Chaos. Never ending background music because a song is always stuck in my head. Thoughts meander like leaves in a breeze. My brain is never turning off except to sleep. Sleep is like a fog.

An ordinary summoning, she called this. Why did we choose my mind? Because she knew it would be more interesting than hers, and she didn’t want me to know all her secrets. Right. My mind has plenty of cobwebs, oh there’s the quadratic formula! Cobwebs cloud what exactly that formula solves for, maybe something involving square roots? I can’t remember. School was so long ago. I miss it, but I could live inside my mind, call it the school of the self. Isn’t that what philosophers did? Solipsism, that’s what living exclusively in my mind would involve, only I can’t because I’m not alone in here. I have to find a way out somehow. I haven’t yet. I’m tripping on words, which have real physical properties in my mind apparently.

I’m lost, and I’ve lost Talia too. She’ll probably enjoy the forest of my brain, she likes hiking, and I too am enjoying walking through pink leaves, sunlight dappled shadows. Birds chirp, woodpeckers hollow out certain trees, nesting inside my mind. Exhaustion hits like the sun setting, and the darkness sets in. The fog settles, like I’m never going to find her again, like I’m always going to stay lost here. Still, comforting numbness returns, none of what’s outside is real in my mind, just characters, Blaine Anderson and Kurt Hummel, some people are permanent high school students, and god I miss high school, I had friends back then, though never the kind of friendships shown on TV, still, rewriting the stories is how my mind occupies itself at night, when the fog sets in and the world outside doesn’t exist. Talia calls and I consider ignoring her but instead I track the sound of her voice. In my mind, my ears work perfectly, though outside one is faulty without the hearing aid and unreliable when the hearing aid is on also.

She found the cord, the pull cord my dad almost refused to pull when my mom was giving birth to me. If we pull it, we’ll be ejected, I tell her. She’s not ready to leave my mind, and I don’t blame her. We’re in a nice spot - the cast of all the TV I watched as a child are cardboard cutouts symbolizing how I played with them in my mind, my first crush waves at Talia, who tells me I had good taste back then. I did.

In a secret alternate universe, Talia occupies a similar section of real estate, but not in the version of my mind we’re traveling through. I don’t let myself think about my friends that way. Not if they’re in relationships - they are off limits, just like professors and therapists.

As though thinking about it changed the scenery, my old therapist’s office sprouts into view. The green coach I used to sit on when I was diagnosed with PTSD, when I was told what happened to me was traumatic, that the nightmares I was suffering from were actually maybe memories. Those memories are further in the fog, so I lead Talia away from this area, far from that part of the mind. She wouldn’t want to see me like that. I didn’t want to be like that, that’s part of why I’m not in therapy anymore - it’s pointless to dwell on the past.

But the past is most of my mind’s real estate, what’s not taken up by fiction and daydreams, oh Wikipedia citations are floating through the fog, wild. Maybe we should pull that cord now? I’m worried Talia will see too much and decide I’m too much like Liam and Darby and Aviva and Kevin and so many friends that no longer occupy the title anymore decided. Traffic come, oh great Liam’s here, fat and immovable and I was so bad at being their friend, our autisms clashed in opposing ways.

I never got around to outright telling Talia what happened with Liam because it would involve my brother, and Liam made it abundantly clear nobody wants to hear about my brother. Nobody wants to hear about my brother. Nobody wants to - aaaand he’s in my mind now.

“Talia, I’m pulling the cord!” Talia nodded, the wind making hearing words impossible as I yanked the cord just as my brother’s hands began… we’re just sitting on my living room couch now. My mind was chaos, and my house appears comparatively calm. “Sorry about that.”