Chapter 1: Who (Isn’t) Looking for Alice.
Chapter 1: Who (Isn’t) Looking for Alice.
I’m tired.
So tired that for a moment I can’t even see or hear the colors and noise that exploded in my head just a second ago.
I’m still not ready to let go of it.
I don’t even know where I am, or what I’m doing here - what I did before…
I force my eyes open so everything will come back, and suddenly I’m back there again.
Back to all the noise and color.
That carnival pulses through my body and I never want to leave.
Everything here is good.
So much better.
Clyde would laugh at me.
He says he doesn’t believe in “good.” That there’s no such thing.
When I tell him he’s good, he just looks at me and smiles. I never know what he wants from me with that smile, but he doesn’t say.
He just pulls something out of one of the boxes he always carries on him and offers it to me like it’s the most tempting thing in the world.
He offers me things.
Simple things I never seem able to get on my own.
He gives me quiet.
Darkness.
Escape.
Relief.
Colors.
Scents.
Entire worlds.
Experiences.
He’s always mesmerized by me, as if in his world I’m made of some kind of magic he can’t produce.
He gives me whole worlds, yet all I want is to be in a world with him.
I never say that out loud. He doesn’t like hearing it.
The first time it slipped out by accident, the second time he claimed he’d locked the door, and now he just smiles at me like I’m his treasure and tells me his world is full of dark, shadowy monsters, and he doesn’t want them to see me.
He says I belong only to him and he doesn’t want to share me with anyone.
He says his monsters are bad.
And dark.
And shadowy.
And they hate the light.
And I’m all light.
So we only meet in my worlds now, and I make sure everything is filled with enough color and light that his monsters will never be able to enter.
Just the way he wants.
Every time we meet there I try harder and harder. I don’t care - everything is so much easier here.
No matter how colorful it gets, somehow it calms me, and I try to calm him.
I want everything, as long as he stays.
He barely lets me see him in the real world.
He says I don’t really want to, but I don’t understand what that means.
I don’t understand much with him.
Actually, that’s not entirely true.
I do see him often in the real world, but he’s like a shadow. By the time I reach him he’s almost gone, always appearing just one step ahead.
Sometimes I think I don’t care about too many things, but I love shadows, and I love him.
I don’t have many voices in my head.
Sometimes it doesn’t feel that way even to me, but truly - I don’t.
The voices in my head don’t like each other, which is funny because they belong to two people who barely know each other.
Clyde loves me.
His voice always encourages me to seek relief.
I hear him whispering in a soft, almost hypnotic tone that I’m beautiful and enchanting, and I feel dizzy - almost like after an especially good night.
He always pulls me toward him, standing there with open arms, waiting.
Julian’s voice hates him.
I don’t know why.
It feels strange sometimes, not understanding instead of just failing to understand - but that’s how it is.
Julian doesn’t hate anyone, but him he really hates.
Julian’s voice is always calm.
He loves talking to me just to talk.
Sometimes I like resting my head on his knees and imagining I’m showing him my world, but that’s only imagination.
He always says he loves me exactly where I am right now.
When I’m with him.
He says he doesn’t need to see a world he can’t always see anyway, and he’d rather just see me.
I think he’s afraid of my world, but when I told him there were only two monsters there and none of them would hurt him, he got a little angry.
Julian almost never gets angry with me, but he did then.
He told me I couldn’t be a monster because monsters don’t have angel wings, and the next day he bought me a necklace with a blue teardrop.
It was beautiful, and he told me it was a teardrop of angels - like me - but that it wouldn’t hurt me because angels can’t hurt.
I didn’t tell him I don’t really believe in angels, but he already knows.
He looked at me with such beautiful eyes after that that I’ve never taken the teardrop off.
About the other monster, he said nothing.
I don’t think he knows.
I start to hear Julian’s voice now, when I can’t create any more colors.
It scares me.
Clyde always said his monsters come from the dark.
He tells me to follow him.
