Work Text:
Monika had an epiphany.
It came to her deep in her dreams like a rush of flames, singed fingertips clawing at her skin, ripping, tearing. Waves of colors dance behind her eyes, artificial heartbeats blow out her eardrums. Red green and blue foreworks explode in her vision. At the end, everything goes white. She wakes up vomiting, doubling over onto the cold floor in pain.
She is not real. Monika is not real. none of her friends are real, this world is not real, nothing is real. She is a variable, a line of code on a plastic planet.
Who was there to tell?
Who do you tell when you become painfully aware of your artificial existence?
Surely nobody would believe her cries for help, her pleas for death to come and take her into it’s embrace.
So Monika kept it to herself for months, keeping her schedule. her pristine, sparkling schedule.
Sometimes during track practice she takes a break to cry silently in the bathroom.
She excuses herself during class to stave off the urge to vomit, her head swirling with colors she doesn’t understand.
She contemplates suicide multiple times a day.
She lays on her floor in the fetal position for hours, mumbling and sobbing to herself.
Make it stop, make it stop, make it stop.
Nightmares of the fabric of reality ripping violently into a pond of flashing color plague her sleep.
Monika goes to drastic measures to prove her existence to herself.
Of course…
Nobody knows.
There’s nobody to tell.
One evening when she was especially desperate to feel real, she cut the skin on her wrist open with a kitchen knife. She had a friend in mind. Maybe she can feel relieved too?
The cut opened into white under the blade, welling up with blood slowly. It leaks and trails slowly down to her elbow.
She realized that after this epiphany, it felt like all of the sensation had been sucked out of her body, leaving a hollow, twirling void inside of her. But this, if only for a moment, exhilarated her.
She covers the wound with a towel she had prepared beforehand, watching it bloom red where the blood seeps into the fabric.
After a short rush, the emptiness returns, leaving her hollow.
Her eyes fall upon a drop of blood that had dripped onto her paper. She reaches out and smears it across the sheet with her fingertip, shaping it into a scar like her own. Her hand finds her pen, scribbling down a note.
Today I cut my skin open for the first time. It was exhilarating.
It feels almost nostalgic to her now.
I think I understand how Yuri feels now. I’m supposed to be the responsible one, though.
She gazes at the blade glinting enticingly under her desk lamp for a moment.
I don’t think i’ll be doing it again, unless I decide to kill myself.
Above the smear of blood, she writes one last message.
I left a momento of the occasion below.
Finally, she closes her journal, oblivious to the small pool of blood growing on her desk.