And Then I Woke Up

by Malcolm Devlin

Macey used to write horror stories she sold as love stories.

When I say this is a love story, I mean this is a story about someone who believed in something impossible and beautiful and dangerous with such strength of character and devotion that they followed the thread of it all the way to the very end, no matter what the world threw at them.

Night means darkness, darkness means introspection, introspection dredges up all kinds of monsters and my god, do those bastards keep us busy until dawn.

Isn’t it beautiful how stories can work like that? The subtle way they help the teller, the subversive way they reach the listener, how they creep inside you like waking dreams.

Macey once told me the problem with the truth was that it was so poorly written. Given the choice, the pleasantly told lie is always more seductive. That’s why religion is so potent, she said. Why history and science are still considered up for debate. Myth is more appealing than verified truth because the grey areas between the facts can still be used against us.

When the narrative has taken hold, it brings with it a constricting of focus; a tendency to only see what is perceived to be true at the expense of everything else.

The infection is never really gone. It isn’t communicable, but at best it’s dormant. It’s worked around, understood.

If my time in the facility has taught me anything, it’s when people insist nothing is wrong, it’s a lie to buy them time to process their situation.

There would be time for her story and the timetable was hers to define, not mine.

Not everybody, I learned, wants to know the truth.

I read voraciously, because words on a page felt committed in a way words said out loud were not.

They liked the weapons she had forged herself; they couldn’t stand the way she chose to wield them.

She wasn’t writing stories like she did because she was damaged or dark—from what I could tell, she was better adjusted than most people I knew. She found it fun. Interesting, she said. “People’s reactions to them are the most interesting of all.”

You could watch it side by side with a friend and you’d each see something different. It was the new gold/blue dress optical trick, the new yanny/laurel audio illusion, the new test to see which side of the imaginary divide you belonged.

As soon as she told me what I was supposed to be hearing, I heard it.

Macey spoke and the world clarified as though her description of it served as a corrective lens.

You try and account for the unexpected, but events have a way of taking you by surprise and you find yourself doing what I did: standing and staring, mouth gaping like an idiot.

When the dominant narrative started to snowball, the infection short-circuited our reason. It drip-fed us confirmation bias. It took the lie and weaponised it.

A certain sort of vulnerability to look at someone, a group of people and think: monster, zombie, Other.

A story told under duress is not the story ready to be told.

look at these poor fools. They’re still going about what they think of as normal life. They’re still acting out impulses to consume, consume, consume. Staring at blank televisions, pawing away at phones and laptops like they actually mean something.

“Events happen in more than two dimensions,” he says. “You have to imagine how they look from different sides, otherwise you don’t see them at all.”

I would learn later that the pink room was one of many around the town. Random acts of grand surrealism designed to make people question what they saw.

imagined I understood the nature of her silence properly. It wasn’t so much a personal silence. It was an external stillness that served to balance an internal cacophony. It was a hyperawareness, a heightened alertness.

the worst way a story can end is by someone waking up and realising everything that happened was only a dream. “It’s a cop-out,”

I felt I was alone in an unfamiliar house; I felt exposed but strangely at peace. If Leila had never been there, then maybe I had never met her. Maybe I had never been cured, maybe there’d never even been a cure.

I’m talking about comfort reads. Have you ever had those?” I considered it, then shook my head. “There’s . . . not enough time,” I said. “There’s so much else to read. So many new things.”

He wasn’t what I was looking for, he was someone I found on the way. And sometimes that’s enough.

You find someone going the same direction as you are and it’s all the connection you need when the world had turned as much as it had.

Relationships aren’t scientific, they’re not mathematical. They’re chaotic, abstract, irrational.

he was small, red, already furious with the world. I asked myself when I would know, without any doubt or duty, that I loved him.

History is one long string of stories honed to sharpen one side over another.

“I miss missing him in that way. I miss loving him so unconditionally. I miss him and I miss the disease that made me see monsters.”

How satisfying, how humiliating to think the cure had always been so easily within our grasp. Kept distant from us by our own cynicism, our own jaundiced conviction that strength lay in complexity, in convolution.

It’s a problem I have these days. Stories are addictive. I keep imagining futures for the world. I keep imagining I had a part in them, no matter how small.

Macey would’ve been proud of me. I hope Macey would’ve been proud of me.

I was never seeking forgiveness. Awad will tell me I never need to, because it was never me, it was the disease and so on and so forth, but forgiveness—while something I admit I occasionally dream of—is not a blessing I feel entitled to, let alone one I expect.

It will not bring their families back, but I hope they’ll find it serves as a conclusion, because stories deserve a proper conclusion, even if they do not—cannot—have a happy ending.

is everyone caught up in their own fictions, born of their own histories, their own conversations, their own media?