THE JOURNAL OF LUCAS BROWN. PART 2

March 24th, 2001

Ever since the incident in the car park I have not been myself.

Something about those vibrations shook a part of my insides so that I am never comfortable, I feel uneasy and unable to concentrate.

Everything looks a little different. I can’t say why or in what way, but everything is definitely different.

The remnants of that period fear seem determined to not slip away, they still appear to be coursing through my veins and instilling in me a continuous dread of its return.

The rudimentary task of acquiring a pen with which to write these words was imbued with this foreboding.

I leant over my desk towards the shelf, hand outstretched towards the object. My fingers folded all too softly to pluck it with success and it tumbled down from the elevated wooden compartment. As it did so time seemed to slow down. I watched helplessly as it crashed to the floor, the fact it had done so reverberating around me in quick succession, one after another mimicking the sound that came before it but at the same time not being quite identical.

Why does that matter?

I know I need to keep using the pen, as much as it may scare me.

March 25th, 2001

I’m not myself again today.

But then I think I may never be myself as there is no way of me knowing what that is. This morning, as I lay upon my bed with the world spinning around me, bouncing back off of itself to torment me a knock at the door slowed things momentarily. I eagerly got up, rushing to the door in the hope that it would be some news, something that would set things back to the way they used to be, some kind of eraser that could blank out whatever caused me to fall into this seemingly reasonless yet somehow familiar spiral. Let me explain. I am completely in the dark as to the nature of my plague, yet I feel a deep seated understanding and this only makes me fear it more.

Back to the knock at the door.

There stood a uniformed man in light blue. He looked down at a clipboard in front of him and then straight into my face.

“Are you Lucas Brown?” he asked me

I almost collapsed at the utterance of my own name. I held myself up by putting my hand on the wall for support. He looked confused. I managed to force a nod in his direction so he handed me a piece of paper and asked me to sign it. My hand shook as I placed the ‘L’ on the page. I slowly followed with the pattern of letters I had been designated at birth yet they felt so alien. What do they mean? They mean nothing? They are at once nothing to do with me, mere scratching, and yet somehow indicative of my existence. I have been given symbols with which to state my being and it sickens and terrifies me. I dropped the pen, my hands unable to maintain a grasp, it crashed and caused the storm again, I was feeling intensely ill by this point. He picked it up and thrust the package into my hands, eager to get away from me.

I closed the door as quietly as I possibly could, but the slight click it generated still made me shudder.

I put the package aside, completely disinterested with what might be in it (I still have not opened it).

I could not get the sound of the uniformed man saying my name out of my head. I made the impulsive decision to shout out my own name.

It shot out of my mouth, so comforting at first, so beautifully familiar, but as it danced around the room it quickly became something else all together. It became someone else.

It is me and is not me at the same time.

I think I will lie down again, I can feel it watching me, the thing that is both me and not me. Maybe if I close my eyes for a while it will stop dancing.

I need it to go away.