted. I don’t even need the stupid calculator I’d brought out; my exhausted brain just grabbed it out of habit. I leave it there for now though. Somehow having it on the desk makes me feel just a tiny bit more prepared.

 

CW: light parental abuse

 

I need to calm down and fast, so I can actually do this. I imagine a small open candle about a foot away from my mouth, and I begin to regulate my panicked breathing. I’ve done this many times before, usually after escaping an argument between my parents. The goal is to control my breathing enough that I don’t blow my imagined flame of calm out. 

 

End parental abuse cw

 

I take a deep breath, wait a second or two, then let it out slowly. 

 

In... and out.

 

In... and out.

 

It takes me a couple minutes to settle down to a good rhythm, one that helps both the candle stay lit and myself stay sane, but I get there. 

 

End major test anxiety cw - still taking the test, not as panicked now

 

Okay, show time! I mentally whisper. I rub my hands together, trying to muster up as much energy as I can, and turn my attention to the first problem. It’s a series of statements that I need to translate into a truth table, and then I have to figure out if another related statement is true or false based on each row in said table. I’m actually really good at this shit, so I eagerly get started on it. It’s not long before my pencil is scribbling down Trues and Falses almost as fast as I can think them. 

 

As I work, I go into a sort of focused trance, totally losing touch with the room around me. My mind only has room for the problems before me and my answers to them. I love this state of consciousness, it’s when I get my best work done. I love truth tables too; they hit some deep need for thoroughness in the depths of my soul.

 

It’s as I’m writing down a big ‘F’ for false in the last cell of the first problem’s table that the basic normality of my testing experience ends rather abruptly. I feel a now-nearly-familiar surge of clarity spread throughout my mind, and again it feels as if my thoughts suddenly have more room to breathe. I’m able to think and make decisions so much faster than I had mere moments ago. This isn’t as useful as it might be, because my anxiety spikes in tandem with the tell-tale signs of hallucination. I curse my good-for-nothing brain glitches internally, and try my damnedest to laser focus on the test: hoping to completely ignore whatever craziness is about to hit me. 

 

I dive into the next problem like my life depends on it, and, to my surprise, it goes by much quicker than the first. I have ample time to reason out the nuances of the logic statements to myself, and I find myself completing the truth table in just a few minutes. 

 

I flip the test over, deciding to make the most out of this madness before it either stops or causes me to hallucinate more. I reach the next section of the exam, and find I have to contend with a series of logic circuit puzzles. The first is fairly simple: drawing the correctly shaped ‘gates’ and wires to simulate a circuit equivalent to the given logic statement. 

 

Once more I lose myself in the task, not paying a cent of attention to the vague feeling of a feather quill in my hand. I write down the diagrams as neatly as I can, taking special care to make it clear which gates are ‘AND’, ‘OR’, or ‘NOT’.

 

I get so into the activity, that I almost don’t notice when the contents of the page before me flicker to a giant drawing filled with concentric circles, abstract shapes, and tiny winding passages of sigils from a foreign language. I’m filling in one of those little runic statements towards the bottom of the innermost circle. When I blink, I’m just finishing up the last logic gate in the diagram. I stare at the paper for a second, blearly wondering what the hell I should do. I had been completely focused on the test, what gives? Why was the hallucination able to happen anyway? 

 

I stew in silence for a few more seconds, before deciding I don’t have the time to bother worrying about it. I’ll just have to trust that I have enough un-interrupted time to myself to finish this thing.

 

I quickly hit my zoned in trance state again sketching out the gates for the second circuit puzzle, and I’m left alone for about five minutes more. Then, in a blink, I’m back to making tiny changes to the edges of the runes along the elegant middle ring of the teleportation circle on the desk before me. It takes me about a minute to notice that the paper on my desk isn’t the test again, and I feel panic well up inside me. The spike of anxiety and fear seems to short circuit the connection though, and the test flickers back into existence.

 

I take a deep breath, then let it out slowly. I really, really don’t have time for this. I can’t keep losing my focus every five minutes, or this will never get done! Then I notice something odd: the problem I’d been working on is actually filled out a little more than when I’d last seen it. Shit, maybe I’m still working on the test, even when my mind goes into fantasy land? I can still remember the runes I’d automatically written out in the illusion though, and those are definitely not on the test before me. 

 

Swearing to myself, I forge onward. When the next nonsensical shift in reality happens, I try my best to just roll with it. I watch as I write out a clause in the runic script I’ve never seen before, and I realize I know what it says: ‘Professor Wellan’s Office Node’. I don’t let the thought distract me from my trance state, but I do idly try to figure out what else I apparently ‘know’ about the intricate artwork on my desk. 

 

I seem to know that that phrase, ‘Professor Wellan’s Office Node’, is an integral part of the work. Whoever uses this would have to focus on those runes if they wanted to warp from another connected node to this specific one. I also come to understand that the diagram before me is an elaborate sigil I’m creating as a payment to my kindly spatial manipulation professor.

