Melinda.
Melinda was having the dream again, and in it, she was the only person alive.
The only existence within an all-consuming void that allowed for neither touch, scent, nor even sound.
It was a subliminal space…
One of near-complete sensory deprivation.
Of absence.
A realm wherein the only thing she could be certain to exist was her own thoughts, and even then, who could really say if they were real, to begin with?
Indeed, the lone factor that could have been said to keep her somewhat sane amidst the endless void of all things, trapped within the confines of an infinite pocket of a realm with no beginning or end, was the singular object of permanence beyond her own consciousness.
While it helped, in its own way, if for no other reason beyond the notion that it itself was present amidst the lack of everything else, it was no less infuriating as it was nonsensical.
Improbable from any reasonable perspective, and highly likely a cruel joke that something within the endless domains thought was personally amusing.
And it, for lack of any better way to describe it, was a little blue window.
This was, of course, bizarre for any number of reasons one might choose to note.
That it hovered right at what should have theoretically been eye level was one thing.
That it could somehow be seen, despite herself being entirely incorporeal, was another.
And ignoring the glow it presented, which was both bright and obnoxiously omnipresent, nothing else surrounded it within the field of luminance that it offered.
Bizarrely, there was the tiny addition that, for all intents and purposes, the damned thing looked like some cheap Windows XP popup.
One of those ever-so-familiar sorts that was assured to give oneself a virus just by having it on screen.
A modern-day marvel of historic coding that, quite honestly, likely belonged in some museum or other that celebrated the golden age of a virtual wild west.
Yes, there were many, many odd factors she could reasonably point to. Yet, perhaps, the single most infuriating of such was that it persisted as though to spite her own existence!
The dreamscape manifestation, or possibly, given the general absence of anything possessing its own tangibility, lack thereof, practically mocked her in a way that rankled the girl's nerves as few things in life really could.
Hovering there—menacingly, all alien and queer in its dull backlit glow, waiting as though before the purview of a woman who didn't exist.
Content to merely taunt her as it floated before eyes that she couldn't even be certain were real for all their lack of current physical properties…
Truth be told, Melinda herself had, for the first two nights since this had all begun, not even realized the—well, the place in which she now subsisted had even been the same from dream to dream!
Hadn't connected that they were carbon copies of each other if such a barren waste of nothingness could be attributed as such… Her time within the inky pitch was nearly unchanged, save, of course, for two rather curious aspects.
First was how the small semi-transparent window seemed to pulse with vibrant insistence, her attention constantly refocusing on the ridiculous yet frustratingly alluring scrawled text upon its softly luminescent surface.
Text that not only held a continuously draining timer but also presented a sort of nagging itch whose demand for her to pay it heed, only grew with each passing minute her mind willfully and purposefully ignored it.
Regardless of how her drifting consciousness flitted away, usually upon errant tangents of thought which were as equally random as they were at times inspired through forceful determination, she never could wholeheartedly resist its cosmic call.
She could pretend it didn't exist all she wanted, look away, try and focus on puppies or her favorite music! Yet the lapse of understanding toward the fact that the phantasm was still present, no matter how she tried to ignore it, never fully manifested…
Her mind was always, invariably, disrupted by intrusive thoughts stemming from the invasive presence itself, returned to it no matter how hard she tried otherwise.
Sometimes, Melinda purposefully made a game of seeing how long she could hold out until she could scarcely ignore the box any longer, attention snapping to it like a rubber band mixed with a freshly burning rock of crack!
She'd yield to it, as she usually did… unable to truly help herself or resist its alien insistence, regardless of its absurdity.
Re-reading and re-considering, if for a brief, confused span of time, what it had to offer, just as she did now, just as she had countless times before…
Inevitably, she'd pass the ridiculous nonsense off, as she was already prone to do given how many times the cycle had already occurred, distancing herself and doing her best to focus anywhere else in an eternal contest of unending cat and mouse.
She'd scoff at the box's laughable contents, poke fun at and find holes within its proffered opportunities and stupid logic, ultimately disregarding its presence with haughty indifference as the, quite frankly, impossible thing that it was. Until, like clockwork, it gratingly brought her back.
It was, perhaps, an annoying but nevertheless workable issue she could deal with in light of refusing to acquiesce to her mind's own nocturnal shenanigans. It was already bad enough she was dying, but for her final days, or rather, nights to be filled with such unnatural emptiness…
Well, needless to say, Melinda had a definite bone to pick with her brain that she hoped could transcend the physical, if only so she could manage a semblance of sweet, sweet revenge against her own imagination.
