You Can’t Get Anyone’s Attention
( “Ghost Shadows” by edenpictures is licensed under CC BY 2.0. )
Due to a series of wildly strange events, you wind up stuck in some sort of other dimension with no way home. Some kind of scientific accident or magic spell or weird hiccup in reality, take your pick, the important thing is that you’re no longer really part of this universe anymore. Not entirely at least. You can still see it, hear it, even smell it. That is, however, the extent. Past this, there’s really no way to interact with the world around you.
Try to touch something and your hands pass uselessly through. Try to say something and no one listens. Try to fart? Everyone assumes it was someone else. It’s a wonder you can even stand on the ground. That seems to be the only thing that still believes in you. Everything else? Everyone else? You may as well be watching TV.
It’s not all bad. You never get cold, you never get hungry, you never even get tired. You can walk forever, stopping only when you get bored. You can go places like the movies or the baseball stadium or the White House and no one says a thing. You can never really get hurt–cars pass right through you, fire completely ignores you, you don’t even need to breathe. It takes you a couple of years, but eventually you get used to it. Good thing too, since you figure you’ll probably be around a while, since you never seem to age.
You spend a lot of your time listening in on people, whether you’re wandering around a house or walking down the street or standing in an office. There’s at least a few interesting conversations a day. Sometimes they’re educational, like when you sat in on two professors arguing about light. Sometimes they’re funny, like those two women who accidentally stole someone’s coat and were trying to figure out how to return it without being noticed. Sometimes they’re sad, like with the kid whose parents were asking who he’d rather live with.
You say all sorts of things, commenting when you thought someone was being stupid or mean or praising them for being nice or desperately telling them not to make the bad decision you know they’re going to make. You’ve long since given up on trying to be heard, but you still like to talk. It’s helped keep your mind in place the whole time you’ve been here. At this point you’ve actually spent more of your life here, in this weird other dimension, than there, where you used to be able to live. You don’t really like how lonely it is, but what are you going to do? What can anyone do, really? You’ve looked all over for someone who can see you, hear you, or even smell you. Once you crossed the planet four times—first from north to south, then again from south to north, then from east to west, then finally from west to east—before you gave up. There was no one who could help you.
( “blue globe with arrows” by Andy M Johnson is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0. )
For a long while, you become convinced that nothing will ever change. One day, though, you find this is wrong. That is when you spot something shimmering and gray off in the distance. You squint. It is shaped like a person, but obviously is not. And it is coming closer. As it draws near, you see it as a shimmering silhouette, gauzy gray light evaporating off it like steam. This is the first new thing you have seen in years. It gets closer, and you look around and see no one around you has noticed it. Only you. The arm reaches out, in your direction, and you wonder what it would be like to finally touch something and have it matter. You walk forward, and brush your hand against it.
A light begins to crawl up your arm and tighten. You can actually feel it. You’re amazed at the sensation. It’s a gentle warmth, something like hot bubbling water seething around your hand. There’s a pressure there, one that lets you know it really exists. And it’s increasing. It takes you a second to remember what it was to feel pain, to hurt, because you realize that’s what it’s starting to do. You jerk back your arm and find it’s not that easy. Whatever the shimmering thing is, it’s not letting go, and in fact is gripping even tighter. You scream and wrench your body with all your might, and stumble back free. You look down at your arm. It’s become insubstantial, gray, with vapors rising from its surface. You scream and shake your limb, then watch it re-solidify back to the limb you knew.
The thing is still there and it reaches for you again. This time you run, as long as you can for as far as you can, which is very, very far indeed. You don’t even thinking of slowing until you’ve crossed one ocean, and you don’t actually stop until you’ve crossed two. At which point you see, not too far from you, the shimmering thing, walking toward you. Stopping was a mistake. So you run again and don’t stop, the world speeding past your vision in a blue and you keep going for weeks on end until, finally, you stop to see if you lost it. You did not.
( “CERN Globe Light Man” by shotleyshort is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0. )
You keep running. This becomes your life for a long, long, long time. How long, you don’t even know. You can’t even remember the last time you stopped. Whenever you do, the thing is always there and is always closer. The only thing to do then, is keep running, forever and ever.  You spend your life fleeing, escape the only thing on your mind. All other thoughts have been sanded away. Who you were, what you loved, where you came from, how you lived–replaced with nothing more than raw animal flight, the parts of your brain devoted to any thought but this goal withering away to nothing. Including, one day, why you were running in the first place. That is when you finally stop.
The thing closes in, its arms outstretched. A terrible pressure builds over all that you are, but you’re no longer afraid. Because now there is no more you to be afraid for.
