Cori spoke first. She didn’t mince words.
“Kendal, what the fuck happened last night?” she ejected, pleasantries be damned.
“How do you know something happened last night?” Kendal responded.
It came out sassier than they had intended. Their mouth was dry as tinder; Kendal hadn’t spoken aloud in hours. Still sitting on the porch swing, they were glued to the spot they’d been in since they snapped their laptop closed the prior evening. Everything in Kendal’s vicinity was as it had been since that moment.
“You’ve been completely unreachable! I would’ve kept calling, but I had to get some sleep. Location had you at home, so I assumed you’d get back to me once you saw all the missed calls… why didn’t you?” She felt heat rising in her cheeks.
“I’m really sorry. Something went down and I can’t quite explain it,” Kendal responded.
“What the hell do you mean ‘something went down’? Are you ok???”
“Physically yes, aside from the fact that I didn’t sleep… at least I don’t think I did. I don’t really know how to describe the last few hours.”
With no sleep, their mind should’ve been foggy at best, but despite this reorientation with reality, Kendal felt electrically awake. In an effort to not exacerbate Cori’s concern they were trying hard to sound put together, but considering the circumstances, they could tell they were failing - Kendal and Cori were simply too intertwined for this weak façade to satisfy her curiosity.
“Could you please try?” Cori was getting increasingly frustrated. The sun wasn’t even up and she felt confusion shifting into anger at the lack of clarity. “I have a massive day ahead of me and I need to be on top of my game. Give me something to work with so I can move on and get my day started. I slept like shit because I never heard back from you after dinner.”
“I’m truly so sorry…” Kendal responded. They always felt like such a burden to Cori, and with her being alone in Chicago with so much to manage, the weight of their guilt was rapidly piling up atop the odd evening in which they’d been enveloped - but they knew that they had to say something to quell the confusion they’d caused. “It’s not something I can explain quickly - honestly I’m not sure I could explain it if I had all day… but I’ll try. I’m gonna go inside and brew some coffee for a boost - why don’t you tell me more about your training yesterday?”
“You’re… outside? It’s not even 5:00am,” Cori was now teetering on the edge of her nerves, and losing balance quickly. “Kendal, I’m gonna need you to start making sense. I don’t think you’re up to anything, but you’re being kind of evasive, and I have to start thinking about my own responsibilities. Soon. So please just spill it. My chill is threatening to leave the building.”
She didn’t want it to - they both deserved a good day - but things weren’t adding up.
Kendal breathed deeply, slowly, trying to think of the clearest, one-sentence kickstarter to begin airing this out; what “this” referred to still completely eluded them.
“I guess the best way I can describe it - which is going to sound insane - is that I basically lived… through a dream? All fucking night long; some parts made more sense than others, I just don’t really know… As far as I could tell, I was awake the entire time.”
That was more than one sentence, but it felt like a somewhat decent start.
“You had a waking dream all night long and then went outside before sunrise?…”
“No… I never went inside. I went out onto the back porch after our virtual dinner date, planning to enjoy the fall time weather and finally get some writing done, but I wasn’t having much success - go figure, the usual. I got flustered, closed my laptop, and just stared out into the woods to try to reset my head.
“That’s when things got weird,” Kendal dropped this last line with shaky breath.
They also felt a pressure begin to lift as they got their mouth to engage with their thoughts after hours of madness and disconnection. Unfortunately, coherent or not, they also knew their explanation would only leave Cori with more questions.
Cori exhaled a sigh tainted with worry as opposed to relief - she was stuck between a buzzing annoyance and increasing concern for her partner.
“Got weird how?”
“I’m not exactly sure. That’s why I described it as ‘dream-like’. I’m pretty sure I was awake, but whatever I was seeing - well, technically I wasn’t seeing anything but the darkness in the trees, however there were, like, shapes and bulges out there, like out in our back woods behind the house, ya know? It sounds ridiculous but that’s the best way I can describe what I could actually see. But while that was occurring, in waves and segments, my mind was registering information, like internal visions or something - I guess, like in my mind’s eye… I don’t know… it felt real and fake at the same time,” they were on a roll now, just not a very succinct one. “I kept wanting to pick up my laptop and start writing, but when I say I felt paralyzed, I don’t mean that metaphorically. I could not move. For hours. I heard the phone ringing but couldn’t move to answer it - that is until this phone call, for some reason.”
