#rilestalks

Alright, fuck this. Here’s my offering to whatever burned the library.

.

My name is Riley Boggs, and you are not going to win. 

You’ve been messing with my world, but I’ve been noticing.

I don’t know who you are, or where you came from.

But if I know one thing it’s that I am not wrong.

.

I remember my town, what my home used to be. 

You’ve taken my friends, fucked with their memory.

You changed my mum’s hair, my school curriculum,

I don’t know what you did, but it’s impossible to run. 

.

Burned the old newspapers, scratched up welcome signs, 

And don’t think I haven’t noticed you’re fucking with time.

You’ve done strange things to animals, changed the colour of the sky,

But I don’t even really care about the reason why. 

.

I don’t want to hurt you, even though you’ve hurt me.

I just want you to leave me and my town be. 

I don’t know who you are, or where you came from. 

I went to the library, to look through old newspaper archives to see if I could find anything. I asked the librarian to show me where the old papers from the last ten years or so were, and she took me out to a back room and showed me where to find them. All was well. It was around the point that I was picking up the first newspaper that I realised I hadn't actually seen one for a long time - like they’d just stopped being printed. But they hadn't - there were recent dates on the papers, up to last week.

I went searching for a paper with the town’s name, news about the weird curriculum, stories about anything at all that might help. I spent so long there, and I didn't take in any information - it was like anything useful that I read just filtered right out. 

But I finally found it. I finally found a paper with the town’s name in it. But the longer I stared, the less the letters made sense to me. They swam on the page, they fuzzed like static. I couldn't understand them. So I decided to try and take a photo. But the moment I pointed my camera at the page. It caught fire. It caught, and the entire paper archives went up with it. Most of the library was fine, but anything that might've helped me is gone now. But that’s not the weirdest part. 

when I was staring into the flames of the lost archives, I swear I could see words dancing in the smoke. Words like no, like stop, like leave us be. And as I watched them dance, I heard them echo deafeningly in my mind. It was so loud, I couldn't move. I had to be dragged out by the librarian.

but the sky would not permit me! oho, no, it wouldn't. 

I could see stars in my peripheral vision, sure, but whenever I tried to focus on one, it vanished! Like the black dots between the squares on those illusion pictures. Freaked me out, so I gave up after a while. 

Someone asked this blog what colour the sky is here... is it weird to say I don't know? That it changes through colours I don't really have names for? 

And if that's weird to you, what does that mean for this blog? Have I accidentally found an internet wormhole to another dimension? The right dimension, maybe?

Or maybe I’m not in a different dimension at all - maybe it’s just some weird shit happening in my town. 

I also called my uncle today - he lives on a farm that, if I remember right, should be just out of town. But I don't remember going there for a long time. Not quite as long as the weird shit has been happening - I think, last year maybe? Hard to say. Anyway, I called him today. No pick up. The phone didn't even ring - it was like the line was dead. 

I’m sure the town used to have a name - most towns do, right? But for the life of me, I can’t remember it, and I don’t think anyone else does either. 

The signs are all scratched off. They clearly used to say something - “Welcome to ------!” - but now there’s just scratched paint where the name should be. 

The infodesk hasn’t been manned in years, and there’re no materials there that I can find which would tell me anything about the place. None of the businesses have the town name anywhere. Whenever I use a map app, the internet seems to cut out - I can’t work out where the fuck I am. And whenever I ask the other people in town, they just laugh. Their laughs sound kinda like I’m being stupid, how could I not know the name of the town I've lived in for 20 years? But then they stop laughing, and their eyes go blank for a moment, and it’s like they forgot I even asked. 

I’ve tried to leave. But the roads all go into the woods, and I’m yet to find one that spits me out anywhere other than another part of town. I see people come and go, sure. But when I ask them where they’ve been, I can’t get a straight answer. 

So, hi. My name is Riley. I don't want to say much more than that here - the internet is a scary place, after all. But I have to let the world know what's going on.

The town I live in is fucked. Up. It's a weird little country Australia town, and I know all rural communities have their own sort of strangeness but this... This isn't right, y'all. I'm not sure how to explain it. It started out normal enough - community football on Saturdays, everyone knows me through knowing my family, we've all lived here forever. It's cramped, and kinda insular, but not a horrible place to grow up.

But things have gotten way weird, in the last few years. For one - by the time I finished high school, the curriculum had nothing to do with anything! We learned math but not like... real math. We learned fake languages. They stopped teaching the regular lessons and started teaching things that I'd never heard of before.

Buuut I was a teenager, and I didn't really like school, so I didn't really notice.

But now.. The air tastes strange. Our shelves are lined with products that don't make sense, fruits that can't exist. I feel like I've stepped into another dimension, but nobody believes me when I tell them my mother used to have jet black hair, because it's strawberry blonde now and she swears she's never bleached it.

Even in the old photos it's blonde now.