I had been slipping deeper and deeper into Depression over the last two weeks. Nothing seemed important anymore, nothing existed that I cared about. I spent most of my time playing The Sims, creating new families and new villages and installing new skins and objects. But after awhile, even that began to seem pointless. So I began to spend more and more time lying on the couch, just staring at the ceiling, occasionally with a damp towel over my head.
My family became concerned. They invited other members of my family to move in, presumably to help take care of me, although in my dazed state, it was more like they just showed up, like actors walking on stage in a play to deliver their lines and walk off again. One of them was the new wife of my uncle, who I had never met before. She was younger than even me. The other was my father. I don’t know who’s bright idea it was to bring him in on this. It was no secret that we didn’t get along.
I noticed that my father was spending a lot of time on my computer. He played this shoot-em-up game that I had never seen before and had graphics that would have been state-of-the-art in 1990, but these days just looked silly. I didn’t care that much because I wasn’t using the computer anyway, and the longer he played that game, the less time he spent trying to talk to me, trying to share what I’m sure he thought was comfort and wisdom, but in reality was just one covert insult after another.
It was during one of these so-called pep talks that I finally broke. I yelled at him, confronting him and his behavior, and the psychological abuse he’d been inflicting on me since I was born. Somehow, the angry words just flowed out of me, unlike so many times before, when I’d just freeze up and the words wouldn’t come. I don’t think it did any good, and the rest of my family were upset at me (since they never really believed that the abuse I talked about really happened in the first place), but at least I had gotten it out of my system. I felt relieved.
The next day, the Depression broke. I felt awake and renewed. I decided to get on my computer to see how my Sims were doing. But when I went into my room I was in for a shock. The computer was GONE! Nothing but dust and disconnected wires sat on the desk where it had been.
I went running for my father. “Dad,” I said, “what did you do with my computer?”
He said, “It’s gone.”
“What??? Where is it??”
“Somewhere near Abilene by now. You really shouldn’t get attached to such things.”
I couldn’t believe it. This was the thing he had always been doing, treating my personal items like they were his, selling them or giving them away without my awareness or consent, and always seeming to hone in on those toys that I was most attached to. But that had all stopped when I had grown up and moved out several years ago. Now here he was, like the old nightmare returned, and…my computer was gone!! Along with all of my Sims. That’s was hurt the most – I didn’t care so much about the mp3s, or my Netscape bookmarks, or the other various odds and ends of games like the one my father had been playing. My Sims were GONE! All that work of the last two years, erased!!
I flew into a rage. I began breaking things, overturning furniture, punching holes in the wall. I don’t know how long I spent screaming, attacking anything within reach. It felt like hours. As I grew tired, I noticed that I was all alone in the house. My family must have fled, fearing my wrath. I knew it wouldn’t last, however. They would return, possibly with the police, to drag me off to some sanitarium where they would pump me with drugs and try and tell me it was all for the best, that I must accept this fate and move on. I knew I could not let that happen.
I went to the kitchen to look for knives. I had never really looked in the kitchen knife drawers before. There were all shapes and sizes, some small, some long, some straight, some with weird angles. I spent a lot of time looking over the collection to decide which ones I would need. Finally I chose a long, straight butcher knife, a smaller paring knife, and a large pair of meat tongs. Those last seemed interesting. I had all sorts of thoughts of what I would do with those.
But as I began to leave the kitchen, a foggy haze took over me. It was like all the emotions over the last few hours had blown a circuit in my brain. Dizzy, unable to focus, I collapsed and blacked out…
I woke up to the sound of scratching on the plate glass window. It was a cat, a large orange and yellow tabby. Must be some stray, I thought. I opened the door to shoo it away. It just stared at me, curiously. “Bwanana! Took!” I shouted, speaking to it like my Sims sometimes do. For some reason I thought that would work. It didn’t.
Then I noticed my brother was in the backgarden, digging in the garden with his shirt off. “What’s up with this cat?” I asked him.
“Oh, that’s Sara,” he answered. “No wonder you didn’t recognize her. I got her to replace the old Sara.”
“Oh.”
It was overcast and gloomy outside. I’d never really noticed this vantage point before. The air hung like a mist over the shore of the lake. The shore itself was dark and muddy, with chunks of blackened wood and other debris sticking up from the dirt. But what really struck me was that it felt much cooler than before. In fact, it hadn’t felt so cold since…
“Dan,” I asked, “what day is today?”
He looked at me like I was crazy. “It’s March 29th, of course. Why do you ask?”
I was stunned. Somehow, the last two weeks of hell had been erased. I had lost days or weeks before, of course. But this was the first time I had ever woken up and found myself going BACKWARDS in time. It was like the universe had reset itself.
Then a thought of hope struck me. “Is my computer still here??”
“Of course it is!” my brother responded. “It’s in your room where it’s always been.”
With a flash I raced into the house and into my room to confirm it. Sure enough, there it was! My computer was here and my Sims were safe! Of course I had lost all the work I had done over the last two weeks, but comparing that to losing everything, I could accept that. I was happy!
But then I noticed just how much DIFFERENT everything was now. For one thing, my computer wasn’t in my bedroom at all. It was in the kitchen. And the kitchen was a tiny room, barely large enough to hold all the appliances, let alone the desk and computer. Plus, the oven door was open. I was aghast at how anyone would allow something so HOT so close to a piece of sensitive electronics! But then I noticed the refrigerator door was open too, and I understood – the cold air was flowing from the fridge to the oven and escaping up the chimney, to keep the computer cool. Since we were poor and couldn’t afford air conditioning.
And that’s when I noticed EVERYTHING had changed. My family came home, and they weren’t the same people. I lived with my father, who was married to the young women I thought my uncle had married. Except, he was a complete opposite of the person I had always known. He was kind, generous, compassionate. He understood my feelings and would never invade my privacy like his doppleganger did so capriciously. And the computer itself had changed. It looked like a cheap old Amiga or TRS-80, with a tiny screen barely four inches wide. But looks were deceiving, because it ran The Sims just fine.
Which was the biggest shock of all. The game was there, but it was not the same at all. There were houses there that I had thought about building, but never got around to it. There were families and neighborhoods that I had always had pictures in my mind of creating, but never did. There were objects and skins from websites long closed down, that I thought I would never be able to find, but always fantasized that I would find someday. In fact, every single thing in the game was from fantasy and imagination, except now it was here. Real.
And it wasn’t like I was missing any of the things I had done in real life beforehand. They were all right here, in a pack of Zip discs that I pulled out of my brain.
Suddenly, I understood. This wasn’t a time-warp…it was a parallel universe! It was a place and time where everything was made right, containing all the halves and missing pieces from the universe I had inhabited before. Except, now I could pass between them at will, and anything that happened in one world, no matter how evil, I would understand, because I knew there was a good side in the opposite world. Many times I had met people who seemed to have no problems at all, who seemed to wink at me in a sly way, like they understood how things really worked and their problems did not faze them. At last, I understood. They held the secret to the universe, one that I now shared. I felt a powerful sense of peace and fulfillment that I had never experienced before without the use of powerful drugs. Everything was all right now, and would always be. I had crossed over.
Then I woke up. EVERYTHING had been a dream. All of it.
I don’t even have a cat named Sara.