The reality of the weirdness was really setting in.
For both of them.
“Did you smoke? -THC seltzer? -fucking mushrooms?” Cori inquired.
“Nothing, I swear it. I really wanted to write last night and figured something like that would brick my brain. It surely would explain all this, but no, I was as sober as a church mouse,” they responded.
“Ok… we’re getting somewhere. Somewhere strange, but somewhere nonetheless,” Cori heaved out, all in one breath. “So what exactly were you seeing? -and not seeing, I guess?”
Kendall knew this question was coming, but had no idea how to describe it.
“That’s too much to get into before you begin your day, but I’ll try to give you the gist of it. I keep coming back to comparing all this to a dream because it’s quite accurate, but that doesn’t clarify much, I’m aware.
“I was getting, like, erratic glimpses of what felt like… predictions? But not predictions I could really translate, they just felt like the future somehow - our future specifically. But there were also vivid slices of memories, some from way back, some more recent, but they were all real ones we lived, and none that occurred before we met.
“Everything I was… receiving” - that sounded so crazy coming out of their mouth, but it felt like the exact word to use - “felt like our story, I guess - before, now, and later. There was no obvious connection between the visions, aside from the fact that I knew beyond question that I was receiving stuff about us and our life together.”
Cori started this conversation by pacing her tiny Airbnb, but now she was locked in place, trying to parse through what felt like nonsense coming from her most trusted friend. She couldn’t help but allow silence to fill the miles between the two of them.
Kendal was using language that sounded like they were recounting a full-blown hallucination - maybe they were. But Cori knew that while Kendal often frolicked in the whimsical, they were also intensely skeptical, using major discretion when deciding whether or not they believed in something, or if something could actually be classified as paranormal, or if an actual conspiracy was afoot. They often deferred to agnosticism with things of the sort.
But what they were describing to Cori seemed like something they fully believed had happened - wholeheartedly. Whatever was going on, something real, in some sense or another, had occurred.
Or Kendal was just fucking losing it.
Knowing, regrettably, that they’d generated a jagged anxiety guaranteed to linger on the edges of Cori’s already stressful day, they finally spoke up after what felt like an hour of dead silence.
“Are you there?…”
“Yes. Just trying to process that. It doesn’t make any sense; honestly it’s really concerning,” Cory managed to force out, doing her damndest not to tip into the deep end just yet. “Do you feel ok? Aside from experiencing what kind of sounds like a mental break?”
“I really do - I’m not even sleepy. I think I’ll-”
“Kendal you should be sleepy,” Cori cut in.
“No, I know, you’re right, but you remember that all-nighter feeling!” (it had been years since they’d pulled that off) “You always get a weird, unearned second wind around sunrise,” Kendal cheerily shot back, as if they were quipping about something totally inconsequential. They knew they needed to follow this up with some further reassurance - they needed to show that they had, indeed, NOT suffered a mental break. “However, you should also know that I feel a sense of… relief?… a feeling like I’m better off having gone through all that - like it means something. I know I sound nuts, and I’m so sorry for putting this on you while you’re away. It just… happened. Something happened.”
“It’s ok,” was all Cori could muster. It felt awkward between them in that moment, a wildly foreign feeling between the two. Truthfully, it may have been a completely virginal experience - they were a perfect match from jump and 12 years of togetherness covers a lot of firsts.
But this had uniquely jarred them.
Kendal and Cori wrapped up their conversation cordially, and with love, as always.
They knew this wasn’t over, but for the time being, for the morning, for the day -
- it had to be.
Something I noticed in this piece was your ability to show Kendal and Cori’s relationship dynamic.
“Kendal and Cori were simply too intertwined for this weak façade to satisfy her curiosity.” So familiar! To know someone so intimately you know when things aren’t lining up quite right.
“Cori exhaled a sigh tainted with worry as opposed to relief - she was stuck between a buzzing annoyance and increasing concern for her partner.” So much emotion present here. “Buzzing” works so well.
To me, Kendal’s experience that night was best described by the quote, “it felt real and fake at the same time.” I can’t wait to see where this story and these characters go! Thank you for sharing your work.