Red

“You’re useless!”

I opened my eyes to see a pitch black world around me.

Huh? That was strange, normally when I open my eyes, I see a white world, not a black one.

“Get out of here!”

I turned around.

Where was that voice coming from? Who was shouting?

“We should’ve never let you come here.”

And then I saw it.

It was a gray blob standing there in the pitch black darkness a few feet away from me. It was motionless, and all it seemed to be doing was saying mean things—things that somehow sounded familiar, even though I had no idea what it was talking about.

Here? Where was ‘here’? And never letting me come here? I don’t want to be in this black room anyway! And why is calling me useless? I know I don’t do anything but explore the world every day, but that’s only because there’s nothing else I can do.

I looked at its face to see what kind of expression the blob had. It was frowning, but its eyes were weird—the same exact expression I saw on the blob two days ago, and the same one that the blob that put the piece of paper Emuru called an ‘eviction notice’ outside my house had.

What was that expression, and why did a lot of blobs seem to have it? It felt… wrong somehow, and looking at it made me feel bad.

“Don’t talk to me! I’m just… very angry at you right now.”

Angry?

Suddenly, the color of the blob begins to shift into a new color I hadn’t seen in this world before.

Red.

Anger. Red. Red means anger. But what was anger? And why did it make me feel bad?

I didn’t know, but I felt something strange building up inside me. Something that felt bad to feel. Something I felt because I felt bad from the things the blob was saying to me. Was this, perhaps, anger?

But if anger comes from feeling bad, then why was this blob angry? Why was it angry at me? What did I do to make it feel bad?

I don’t know. I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.

What did I do?

“How could you do that?”

“What did I do?!” I shouted back.

“Why did you—”

“IT WASN’T MY FAULT!”

I froze.

What wasn’t my fault?

For a split second, I seemed to know what I did wrong, but just as fast as that knowledge came, it faded away.

“It wasn’t my fault…” I murmured, trying to understand why I said that.

I looked over at the red blob, who was now silently standing there again.

Maybe if I keep staring at it I'll know. Staring at blobs seems to make their form more detailed, and maybe I can figure something out from there.

I continued staring at the blob, watching its form shift and change, but the more I kept looking at it, the more confusing and less humanoid it seemed, as if it was changing from one blob to another.

But that wasn’t all.

I began to feel a searing pain in my chest that only got stronger the longer I stared. It felt weird—both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. It was like a mix of both sadness and the newly acquired anger I had been feeling, except it hurt much, much worse than any of them alone.

Overwhelmed by the new sensation, I looked away from the blob, wincing from the pain in my chest. My head was pounding from trying to adapt to it, and my mind was dizzy, filled with dozens of questions without answers.

What’s wrong with this thing? I wondered, all it does is cause me pain no matter what.

If I left it alone, it would say hurtful things, but if I interacted with it or stared at it, it also caused me more pain. However, if I didn’t stare at it I would never know what it was, yet at the same time, staring at it seemed to do no good either—and to top it all off, I still didn’t know what I was doing here, nor how I got here.

What was this world? Was it a new world? Seeing how there’s more black than anything else, it’s as if this world was somehow the complete opposite of the previous world, like its inverse or something. Why do I keep changing worlds? I don’t like this.

Every world I ended up in seemed to get worse than the last.

And why do I feel like I’m slowly forgetting the details of the white world I used to live in? No—it’s not that I’m forgetting––it’s that I can’t remember it properly at all, as if there’s something blocking my mind from recalling the details of it. If I try to recall something, I feel like I hit a wall instead.

Whatever it was, I knew I didn’t like it. I hated this place. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life wandering around in this pitch black landscape with nothing to keep me company but this red blob. There was another blob I wanted to be next to instead. Who was it? I couldn’t remember them properly. It was blocked off along with everything else by the wall that seemed to have formed in my mind.

I want to get out of here. I want to see the other blob instead. The one that made me happy. The one that taught me new things instead of making them more confusing. The one that seemed to always go to a single place instead of wandering around like me. The one who, despite that, seemed to know more than me, as if going to the same place taught them more things than wandering around.

I want to get out. I want to get out, I want to get out, I want to get out.

Suddenly, I felt a sudden wave of dizziness crash over me, and felt my body beginning to collapse as if falling through the black landscape itself. I fell, and fell, and fell, and after some time, I felt my mind beginning to feel better the longer I did.

After some time passed that both felt like forever and not that long at all, I realized that my eyes were closed—and upon opening them, I found myself staring up at something white.

A ceiling.

I was back.