"Seriously…" She thought, scowling at the small window as it roped her back in to read for the umpteenth time. "Less than a week to live, and I don't get to be a superhero or even a billionaire blowing all their money, not even in my dreams?"
She felt cheated by her own mind, betrayed even! And rightly so, as instead of anything interesting, all her usually overactive and insomnia-inducing imagination could manage was little else save this? What even was this?
"The infinite dark here to consume my soul for liking too much black makeup and listening to Metallica and the odd Slayer songs? Have I been corrupted by the forces of evil and press-ganged into purgatory for wearing fishnets and combat boots to school?"
She could have laughed! While it was true that dressing in a palette that was either monochromatically dark, dark red, or purple was her usual go-to, those aspects hardly seemed deserving of being labeled as some—penultimate evil, earning herself such a fate as she'd been bestowed with…
Had her supposed 'destruction' of her only family, the phrase heavily laden with sarcasm even in her own mind, just because she didn't want to go to church every Sunday and pray been the heavenly, antithetical nail in her metaphysical and metaphorical coffin?
And now this was to be her, what?
Her repentance?
Forced to endure this quasi-wakeful nightmare of a vacuum for all of eternity?
Quite honestly, at this point, Melinda would have been sneering—if only she had a mouth to do so. Which, in being denied, was honestly more of a perfect 'fuck you' to herself than she could otherwise reasonably come up with.
So, bravo, her, she supposed…
In truth, she didn't find the crime exactly fit the punishment here. Sure, maybe she hadn't been the best daughter in the world or the most cooperative student, but her grades had always been high regardless.
Plus, it wasn't like she'd wandered home high on oxy or popping Percs in the back of some beer-bellied, handlebar-mustachioed hillbilly's truck…
No.
She'd never gotten herself pregnant, hadn't ever spent a night in jail or even been arrested!
All Melinda had wanted was to be left alone by those desiring so badly to meddle in her interests and personal time, which, in a weirdly prophetic and roundabout way given how quickly her family had stopped visiting, was, depressingly, precisely what she'd always hoped for.
"Your wish is my command!" She lazily mocked, offering the universe an imagined single-finger salute as her consciousness hung there, lost amidst the encroaching expanse of gloom.
Honestly, this time around was a little more eye-twitchingly annoying than the last as, unlike that initial evening she'd been here, or the second for that matter, Melinda was, for the first time, fully cognizant of her own thoughts, a deviation from what otherwise might be observed as the norm towards a fairly problematic issue.
Melinda was dying…
Yes, she already knew that, and yes, she'd come to terms with the fact that her relatively short life was, maybe a touch unfairly, coming to an abrupt end.
That said, Melinda knew that life could be as cruel as it was, at times, meaningless. Her natural tilt towards that admittedly bleak and strangely liberating way of thinking, bizarrely enough, was the very same reason why she enjoyed living as she had.
If anything, now Melinda had been ratified in her laissez-faire attitude towards existence!
In her adherence to nihilistic values that, at times, could be misconceived as pessimistic cynicism to those around her, Melinda's therapist and parents included.
Yet, the truth of the matter was so much less…
Honestly, from a young age, she'd just understood how small and insignificant her place in the universe truly was, and from there, had built an idyllic foundation around herself, propagating her desires to simply do as she pleased, knowing full well how little she actually mattered within the cosmos's grander schemes.
Melinda didn't listen to rock and metal because she worshiped Satan, hmph, dear God, she did it because she thought the guys on stage were weirdly kickass with all their makeup, tight leather, and—sexy, sweating bodies…
Heck, Mindy wished she could sing and play guitar half as awesomely as they did and join them up there!
Also, the lyrics often resonated with her sometimes dour mood. A subject, as such, that she couldn't necessarily help but that she doubted would ever change.
She was who she was, after all.
Likewise, Mindy had always worn darker colors because those were the ones she found to make her otherwise pallor and snow-white ass pop with flattery.
And, she dressed herself in clothes that accentuated the captivating curves of her slim body, an issue she'd been called to the office for on several occasions, not just to make her male teachers uncomfortable, though it was sort of fun!
No, it was more because she liked sex and was using her outfits to very clearly celebrate that fact! To invigorate herself and her confidence, not to mention invite others to openly approach and be her partner for a day, a week, or however long until she or they got bored and sought out a change of pace.
