Introduction
I have been bad about writing the past couple months. There are a few things I’ve written that I don’t hate, but I don’t think they work on their own. They’re too similar and share events with one another, so I figured I’d compile them. The first piece is called Spaces in Between, a rambling story I wrote during work, along with the original shorter version I had written the day prior to the final one. The next one is called Sleep to Dream, which is a bunch of bullshit inspired by some of the stuff in Spaces in Between.

Spaces in Between
Note: I wrote this by hand while bored at work, with it being a junction of another shorter piece I had written previously. It’s the first time in a while I’ve had the drive to write for more than just a little bit. I only realized after transcribing it digitally that this story is just kind of about dying and there being nothing on the other side, so I leaned into it more with some of my edits.
lost in the dreamplex…falling souls blip in and out of view. white clouds surrounding fluorescent buildings packed with windows too small to fit anybody. alleys of light and corporate graffiti, the space beyond a flat backdrop encircling the area. the sun shines in a fruit-filled sky, wisps visible in the glare, a physical embodiment of the wind that is singing through the trees, swaying mechanically on a cycle, back, forth, back, forth. space exists past the bounds of reality. in the plaza are the only things you will ever know. a fountain gurgles, the bubbles float and pop in the sky and rain down dew down on the square. shops surround you, no larger than you from the outside, but entering through the double doors reveal a massive space, larger than could ever fit in the tiny cutout of brick and glass. markets with paper-thin products behind booths which never reflect your face. malls with black voids for ceilings containing flowing rivers, moss growing on trees which reach up to the abyssal sky. others are entirely vertical, fractaling off in infinite directions; cracked tile islands holding shops of uncountable variety. you float if you think hard enough. the door is always behind you.
waterfalls crash with the sound of muzak, splashing on unending fragments, streaming off into the expanse below and above. you float between them, feeling the mist on your skin. you can’t find a way to slow your floating. the higher you go, the colder it gets. the shops begin to dissipate and the islands stop forming, until the only landing contains a maintenance door set within an outcrop in the void. you are freezing. the knob stings to the touch.
it is a blizzard indoors. cold air icing the dew on your clothes. the frigid tile eats through your shoes, present only under thick sheets of white. aisles surround you in a vignette of shelves, a maze of products. an almost wholly dark environment with an unknown depth and no clear exit. the door has vanished.
your steps disappear in the snow behind you. the storm rages from the unseen reaches of the store, banks piling up outside the open doors of the freezers. boxes and cans lay prostrate in the snow, some having burst open, an in-progress explosion fossilized on the ground. the gusts screaming past your ears sound like voices, ghosts of a different time without faces to prove them, and yet still spilling their dying breath into your body. the remaining charge of each sputtering bulb goes out as soon as you walk beneath them. the nape of your neck begins to sting. your soul feels like it’s decomposing.
a shining beacon on the horizon. nearly blinding you through the snowfall is a glowing orb of powerful fluorescence, illuminating the detail of the flakes landing all around–still just a speck in the distance. or maybe it isn’t; you cannot distinguish the space around you from the black spots in your vision. figures come into view, molded by the darkness, hands outstretched towards their salvation. as you approach their glistening bodies, they appear as sculptures, carved from blocks of ice, lacking faces.
the larger the light appears, the fewer statues there are, with the ones closest to the glow donning wings on their backs. white rays from beyond a barrier, an outward-jutting space with shelved items on wire racks. surrounding this are pillars, covered in the visages of screaming faces. the snow melts in the areas the light touches, leaving inches of standing water in its wake. on the other side of the barrier, through the cartons and jugs, you see a glowing supermarket interior, shining tile floors with product-lined shelves blurry in the distance. the columns of ice watch your climb through the cooler, knocking items to the floor and snapping through racks. body still shivering uncontrollably, the other side gives you the warmth of light. you sit and rock, looking around to see what awaits you but you stop. the walls here repeat, curving around you on a flat plane, with no visible exits. you walk to the edge and feel along the length; there are no seams, just an unbroken mass. you realize now that the faces were not screaming.
they were laughing.
original flash fiction idea
my steps disappear in the snow behind me. the store has been closed but a storm floats from the far reaches of the dairy cooler. carved sculptures of the Lord God and His angels scream behind shelved cartons, faces trapped in ice. they tried to escape this place but they forgot the way, now they suffer for their mistakes. and now I trudge on without their guidance.
ghosts from a different time join me in the darkness. voices sing down the aisles without faces to prove them. but eyes, they burn into me. frigid cold like dying breath on my body and ice slick on the tile. the skylights show black and the few lights still functioning are only barely. the snowstorm rages through the store. racks spin in the violent winds. products fly off the shelves.
my nape begins stinging. soul decomposing. my body begins to dissipate.

Sleep to Dream
Note: I had an idea to let my mind wander as I fell asleep. I turned on loud ambient music and spoke into my phone, trying to get my most disorganized but pure thoughts from when I was dead tired, or something like that. The result was a four-hour recording where I am speaking incoherently for the first fifteen minutes before I fell asleep. I then took the transcription and moved some stuff around, most of which was not very coherent.
I sleep with my head on my notebooks so I can wake up in the worlds of the pages. The storm of the unquiet mind kept me up too many nights. Rain pouring, coming down on the ghosts beneath me. Thunder claps and rattles my town. Outside on the pavement we look up as lightning streaks across the sky and the water pitter patters on our faces. Slowly we're lifted. Into the clouds we go to join with the moon. We can see everything from up there, nothing but specks in the grand scheme of things. And yet, we barely scrape the sky before I return to my interior, to the empty shell devoid of life, devoid of happiness. What is there to offer me from this vacant lot, but a field of asphalt to lay down in and to enjoy the solitude of?
Disquieting ambiance in the grocery store, alone in the back aisles where there are no products on shelves between stocking phases, the gutted supermarket lays. There are no lights except for the ones coming from the freezer. A cold breeze rips at my skin. The sound of the howling wind goes past my ears and rips throughout the store, blowing items off shelves and spinning racks, knocking over displays and sending me tumbling to the ground. I land in a pile of snow and fall out the back end of reality. There's no sound. There's no light, except at the bottom and it's growing brighter. The brighter it gets the more scared I am because I don't know if I’ll like what's on the other side.
Voices on the radio heard through static; meaning from the meaningless.
But I knew what they said:
Where does your body go when your mind is quiet?
How do you live when your thoughts are not your own?
Why are the nights so long alone?
I knew that if I went to sleep now and began to dream, they would kill me and my body would die. But in my dream, I got away.

More shit
When there's no one left to live for us then the machines will take over our bodies when our skin falls off when our shells are of no more use, the machines will take over in a last ditch attempt to reincarnation. the machines burst out and all the memories of that person from the moment they ingested the machines until the end of their life was wiped clean.

The ones who lead us astray, the ones who appear in the corners of our visions, in the corners of apartments, empty rooms, vacant lots in the dark recesses of the cones brought by lights up above or around or below. In the daytime, the shadows are snuffed out by golden rays, but at night they're allowed to take form. They're molded by the environment around them, all of the blackness that seeps in from the dark, like rats that come through cracks and stand and stare.
Sleep to dream we spiral out of the conscious abyss, the subconscious flowers as the mind lays dormant processing idly in the background. We take our minds for a spin, my trance-like stumbling between life's innumerable corridors.