Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, this is Annie and Samantha and welcome to stuff
I've never told your protection of iHeart Radio and it
is time for another edition of Smindy Fiction and it
(00:25):
as is perfect from Holidays. This is one comes with
a trigger warning. So everybody, Holidays, here's a dark fiction
for you. It's hard to describe, but it does. It
does include, uh, sexual assault and violence mentioned, but it
doesn't really go into it. But it also deals with
(00:46):
the trauma of those things and how that can just
ripple out and impact all of your life. So this
was something I wrote in high school and we'll discuss
some of the reasoning behind it after we do the reading.
As always, this is something we're trying. It's new, but
(01:07):
don't worry, like our regular content isn't going to change.
I feel like I'm holding your hand on this journey,
like it's all right. We're doing like sex in the City, Watch,
We're doing a bunch of new things. Math. I feel
like we have to, you know, just let that has
been weird. I feel like we need to end it
with a bang and then kind of go ahead and
preface by the way. Changes are coming, not huge changes,
(01:29):
just a few new things. Because we're about to lose
our minds. So we're bringing you a Sex in the
City watch through and some fiction. But it's not nothing
else is changing. We're just trying some new things and
we have to you enjoy it. And as always, if
you have any suggestions for new segments we should try,
(01:51):
we would love to hear about it. We are we're
interested in trying new things. And thanks. It's always to
Christine for her amazing work on this one. These fiction
ones are a bit of a heavier push for her,
So thank Christina. Everyone genius the goat. Yes, yes, And
(02:13):
then I feel like I have to put this disclaimer
in here. I did write this in high school. I
slightly edited it for I submitted it for Thirteen Days
of Halloween two years ago. I was like, it's really dark,
and they're like dark is good, and then they were
like it's too dark. I'm like, yeah, what do you
think with my sweet disposition? And they're like no, Andy, no, yes,
(02:38):
they know you love horror right like, and you love
like all the darkness I do. I think they were
just surprised, because I think they were. I guess when
you say dark that can mean a lot of different things.
And they weren't anticipating kind of a real world tragedy.
And on Dark I'm building it up into way more
(02:58):
than it actually as I promised. But it was part
of a larger story that I did right. And I'm
really eager to talk about it because I think it's
really interesting. But before we do that, we don't want
to spoil it. So let's get into the fiction reading
of Deep Dream. You already know how this story ends.
(03:35):
There was always only one outcome. I wish you were different,
but wishing does not make it so. My name is
Tara Martkin. I'm twenty two years old. I have lived
an incredibly sheltered life. I've never had sex, I've never
(03:56):
broken a bone. I've never experienced trauma of any kind.
I have also been beaten. I have also broken numerous bones.
I have also been sexually assaulted. Every time I attempt
to count the number of traumatic instances in my life,
I decided it's not worth knowing. There is no cognitive
(04:18):
business here, no eu finistic language, no mental gymnastics, no
selective memory. Both are true. At once. You doubt the
veracity of this. I did too, when I would remember
the violence and faded yet selectively vivid detail. I would
tell myself I was remembering a dream, A brutal dream
(04:40):
lodged in my brain like a splinter, unsettling, disturbing, but false,
an explosion of anxious nerves and an unsettled mind. For
a time, I could ignore these dreams that felt more
like memories, but they bled into my life life. When
(05:02):
I slept in the room, she I had been attacked,
and it took my breath away, as though she I
was right there. When I ignored the knocking, she had
answered that resulted in years of violence for her. I
could see it, the path not traveled. Anxiety, depression. That's
(05:28):
what I thought, That's what everyone thought. But these memories
visions became harder and harder to ignore. I had all
the symptoms of someone who had undergone a trauma without
ever having endured one. I felt like a fake, but
the trauma was real all the same. I avoided people,
(05:54):
I avoided my reflection, I avoided everything. I slept all
the time. When I wasn't sleeping, I was crying tears
that had no end. Then came a new theory, repressed
memories fighting to the surface. The idea made my skin crawl.
(06:19):
It made me doubt my memories and question my reality.
I remembered not being attacked, and I remembered being attacked.
I remembered the dates that happened to one version of
me and didn't to the other. To me, I remembered
(06:40):
the knocking on the door and not answering it, falling
back into an uneasy sleep. And I remember the knocking
on the door, answering it and the attack that followed.