Everything Melinda did in her life usually had a reason, but whenever she tried to explain a damned thing, people just wanted to shove 'pills' and 'programs' so far up her puckered star that it was no surprise her default response to life and, by extension, people, had become: be a raging bitch.
Earnestly, she was as much a product of her environment as she was her own outlook on the world… knowing full well that if she'd just been allowed to tend to her own devices, been left alone to just live within the perfectly reasonable expectations of the vast majority of those around her, Melinda might just have been the fun-loving, slightly slutty, but good-natured girl who was everyone's friend!
The very same one that just did things at her own pace instead of the perhaps more cliché goth trollop riddled with STIs. And, of course, that worshiped the devil, as it had been so openly proclaimed of her and as she'd been labeled by the majority of adults or peers that supposedly knew her.
Parents, doctors, teachers, or other kids in high school, it didn't seem to matter which… One could honestly take their pick…
Growing up in the rural Midwest haven of all things Jesus and right-wing had been more than a thorn in her side, mainly since she'd fought against conformity tooth and nail, always believing people should be allowed to do as they pleased within the bounds and scope of the law.
After all, why else have the fucking things if not as the baseline of what you were allowed to do?
Ha!
It was just as well she had realized that her time was likely coming to an end as being forced to swallow so many ideals and morals from fake pretenders who cultivated their idealized perfect lives on social media while seated atop their high horses to preach at Melinda and condemn her just for trying to do the same, only in reality rather than the digital, was—frankly, long-winded and exhausting…
Perhaps, from a particular perspective, her untimely fate could even have been said to be a mercy of sorts…
Like putting down a wounded animal that had just been fucking kicked and stomped on by a gaggle of teenage shitheads…
The same kind that had fewer brains between them all than the goddamned chicken nuggets their parents fed them as children rather than actually cooking real food… The lack of nutritional value possibly serving to explain how thoroughly fucked in the head they all were.
Yet, despite everything, Melinda's own outlook on her current state largely concluded that her time was running out, of that, the young woman was confident.
She didn't have anything so concrete as evidence toward the scientific, yet the correlation of her brain's activity here as she slowly found her waking hours ever more detached and hazy was, in reality, a glaring sign that she likely wasn't long for the world.
It had been a rapid decline, the likes nobody had really expected. A spiraling descent of health so drastic that the scans they'd taken of her brain were likely still warm from the machine…
At first, during that initial night, Melinda could hardly string two sentences together within the confines of her mind whilst floating amidst the infinite, just existing in a state of near-catatonic impotence.
Only for Melinda to wake the following morning and realize that her faculties weren't as clear as they had once been.
A pattern emerged when, upon her second night, trapped within this strange dreamscape, her thoughts had come slightly easier than they had during the day, and once waking up, yet fully able to recall her time in the void, Melinda's mind had, in a distressingly familiar way.
Perhaps the biggest outlier among them was her parents coming in for a short span to discuss 'options'. The phrase 'coma' having been thrown around by more than one set of lips.
Pulling the plug had naturally, given her relationship with her mother and father, specifically, been their ultimate decision. Which was strangely pragmatic of the pair, given medical costs and what she herself knew of their somewhat lackluster insurance and savings.
She hadn't been named dead as of yet, legally speaking. But something told Melinda that, when she woke, if she ever did so again, she would do so as a doll, unresponsive and unintelligent.
The visible path of events she was already trailblazing, leaving her as little more than a pale imitation of what she'd once been…
Alive, if by the strictness of clinical definitions, but gone in mind, body, and perhaps even spirit.
It was, actually, sort of an astoundingly terrifying premise when one really sat down and gave it thought…
One that she ardently hoped wouldn't be artificially extended through the powers of now-horrifying modern medicine. She didn't want to be some 'husk' kept alive by pumps and electronics, didn't want to waste away while stuck like a helpless vegetable.
If it were her time, then, well, then let it come!
Brave words, to be sure, especially for somebody so young, but, in contrast, Melinda hadn't ever considered herself as such.
In her mind, she was trying to escape, not confront the possible worst-case scenario of her situation.
Escape the chance she might be imprisoned within her own brain, mindless as much as she was hollow and zombie-like.
That, more than anything else, Melinda viewed as a fate far worse than death itself… and one, at that moment, she decided she'd do anything in her limited power to avoid, even if it meant taking a hair-brained leap of faith towards insanity itself…