Dissociation

Elysia had always an exceptional mind, but it was failing her. She was desperately probing
through her memories, a dense matrix of shelves arranged in weeks, sectioned by occasion,
sorted alphabetically. This book was missing.

“Have you actually forgotten? I can’t believe it!” her friend chuckled.

Elysia tried not to show that it was bothering her.

“I haven’t forgotten, I’m just tired. It probably doesn’t exist anyway.”

“You’re being serious, aren’t you?! Really, you don’t remember the pizza place where we
first met?”

“It was the Japanese place. The one with the blue double-door, classical music in the
background, a chef called Miyagi…”

“No, it wasn’t.”

“I’m sure it was.”

“You don’t look too sure, girl.” They were both smiling now.

“Fine… just give me a hint or something-”

“We met at the Domino’s on High Street, did we not?”

Elysia paused. She now remembered. The sequestered part of that memory, a rogue shelf,
suddenly sprang up from the ground of her mind like it’d always been there. The details of
that day flooded her head, an avalanche of books she had seen before, so obvious and
palpable and confusing how they had went missing in the first place.

“Well, do you at least remember my name?”

“Shut up.”

Then it started happening more and more in the following few days. A fog was forming in
her library, and the shelves stood closer to each other than before. Time seemed to both
slow and quicken. She had been typing out her dissertation for university finals, but the
keys felt distant to her touch, yet the content of her work inordinately close. She then
found herself staying inexplicably still for long periods of time. She brushed it off. She
missed the bus.

That night Elysia stopped to rest on a bicycle rack by the pavement, by her apartment block,
by a busy street under a sky that was singularly dark. Illumination was the neon signs of
the shops and the blinking turn signals of an emerging traffic queue. The sounds of distal
sirens echoed and merged with a moderate breeze, sporadically interrupted by the
frustrations of cars, drivers, salesmen. A sea of indistinguishable but variable conversation
accompanied the gentle but passionate cacophony of rustling plastics, leaves and
footsteps.

Then the street tiles, perfect rows of squares and right angles, appeared to sway gently.
The words on the signage surrounding her began to morph, but without moving. The
familiar street objects began to take on surreal shapes, but only subtly, as if moulded by
an artist with a penchant for distortion.

The night progressed in a haze. She found herself wandering through the streets but
couldn’t recall starting to walk. The familiar landmarks became fragments of vague
recognition, half-remembered, fleeting. The conversations around her slurred into a
diminuendo and a vivid picture of anxiety took centre stage as everything else subsided.
She tried to grasp out into this encompassing confusion, trying to find something solid,
something real, but it was like trying to catch a handful of mist.

Elysia saw discordant dissonance. Amorphous shapes that developed and complexified the
more she thought about it, and which grew wherever she gave attention. A concrete wall
with its floor beneath smoothly driving into it, lined with divergent edges whose razor
sharpness only reflected it its shadow. A doll with perfectly circular holes as eyes, like the
rotten underside of a mushroom, that drooped across a rough, porcelain face, spotted with
incessant pores, that paled, and came to life, and paled, to the rhythm of Elysia’s heartbeat;
its eyebrows sunk just below the skin, travelling towards and linking with another
protrusion from below that slowly emerged to the top as a large, rusty, golden tear that
flowed viscously over a slim edge, one that encircled the face across its circumference that
could only be interpreted as its mouth. A shelf containing colours that pulsed from vibrant
to muted hues, each watching Elysia, each an insidious needle pricking at her thoughts,
then contorting into tendrils with a sickening fluidity in a way that mirrored its adjacent
neighbour. A clock whose hands moved in an unpredictable manner, ticking in irregular
beats and angles but only a split second after or before each beat of her accelerating heart.

She bought coffee and watched the sunrise.

“How much for these, please?”

“You need a prescription for zolpidem, dear.”

“I just need them for my sleep, please. I haven’t slept in days.” Elysia begged.

The pharmacist gave her a worried look. She had noticeable bags under her eyes, harshly
brushed over with makeup. She stood with shoulders lopsided, eyes darting from object
to object, pupils dilated and void of vitality.

“You should see a doctor.”

Elysia winced.

“I can’t control what I think, or say, or do. Twice a day now. I need answers, please.”

“I understand it must feel very distressing, Elysia…”

“Doctor, you don’t understand.”

“…but your tests show nothing abnormal. There are no signs of hallucinations. Your only
symptom is anxiety and insomnia…”

“But why do I feel dissociated from-”

“…hormonal changes can easily explain both.”

There was a pause.

“You’re completely fine, Elysia. I can prescribe therapy if you’d like.”

Elysia’s episodes continued. She began watching herself from a distance, half-detached
yet still maintaining control over the tips of her limbs. It was like watching a character in a
film, but her world couldn’t decide between the real and the surreal.

Conversations felt like rehearsals. She found herself answering before thinking of an
answer, that every word was automatic. Every moment stretched or contracted at its whim;
hours shrunk to seconds, and yet a single second could stretch on for what felt like an
eternity.

A swing, in a playground, in a park, under a sky that was singularly dark. There was a blue
double-door next to the bicycle rack, with classical music in the background. As the night
deepened, each swing became a pendulum swinging between the real and the surreal, and
she found herself on one side before thinking of the other.

She felt herself slipping into the void of dissociation. She heard an erratic rhythm of
breathing but couldn’t feel the stroke of air running through her. She stopped asking
questions or investigating what was happening. Air, swings, playgrounds, parks and skies
simply became concepts; concepts suspended in a liminal space, and the boundary
between herself and the world dissolved entirely.

But Elysia was, and always was, what she thought.