"Is there something underlying
The melancholy in my mind?"

I am one sick fuck.

I boot up the monitor.

Or at least I feel like one.

I punch in my password.

As far as anyone can tell, I’m just a regular 23 year old guy.

I pull up my browser.

Unless they saw my browser history.

I open an incognito tab.

They’d think there’s something wrong with me.

I brought up the subreddit.

And they’d be right!

I take a deep breath in.

Calm down, it’s just a fetish. I think to myself.

Exhale that breath.

Then why have I never been able to shake this feeling that something is seriously wrong with me?

It’s haunted me my whole life. Long before I discovered auditory erotica, before graduation, the pandemic, and getting depressed I knew there was a problem. I paused to reflect before scrolling down the page.

You’ve had body issues since the start of high school. Deep down you remember that this sense of wrongness about your body has lingered since childhood. You grew up in a loving family and you made some really good friends. You tried to do your best to fit in and be normal for them but I guess I still turned out fucked.

I took another deep breath in and held it a little while before exhaling. 

You’re working with what you’ve got and trying to make the most of it. Too uncomfortable with your own body to touch yourself? Introducing the hands free orgasm baby!  Never got addicted to traditional porn but laid off, locked down and unable to outrun yourself any longer, you’re in deep now Archie.

Finally I started scrolling. 

This was a subreddit I’d found for erotic audio files. Honestly, it wasn’t the first I’d frequented but this latest one had all the good stuff. From spicy leaked Only Fans ASMR audio to guided meditations for increasing sexual energy to commissioned self hypnosis sessions and everything in between, I’ve been going further and further down the rabbit hole for weeks now.

Which brings me to tonight.

I discovered a new audio file.

The post was made a couple of days ago. Coincidentally, it was only a few hours old when I first read its description but it’s been running through my mind ever since:

Once you enter this trance, there is no going back.

Once you press play, the spiral begins.

Your obsession has brought you here.

The answers you seek lay within.

What you do with the truth is up to you.

Reading these mysterious lines for the first time sent a chill up my spine. It was silly of me. Really. Plenty of fetish trances came with vague warnings like this and it’s not like listening to it was going to actually cause anything to happen to me. Most of the fun of getting off this way is that it’s all in your head. Cryptic uploads are meant to enhance that experience. It’s more exciting when you play along and pretend that you’re really doing something irreversible and dangerous. It’s from that suspension of disbelief that I really started to feel turned on listening to degenerate shit like this. 

But what kind of degeneracy is this? My curiosity had been piqued and I wanted to make up my mind. Was I going to check it out or not? What kind of answers would I find? It was when I went to the comments section to double check I wasn’t about to download a virus that things started to get weird.

First, listeners couldn’t agree on the length of the audio file. Upon downloading spiral.mp3, users experienced similar download times for files of varying sizes. They were all high quality audio recordings but they varied in length from around 45 minutes to up to 4 hours. The content was also different according to each user. For some, it was simply a really good furry or inflation HFO. For others, it was more dramatic. Several users claimed they went into intense trances that resulted in subtle changes to their bodies.

In the days that followed, the comments piled up. As more and more users listened to the file, the reported effects became more extreme. Naturally, this drew trolls who claimed it was all fake. People would announce their intentions to listen to the file in order to debunk the whole thing only to never report back with their findings. The more time that went by, the stranger it all seemed. Jokes were made that spiral.mp3 was a magical cursed audio file with individual results unique to each listener. Yet there was absolutely no way that could be real right? 

I’d scrolled down to the infamous download link.

Thinking back on how I got here sounds like something out of a bad creepy pasta. Except I had felt the pull of spiral.mp3. With each new listener, the strange allure of the file grew and it felt like it was an itch that I needed to scratch. My imagination was running wild. I’d never told anyone my dirty little secret. Would anything happen to my body? Would anybody notice? Why did the haters never respond once they apparently started the file? How long would it be before it gets taken down? How long would it be before I found out for myself?

Which brings me to right now.

I’m going to listen to it.