Too quiet. The kind of quiet that makes your ears impossible to ignore. Your attention folds into your own head. You hear the noise inside your brain, a sharp frequency, worse than ordinary tinnitus.
How did you get sucked in here? How do you shut up this screaming brain?
It must be those jokes from yesterday. The ones that didn't make your friends laugh. They're mocking you now.
Then you hear it. Not with your ears. From the meat of your bones.
"Oh. You're real after all."
The voice is yours, but it has never spoken before. It's the voice you use when you're alone and accidentally say something you'd never tell another human.
"This place is you. The part you don't show. The part that doesn't have a name."
You look down. The land is a dark, glassy surface, and beneath it, faces. Your faces. Versions of you that died in memories, in failed love, in the split second you decided not to say what you really meant, in self tortures, in resentment, in ecstasy.