 

In a blink I’m back in the classroom, and I find that the problem I’d been working on before the shift is now done. 

 

What the even fuck, I think. That’s the first time I’ve felt so attuned to the changes in my perception, and it raises about a thousand more questions than it answers. But I’m exhausted, and I do not have the emotional bandwidth to deal with any of them right now. So I take a breath, and force myself to move on to the next question. When the page before me next switches to the sigil, I just keep going, doing what my instincts tell me to do. I make good progress on the sigil, and when I lift my quill from the parchment, I’m happy to find my pen and test shift back into existence, with about two more whole questions answered.

 

It goes on like this for a while, and I’m so tired all I care about is that, when I do see my test, it looks like it’s filled out as accurately as if I had done it all myself without periodically hallucinating. I even find myself catching mistakes in my work that I hadn’t previously known were mistakes. And to add to the weirdness, when I’m staring at the magical sigil, I have enough knowledge of how it’s supposed to look that I catch a few missed letters and incomplete clauses in the runic safety warnings inscribed around the edges. It’s supposed to describe the information about the area the teleportation node is placed in, everything from physical climate to the levels of latent magic in the air to specific hazards nearby that travelers should be aware of.

 

My entire will has essentially narrowed down to completing both my math test and the teleportation diagram as precisely and quickly as possible. There’s a looming deadline for both desires, after all. A glance at the clock in my classroom shows I only have half an hour to finish the last section of the exam, which is on graphical planarity. A look out the little window of the cozy wood-paneled private room that houses the teleportation sigil shows me that I have to complete it in about the same time frame, before the red sun in the sky touches the vast lake north of the city.

 

There’s a lot, and I mean a lot, of weirdness going on in my head. Far too much for my poor beleaguered psyche to process coherently. This episode of crazy is much, much longer and more detailed than any of the previous ones have been. And yet, I’m not freaked out. Partly because I don’t have time or energy to be scared of the strangeness, but also because I feel genuine gratitude whenever I feel my attention drawn to a mistake in my proofs. I even find myself feeling useful when I point out poorly worded clauses that could confuse would-be users of the teleportation node.

 

I can’t tell for sure, but I have the distinct suspicion that I’m not alone in my thoughts as all this goes on. Surges of emotions and seemingly out of context thoughts and ideas periodically flicker through my consciousness. I get the sense that the girl I’m sharing thoughts with is nearly as confused about the situation as I am, and has also decided to just go with the flow for now.

 

I don’t have the energy to try to communicate with her, but I do decide to write “thanks for the help <3” in the top right corner of the test page I’m on. Then I lose myself in the work once more.

 

---

 

I spend the last few minutes of class reviewing both my exam and the teleportation sigil. It’s felt sort of like I’m working silently with an invisible partner, only they’re in my head and we don’t actually interact at all. I just go where my attention takes me and dive into fixing whatever mistakes I catch, and I find progress being made on whichever project I’m not focusing on while I’m distracted by the other. I’ve almost gotten used to the periodic flickers in perception.

 

I lean back in my chair, tapping my pencil on my chin and reviewing everything as thoroughly as I can. I turn to the page I’d written ‘thanks’ on, and am startled to find ‘No Problem’ scribbled in blocky letters underneath it. I must not have switched back before we moved on to the next page, because this is the first time I see it. I smile a little wryly at it, and use a black pen to scribble it all out so the professor doesn’t think I cheated or whatever. That done, I blaze through the rest of my review.

 

As far as I can tell, both the test and the sigil for the spatial manipulation professor are as flawless as I know how to make them. By the time my teacher moves to stand up, I’m already putting my writing implements and calculator away.

 

“Time’s up!” Professor Faul calls out, “Please bring your exams to the front. I wish all of you a wonderful day!”

 

In a bizarre moment that feels like double deja-vu, I feel myself standing up in both the classroom and the cozy study room. I stumble a bit and catch myself on the desk, and the shock causes my connection to my mysterious partner to fade. I shake my head slightly, then move to take my test to the professor. The noises and bustle of the students around me draw my mind more and more firmly back to the classroom.

 

I see a few final flashes of the other world: the sigil parchment rolled up and stowed in a shoulder bag, then the inkwell and the quill in the act of getting tossed in as well. But the immediacy of the perceptions is fading. The sensation of the connection itself, the heightened awareness of my thoughts, grows distant, quieter, as I focus away from it. I start processing the world around me at normal speed again, and I make my peace with that. I don’t know what to make of this bizarre hour of collaboration, but I am more than happy to leave that puzzle for another time.

 

Especially seeing as I have to get to my next class now and possibly take a pop calculus quiz. I hurry out the door of the classroom and into the whitewashed halls of the squat mathematics building.

 

End of

Chapter 3.e - The Smoke

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