Both existed in my brain m Neither was repressed. Otherwise,
(07:03):
our lives were the same. It was only in these
key traumatic moments we diverged. She was me, I was her.
I went to therapy. It was difficult to explain, even
to myself. Some days I was sure memories of this
(07:24):
other me were dreams or or repressed memories. Some days
I just thought I had lost my might. Others I
thought there was another me existing alongside me in an
alternate timeline, and I was catching glimpses into her life.
(07:49):
I wondered if she was catching glimpses into mine. She
was angry to have suffered where I did not. She
was aware of me at all. Sometimes I blamed her.
I wasn't foolish enough to answer the knocking at the door.
(08:10):
I shouldn't have to suffer the consequences for a decision
I did not make. But I dismissed these thoughts, ashamed
to have thought them in the first place. As unhinged
as this might sound to you, in a weird way,
it soon became the explanation that most accurately described my experience.
(08:31):
I'm a logical person. I did not arrive at this
conclusion easily process of elimination. Years of it. I had
no precedent to believe it, and very little desire to.
As time passed, as the memories pounded more loudly and
incessantly for entering into my brain, I had no choice
(08:52):
but to believe it. Not that I would tell anyone,
I would barely admit it to myself. Do you know
what trauma does to the brain? I do. There's a
bringing in your years. Learn of colors, something stick out,
(09:13):
bright stripes, and the clothes you're wearing. How poorly those
clothes fit, while others blur the edges soft the memory
both overly clear and utterly glossed over, a consuming mess
of colors and sensations and feelings that don't feel like
they're yours. Time becomes meaningless, and also everything, because after
(09:34):
a traumatic event, everything will be defined as before and after.
These sound like contradictions because they are, but that doesn't
change the truth of them. How would I know this?
No it in my bones, in my soul if these
traumatic events never happened to me? There was no reason
(09:54):
for me too, perhaps a remnant of my alternate someone.
I began to resent more and more, how was this
my responsibility? In quiet moments when sleep adot to me,
questions with her eyes, how had this happened? Was the
other me all right? Did she exists in a parallel universe?
(10:17):
Or was she here? Had there been some mistake of
splitting time? Had she died a ghost in my life?
Had I been cursed to bear witness to her pain?
Some ability that opened a window into her world and
let me observe it? Could I help her? Because she
(10:37):
needed help? I began to suspect she was reaching out
to me. It started small at first, aborted Internet searches
about alternate realities, Embarrassment and curiosity warring inside me. These memories, too,
took on fuzzy edges, as though they aren't mine. But
(10:57):
they were right. Things I knew started feeling faint, as
though I was reciting facts from someone else's memories and
not my own. I started to feel immaterial, a spectator
in my own life. Some days I was certain, so
(11:17):
certain I could see something else, someone else, that my
life was fabricated. Whispers of promises of revelation haunted my
waking hours. Every now and then, my reflection in the
mirror moved just slightly off. Scars started appearing on my body.
(11:41):
I scratched at them. I had some. I was desperate
for them not to exist. They weren't mine, I told myself.
And yet any embarrassment around internet searches on alternate realities
paled in the face of my growing terror. Any empathy
I had for the alternate at me faded lost and
resentful anger. I was convinced she was trying to take
(12:06):
over my life. She had discovered the secret to alternate
realities and was coming to race me and take my place.
She's the one that answered that damn door. She's the
one that led evil into her life. She should suffer
for it, not me. I was going to slam the
door to my reality in her face. I found a ritual.
(12:32):
It called for a set of stairs, a candle, and
sacred offerings for each step, and the blood of something new.
For it to work, I had to ascend the stairs backwards,
and above all else not look back. Doing so not
only would cause the ritual to fail, but would leave
me unsure if I was in the correct reality. This
(12:53):
did not terrify me as much as it should have.
It very nearly described how I already felt. I was fortunate.
There was a set of stairs in my small apartment,
a winding set of four. I killed a rat for
the blood. Clumsily, messily, unbearably, terrifyingly numb, the tears streamed
(13:16):
out my face. At one time I would not have
believed myself capable of this. There wasn't much blood. I
hoped it was enough. I waited till midnight to start.
My hands shook as I let the first candle, I
refuse you. I slammed the door shut and lock it.
