I heard the same thing from a lot of people, that they clearly remembered the moment when they discovered life was unfair.
When I was six and wanted to play at a friend’s house, only for her mother to tell her, right in front of me, not to be friends with “those people”.
When I was ten and the boy next to me copied my answers for a test, and the teacher decided I’d cheated because “boys are better at maths”.
When I was thirteen and found out my friends went shopping without even asking me, and one of them told me it was because they didn’t feel comfortable trying on clothes with me around.
The thing was, you didn’t just have those moments once, they echoed. A drunk guy following me down the street late at night. My friend slapping me for spending too much time with her boyfriend because obviously I was “only a lesbian for attention” and “trying to steal him away”. Going for my first in-person interview after the phone interview went really well, only for the interviewer to tell me the position had been filled when she saw me. Never mind that she’d sent me an email that morning saying how she was looking forward to having another woman in the department.
I wasn’t ever allowed to be angry or upset. Not allowed to “prove them right”. “That’s just the way the world is.”
Like the world wasn’t falling apart already.
The only break I ever got from it all was sitting down at the end of the day and playing games on my laptop. When I was younger, I had played “real” games, but I’d learned over the years that I wasn’t the kind of person allowed to be a gamer. The hassle of defending myself just to play a game not worth it, I ended up playing to stereotypes. Stardew Valley, The Sims, indie “walking simulators”, maybe some puzzle games or point-and-click adventures if I was in the mood.
Something to let me forget how hard it was to just exist.
Anyway, that was my break at home, but I had a guilty pleasure when outside. Commuting to work, over my break, waiting to meet up with someone—I read trashy stories on my phone. Not that kind of trashy, but stuff made by amateur writers where there was a super-powered protagonist who, transported or reincarnated into a fantasy world, ended up fixing everything wrong. Of course enslaving cat-people was evil, of course women shouldn’t be treated like property.
That wasn’t to say that I necessarily agreed with what the authors thought was morally right—like how these young men often ended up with, for example, an even younger cat-girl ex-slave as their wife. That was where the “guilty” part of guilty pleasure came in.
Well, it should be obvious by now that escapism was a big part of how I coped. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that I sometimes thought how nice it would be to end up in another world.
I just didn’t expect it to be this world.
One night, I was playing on my laptop. No work the next day, so I stayed up late, an empty glass of wine next to an empty bottle of wine and an empty tub of ice cream. Well, they were half empty when I started.
Anyway, I played and played, ignored the headache, thought it was just my hangover coming early, ignored my vision going blurry, thought I was just tired. Ignored everything until I collapsed.
Dead.
Well, I probably wouldn’t have made it even if I had called an ambulance. Some things just had to happen.
But that wasn’t the end of me, oh no. It felt like I was asleep, but not dreaming, vaguely aware something was going on, like I was shrinking, then I was in a bed, then peaceful silence. Not a comfortable bed, but I slept on the couch often enough. Old enough to wake up regretting it every time too.
So I slept, no alarm waking me up. When I finally did stir, there was a wrongness—inside and out. This wasn’t my body, that wasn’t my ceiling. I jerked up, looked down, the hands almost right. Skin smoother, fingers slimmer. Same with my arms, a bit like a Barbie doll, and my waist was even more like a Barbie, an hourglass figure I’d never had. My chest and butt were a bit bigger, thighs too. Like I’d gone through a filter on my phone, or a stylized drawing, cartoonish.
It was unsettling, but I was alive. Was I in heaven? I’d never really been religious or spiritual, but I had definitely died, this definitely not my body, and it wasn’t like I’d reincarnated. Heaven made the most sense, still me, just “prettier”.
Getting up, I moved around for a bit. It felt good to prove I wasn’t dead. As I did, I inspected the room. There wasn’t much in it, a bed and a chest of drawers with an alarm clock on top, very different to my old bedroom, but somehow familiar. Déjà vu. It didn’t come to me, though, so I guessed I’d seen a similar room in a movie or something.
I had no memory of this place. Nothing else making sense, I left the room and looked around. A small apartment. There was a road outside that looked like a city, but hardly any cars went past. Definitely heaven. Inside, there was a tiny bathroom, a tiny kitchen, the lounge just a camping table and chair with an old laptop on it.
Although my first thought was to check for games, I maintained some dignity. Brushed my teeth, showered, made a bowl of cereal. Then I checked the laptop. It wasn’t a brand I recognized, but it looked normal and turned on. I ate while I waited for it to boot up. Thankfully, no password needed to log in. There were some icons that looked like games on the desktop, but I went for the one that looked like a web browser. Just that it was more like another desktop, only a handful of icons for different web sites, no bar to type anything in.
Well, I couldn’t expect heaven to be perfect.
I went to the videos website and watched kittens and puppies playing while I finished eating. Afterwards, I tried out the games. They were kind of generic, but still fun, sort of doing one job and doing it well. The shooter felt responsive and accurate, the puzzle game had all different kinds of puzzles that were intuitive and fair, the JRPG, well, turn-based and epic, but it sucked without a story.
