Seeing Double

When I was twelve my parents took me to the eye doctor. I’d begged them not to, told them repeatedly through angry tears that I was FINE. I just saw things differently. They never liked that answer, and after years of me going to sit in chairs and ending up on the floor and going to walk through doorways and slamming face-first into walls they brought me in for an appointment.

The doctor ran a series of tests, all of which gave inconclusive results that only made my parents more concerned than before. When asked to read the letters projected up on the wall I could do that just fine. When I told the doctor that the projected image was also upside down underneath the first one on the wall like a mirror copy she’d give me a concerned look and mark little notes on her clipboard with a red pen. When she asked if I’d ever experienced any double vision I told her that I saw everything with a mirror image beneath it. Finally she removed the glasses from the tip of her nose and asked me what I saw when I looked at my parents. I told her that they each had mirror images connected to them by their feet, moving when they moved like 3-dimensional shadows.

A few days later I found myself admitted to the psychiatric facility.

I was diagnosed with schizophrenia not too long after and was kept on a constant, strict regimen of medications that made my body feel like it was dissolving into human applesauce. My parents visited me less as I grew older and the company of the caretakers didn’t make the ward feel any more comfortable. After years of being told that I was ill (in front of my parents) and disturbed and unfixable (behind closed doors) I began to resort to spending the majority of my time staring at my blank ceiling, the one space where I couldn’t see double of anything. It was the one place where I couldn’t look down at my feet and see my own copy of myself staring eerily back with a sinister inhuman expression. I knew that whoever was looking back wasn’t me; I couldn’t shake the thought that these copies would come for me someday.

Now it is 2048, I am 23 years old and all I have to say now is that I knew I was right all along. I always knew I wasn’t mentally ill. I’m writing this letter to explain the circumstances to whomever comes across the carnage that has sadly been left behind. All of this time I wasn’t seeing double: I was seeing a flipside to our own world. Everything is exactly the same there; we control what’s created and destroyed there through our movements, we control who moves. The only thing we couldn’t understand how to control until it was too late was the bloodlust They had. And they found their way here to ravage our world.