(13:40):
I whispered into the flickering dark. I set down my
first offering, a family picture from my ninth birthday party,
worn at the edges. I used it as a bookmark,
and it was almost never without it. I poured a
few drops of blood on the image. Very careful not
to look over my shoulder, I took a step back
onto the second stair. I placed the second candle down
(14:03):
and lit it. The hiss of the match loud in
the dark. I refuse you. I slammed the door and
lock it here. I placed the small stuff to being
my father had given to me, the words someone loves
You stitched along it. Blood dripped on the fabric. Staring
at Crimson, the candles flickered. The hair on the back
(14:28):
of my next stood up ter. I jumped violently at
the whispering in my ear, almost dropping the items in
my arm, almost turning around terrified I'd see my doppelganger
staring at me with her cold, devouring eyes, so full
of pain. She'd do anything not to feel it, including
(14:48):
killing me and taking my place. But I didn't turn.
Unbearably tense, I breathed heavily into the silence, waiting for
a hand to fall on my shoulder, to be shoved
down the stairs. Moments passed and nothing happened. My body
(15:10):
trembled as I fumbled with the next step behind me,
almost tottering over. It took several tries for me to
light the candle, fingers shaking wildly. Once lit, I gulped out,
I refuse you. I slammed the door and lock it. Here.
I placed a necklace my friend had made from me,
(15:30):
goofy and ugly but precious to me. Blood splashed all
over it, and I jerked back, afraid of using it
all Before the ritual was finished, I hesitated, listening for
stepping back onto the final stair, the air heavy around me. Carefully,
I placed the last candle lit. It stared into the flame.
(15:53):
I refuge. I slammed the door and lock it would
tremble in hands. I sat down, my last offering a
paper rose. My mom had given me white and pink
tissue paper. She surprised me with it. She sat down
and made it for me, surprised me with it. A
tear dripped onto the paper, alongside the blood. I was crying.
(16:20):
I straightened my body, painfully, tense, undeserving terry. I heard
in the dark, I'm gonna tear you apart. You already did,
I thought, and then wasn't sure why I thought it.
Now I had to wait, stand still, not look back,
and wait until the candles went out. Whispers slithered in
(16:44):
my ear, warm breath against my neck, and my name,
over and over, Tara, Terence, Darry, Dary, Terry, Terry. I
stood vigil. I prayed. I didn't believe in God, any god,
but I prayed, please, please, Please. Sometimes I whispered it
(17:08):
aloud in the invocation. I didn't do anything wrong. I
don't deserve to be her. I don't deserve to live
in her world. I was never her. As the night
went on, I started swaying on my feet, but I stood,
(17:30):
determined to reclaim my reality, even as the whispers assailed me.
Curled around me in demanding on her, limping, pleading, pleading
with me to let her in, pleading with me to
let her in. I refused. The first candle went out,
(17:56):
the second, the third, in justice exhaustion almost had me
collapsing or turning around, ruining the ritual. The fourth candle
flickered out, leaving me in darkness. I waited, waiting to
feel an easy in my soul that I so desperately
longed for, to feel some semblance of closure, of something,
(18:22):
anything other than the screaming nothingness that refused to be ignored.
My world shattered and nothing changed I turned around to
screen building inside me, and there she was. I did
(18:45):
screams in In the end, there was no alternate reality.
I was the one that didn't exist, she summoned to me.
She was the one to research alternate reality, growing more
and more desperate, lighting candles and spilling blood and chanting,
so desperate for relief from the pain, desperate enough to
(19:08):
abandon ship on her reality and try her luck in another.
I exist now because she willed me into existence. I'm
molded from her pain, borne from her horror and desperation.
But I'm just a fragment. My memories are false. Your
make belief, which is for how things should be. How
(19:34):
much violence has been allowed in the belief of ships.
Entire empires have been built on shoots. There are no
alternate realities, only this one. There's only this reality, and
in this one there's unfathomable violence and pain and grief
(19:56):
and death. We live in a world where so many
of us are hurt and ignored, an accepted fact, just
how it is another statistic the victim's fault. The evil
people are capable of the monstrous acts we have the
(20:18):
capacity to commit, going punished that are allowed perpetuated the
cycle continues. That's the scariest part of the story. You me,
all of us, We are the monster. At the end
(20:39):
of the book, we hear what keeps ourselves up at night.
The most terrifying thing in this world is us, and
(21:09):
that brings us to the end of this fiction reading.