Julian tells me to calm down.
To breathe.
To remember.
Suddenly I don’t want to.
I finally found Clyde - I don’t want to leave him.
Not yet.
I’m not there and I don’t want to remember.
I don’t want to be with him - not now.
I don’t want him to get hurt, but it’s the truth, and he asked me to swear I’d never lie to him no matter what I do.
It makes me sad, but then I stop hearing his voice.
I have something.
I don’t know if it’s made up, or something sitting in my mind.
A memory or just the byproduct of imagination.
Suddenly Julian’s voice returns.
I don’t know how long it’s been since I last heard him or saw him, but suddenly he’s there, and suddenly I’m breathing again even though I didn’t know I was suffocating.
His voice is tempting.
Almost more tempting than Clyde’s, and sometimes I feel so torn between them it’s like someone froze my entire existence. Just like that.
And when that happens, even my imagination can’t help.
His voice is soft.
Like always, when I escape to his house.
I open the door to his room and he always wakes up and pulls me into him.
He hides me from the world.
Sometimes he laughs and says he hides me so well I end up hiding even from him.
His voice wraps around me.
Comforts me.
And I hate it because it makes me want him.
He doesn’t deserve that.
Any of this.
He’s not supposed to make me want to stay here.
Not in this world that’s so gray.
I open my eyes and I don’t really understand where I am or what I’m seeing. Again.
I’m not used to waking up at hours when the sun shines so harshly, and after so many hours of seeing nothing that isn’t practically psychotic, I’m not sure what I’m seeing.
My dream was good - I didn’t want to wake from it - but it always ends.
I hate that it ends.
Everything is filled with color and scent, like an endless carnival, and somehow I feel that inside, behind my eyelids, I can still see it all.
I try to savor the feeling - it’ll fade soon, and I’ll be left in a dreary, gray reality, too quiet, predictable, repetitive.
I don’t understand this world anymore.
A gray place.
No scent, no color, no taste.
Everything is flat and painful.
I hate waking up.
My head always hurts in a way that shouldn’t be possible.
At night I can at least keep dreaming.
In the morning you find out it was all an illusion, but at night you can imagine whatever you want.
Live where you want.
Feel what you want.
Be whoever you want.
It’s all so tempting I sometimes wonder why people bother stopping.
Little moments of good I’m always forced to pause like in a movie - but everything is so much better there that on the really, really bad days, I don’t understand why I bother at all.
It’s not like someone will come looking for me if I go back to Wonderland.
No one looked for Alice, right?
On good days, I know Julian would look for me.
But today I’m not really sure where I am.
Everything always disappears in the sun, fades - as if it decided it’s the only source of light and color the world needs, bleaching everything else.
Clyde laughs at my hatred of the sun, but he always says the moon lets the real monsters come out to breathe.
I never understand what he means, but I prefer the night too.
You can *be* there.
Clyde laughs when he says it, and I never know which one of us he’s calling a monster.
I don’t mind being a monster if it means he’ll look at me the way he sometimes does.
It’s funny sometimes, but not to Clyde.
He just gets closer, kisses my cheek, and calls me Alice, as if it’s a term of endearment and not just my name.
I call him Cheshire.
It always makes him laugh.
I never know why.
All this comes back when Julian’s voice keeps talking to me.
His voice is still there.
Even when I insist on running from him, he catches me in a hug and caresses every part of me.
He fills me so completely that all I can feel is him.
He makes me want to stay, but I still don’t understand why, even though I hate it and don’t want it -
I still want to.
I don’t remember falling asleep again, but eventually I woke up.
Again.
No more ringing, no lights, and it almost hurts.
The only thing I still remember from the night is Clyde.
I think it’s the first time he really talked to me beforehand, and I beg myself to remember.
“Clyde, are you here?” I ask.
I try not to sound so desperate, but I can’t help it.
He isn’t here.
I don’t know where he *is*, but he isn’t here.