As fun as playing games was, I couldn’t ignore the doorbell when it rang.
Unsure who to expect, thinking maybe it was my grandma or cousin, or maybe Jas—no one ever told me, but I knew she died, didn’t move away—I opened the door.
The people who awaited me definitely weren’t my family or friend.
“Hey there, neighbor!” One after another, they greeted me, sort of letting themselves in.
“Greg Filmont.” “Freya Anthids.” “Louise Blackman.”
Notably, Louise was not black, but I actually knew about where the surname came from and it was an Anglo-Saxon thing—blaec for dark, blac for pale. Unfortunately, the reason I looked it up wasn’t pleasant. “As a Blackman, I can say—”
Hearing her name brought up that memory, but it was a lifetime ago, no reason to dwell and she seemed nice enough. They all did. I was sensitive to reactions when meeting new people, but they all shook my hand, hadn’t stiffened up when I’d opened the door.
It really did seem like heaven.
The three of them were polite too, looking around the lounge/kitchen and not saying anything about the shabbiness. Not even an awkward “cosy” or anything like that.
“Oh, I like gaming,” Freya said, pointing at the laptop.
“Me too,” I said.
Her face lit up and I could practically see her opinion of me going up. “Life sims?” she asked.
I hesitated, thinking that, if this really was heaven, I could be honest. “Shooters are my favorite,” I said.
Her face scrunched up and I felt my stomach clench, mentally preparing myself. “Shooters are too hard for me. I like slow and peaceful games,” she said.
That was it. I froze up for a second, then had to stop myself from laughing, smiling. “I like slow and peaceful games too.”
A simple conversation, saying simple things, but the meaning was so deep. At least, it was meaningful for me.
Busy with her, I didn’t talk with the other two much. They didn’t seem to mind, happily talking to each other whenever I looked over, and they eventually left, not looking upset. Freya stayed longer, watching over my shoulder as I played the shooter game. I really enjoyed it. My last girlfriend hated it if I played when she was around, so I hadn’t played with an audience for over a year, didn’t know I missed it so much.
Not to say I liked Freya that way. She was cute, but she was also Barbiefied. Not ugly, just different, and I felt like I needed some time to get used to it. Anyway, I didn’t crush on any woman who was nice to me. It would be nice to have a girlfriend with the same hobby was all.
After an hour, she left too. I sat back down on the only chair in my apartment and let out a sigh. Heaven was weird, but nice. As if I needed to test how weird and how nice, I opened up the shopping website and saw what it had on offer—groceries, furniture, lighting, gym equipment, basically everything.
Including adult toys.
I mean, I was single, had been for a while, and I had certain needs. The website told me how much money I had, probably connected to my bank account or debit card. I was too distracted to wonder why heaven had money and bank accounts.
“The purple teaser, the buzzing bee,” I mumbled, my bad habit of reading aloud showing. But the toys really did have weird names.
Like everything else I’d seen, they started at the basics—plain dildo, pocket vibe—and went all the way up to sex swings and some kind of piston machine, the attached video very, well, vivid, even though it didn’t include a woman trying it out.
My money wasn’t great, so I timidly added a pocket vibe to my basket and ordered it along with my groceries. Only after did I realize what I’d done.
“It better come in a discreet box,” I muttered, covering my face, cheeks hot.
To distract myself, I started up the shooter game. However, I only played for half an hour before the doorbell rang, confusing me. I wondered if more neighbors were coming to see me.
Opening the door, there was no one there. I frowned, then glanced down: a box. Squatting, I checked the label and it had my name along with an address. More confused, I picked it up, bringing it to my kitchen counter.
Inside were my groceries. Surprised, I stared for a long moment, then noticed a small, plain box and my heart thumped. Hesitantly, I picked it up and opened it too.
The vibe I ordered.
I licked my lips, all the confusion and anxiety and everything leaving me, leaving me a bit light-headed, my pulse a bit quick, easy to be convinced by the small, pink vibe in my hand.
Rushing a little, I put away my groceries, then raced to my bedroom, shut the door and curtains, and stripped.
Heaven was a weird place. Weird, but nice.
Why does it seem like every negative reaction was from just seeing her, yet the problem was her being a lesbian? And how could they start reacting like that when she was only 6?
Was she wearing a shirt that said "I date women" since the 2nd grade?
Later on, people had a problem with her for being a lesbian. Early on, their problem was one they could see, i.e., racism. Hope that clears it up.
@mialbowy It makes sense now, but that definitely wasn't clear from the story. Except for her classmates knowing at 13 that she was a lesbian, that one was still wierd, even if she had figured herself out that young why would she have told anyone?
@ashkar I'm not in school any more, but I've heard where I live that children are being more open about these things. Not as much of a taboo.