There is only one explanation for what I’ve seen. There is no Sam Bishop. I made him up.
I’d chased after some psychotic fabrication because I was so weak and pathetic that I needed to create someone to hold on to. But if I can stay crazy, then I can keep Sam alive because I just can’t survive his death if he ever were real.
Except that he can’t be real. If he were, his body could not have simply disappeared, blood and all. If someone inexplicably dragged his body out of the apartment, I would still have blood on my hands, and there is nothing.
To keep him, I need to disappear back into the dream world that I know how to create.
I back out of the bathroom and immediately crawl into bed where I can wrap myself in his smell, imagined or not. I won’t look in the living room or the kitchen again. I won’t go downstairs to see his apartment or his truck. I won’t hang off the bed and reach for his keys that should be there from when he tossed them from his pocket. If anything about him is gone, then this reality that I’ve created won’t hold up.
My brain went wonky enough that I killed him off in my daydream world. But I know about fucked-up realities more than most people, so I can get my Sam world back.
I can dissociate.
I can believe anything.
I can trust myself to fall down the rabbit hole again.
The covers go over my head, and my legs pull into my chest. I let myself disappear. There is no line between truth and fiction for me, and I’d rather be crazy and get to keep Sam than find sanity and lose him.