I’m so surprised and not surprised it actually hurts.
He almost never wakes up with me in the morning.
I know he studies too, but in the morning he’s always gone.
Suddenly my phone rings - my alarm, something I wouldn’t have heard if the sound weren’t accompanied by the screen lighting up.
When I finally get out of bed I see I’m in my own room.
On the nightstand lies Clyde’s black notebook.
It feels strange - he’s never shown it to me, though I always knew it existed.
He almost never takes it out of his pocket.
For once, there’s something about him I don’t want to understand at any cost.
I desperately want to know what’s inside that black notebook - but even more than I want to know, I want *him* to show it to me himself.
I promise myself I’ll wait for him with it, but I can’t tear my eyes away.
I feel like something’s about to come out of it - or like it’s about to touch me.
It stands out so sharply on my white nightstand, almost begging me to touch it.
It’s one of the few physical things I can truly attach to him.
So simple yet so complicated, because I’m tempted to imagine Clyde’s whole life neatly arranged inside it.
Maybe if I looked, I’d finally understand his life.
Understand him.
It feels strange that he left it here, unguarded.
Here of all places.
He knows how badly I want to know everything about him, and this notebook is the deepest piece of him.
It makes me think maybe he’s still here after all.
I’m here, and the notebook is here, and neither of us got here on our own.
Certainly not me.
From the little I remember, we didn’t start the night here at all, but in some miserable forgotten club somewhere.
I wonder how Clyde brought me here.
I doubt he was sober enough to finish the night coherently.
He never is.
Suddenly every breath I take pushes me to look for him.
He should be here, shouldn’t he?
How many times have I told him he belongs here just as much as I do—that he belongs *to me*?
Every time I say that he just laughs.
He loves laughing.
Sometimes I understand enough to laugh with him.
The obsession rises in me because of the notebook—an obsession that usually belongs to the moments when its owner appears and I can’t contain the strange pull he creates.
But it’s not *just* an object—I lie to myself, and I know it.
It’s a piece.
A piece of Clyde’s world, and he left that little shard in my hands.
Remains.
Remains of something so mesmerizing I just want to dive in and keep going until nothing is left unknown.
Suddenly I wonder if he left it here with me on purpose.
He’s always such an actor.
He can play anyone.
He claims he’s his real self with me, but I haven’t told him that for at least a year now I’ve suspected that’s a lie.
I don’t open the notebook.
I just run my fingers lightly over it and hope that when he comes to take it—because he *will* come—
he’ll let me stroke him the same way.
The thought feels so dark and forbidden, wrong and unfitting -
like it’s trying to force me to say things I haven’t even thought before.
It makes me feel insane.
More than I know I am.
“If this is your test, Shade, I’m going to pass it. God knows I love you enough for that,” I say aloud, as if saying it won’t make me tear myself apart every second until Clyde returns.
Julian would probably call me stupid.
Actually, that’s a lie.
He’d never say that about me.
Sometimes he says I’m too afraid to see the different sides of the world - the ones others might see but not everyone.
That I’m afraid of what will happen when I see them.
When he starts talking like that I really don’t understand anything, so I laugh and tell him he’s just like Clyde, always speaking in riddles.
Julian doesn’t like that.
I don’t think he likes Clyde either, but I’m a little afraid to ask.
I don’t know why it would be, and I’m not sure I want the answer.
I hate the morning, and everything about it even more.
Even the shower - I hate showering in the morning.
It feels like the world forces me to suffer from the moment I open my eyes until I sink back again.
The water is so cold, then hot, then cold again, then hot -
and at some point I stop caring and could shower in water made of fire or ice without noticing.
“Clyde?” I call again before I step in.
A quiet call, almost a whisper -
but I know if he’s here, he doesn’t need more than that.
It’s mostly for me.
The endless search.
I know that even before I don’t get an answer.
Sooo, first episode,
Just tell Mr what you think.
Thanks for reading.
Soooo⁷