I hope you enjoyed it. It's always so weird to
say when it's something that's like a little upsetting. I
did name it Deep Dream because, like I said, I
love those like technology names, And this is a thing
Google does where you can feed it images so it
can learn what things look like the Google AI and
(21:30):
then it makes the most trippy like three D paintings
you've ever seen. But I gave this story this name
because I in high school had gone through all this trauma,
was going through all this trauma, and it sort of
ended kind of abruptly, and I was able to convince
(21:51):
myself that the whole thing had been a dream, that
the whole thing this was a different version of me
that had gone through this. It was a dream version
of me, and it was really upsetting. But it wasn't real.
It hadn't actually happened. That wasn't me to the point
that like, I had a breaking moment um several years
later when I was in college and my mom bought
(22:12):
it up and I like stopped in my in my
tracks and thought, wait, that was that happened? Because I
had just so effectively made it into this kind of
like dream sequence that I never gave too much thought
because it was scary. I didn't want to think about it.
But it's like I would have these images and they
(22:33):
were so strong and so powerful, and these memories, and
I could just kept thinking, this is a dream, it's
not a real memory. And I got I would get
really angry at this other version of myself, and I
would blame her for opening the door essentially and letting
this in and letting it happen. And I'm saying letting
you know, and these very guilt driven words that I felt.
(22:56):
And it was a way from me to separate myself
from myself other me who I blamed for letting that happen,
and and I was angry at her because I didn't
want to have to deal with it like that. I
didn't do this. This is why am I feeling all
of your sad emotions in vain? When I didn't do
(23:19):
what you did, but I had. But I I actually
wrote out a whole like book level version of this
story and I'd still have it. And it's interesting to
read because to me now it's so clear that I
was dealing with trauma and I was compartmentalizing things, and
I was like trying to essentially create a separate reality
(23:42):
so that I could function. So you were disassociating, yes, yes,
but it was it. It did come unraveled because they
kept like knocking at the back of my psyche um
and it wouldn't let me go. And I mean, eventually,
when I got into college, I was able to really
(24:03):
put it away and forget about it. But as listeners
know this podcast, as you know, Samantha eventually just wore
me down and I couldn't do it anymore. I couldn't
pretend or keep up that at charade anymore. But I
did do it for years, years and years and years,
and just reading back on it now, it's so fascinating
(24:25):
because I'm so clearly like trying to deal with this
thing and this traumatic all these traumatic experiences, and there's
so many unhealthy things in there that I'm like, wow, yeah,
you were you were really struggling, and I'm still struggling
with some of that stuff. But it's just it's interesting
to read. Thinking, like I really did believe at one
(24:47):
point I convinced myself that this had not happened to me,
and it was different. It's a dream, dream version, but
I still struggling to deal with it, and I was
writing it out and I like created a whole alternate
timeline for her and I called her Terra. She's had
a different name than me. But yeah, so that's what
we just did is sort of a piece of all
(25:09):
of that. Yeah, happy holidays. I do, I do really
think like it's it's interesting and heavy. This is heavy
handed at the end. Um, I did preserve a lot
of it as I wrote it. So if you're like, wow,
this is really over the top, yes it is, Yes
(25:31):
it is. It was a teenage Annie. It was really
leaning into the youngst. But I think that's something that
we have talked about, um, through our our look at
trauma and coping and writing is one of my biggest
coping mechanisms, and clearly I was doing it even yeah,
(25:55):
I mean most of my life, but during that time
I was as well, Yeah, I think it's my It
makes it easier. Like I said before, I think that's
one of the reasons I connect so hard to like
fictional things, and I'll cry at fictional things more easily
cry at nonfictional things, because there's that distance, there's that space,
and I don't feel like I have to put up
(26:15):
so many protections with a fictional thing. Even though this
wasn't fictional, I convinced myself that it was right. Yeah,
So I hope that you enjoyed. We really do like
doing these. Um so we're probably gonna do about once
a month and again. If you have any suggestions or
(26:36):
thoughts or like other things we could do in this format,
we would love to hear them. You can email us
at stuff Medium, mom Stuff at iHeart media dot com.
You can find us on Twitter at moms toff podcast,
or on Instagram and stuff One Never Told You. Thanks,
It's always too our super producer, Christina bug Oat, Yes,
and thanks to you for listening Stuff One Never Told You.
Protection of I Heart Radio from more podcast on my
(26:57):
Heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or
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