If those sensations never change—never become more than an environmental automatism—the brain will make its own entertainment. This is more likely to happen in states of sensory deprivation. It’s common for blind people to hallucinate swirling colours and flashing lights. The deaf hear murmurs, and footsteps, and music. These are never completely original creations, but instead draw on memories. A unique jumble of thoughts and experiences. Lazy abstractions.  

This is also how dreams are formed.  

One method of boring your brain is to stare into a mirror. Fixate on one spot on your face, and after a couple of minutes, your features will start to disappear. This phenomenon is known as Troxler’s Fading. Then, the remaining details will shift. Change. Deform. This is Troxler’s Effect.  

The endurance of mirror games like Bloody Mary and Candy Man can be credited to this. When I first read about Troxler’s Effect, I’d expected to see facial distortion and shadow beings—this is what most other people reported, so anything else seemed far-fetched.  

I hadn’t expected my face to change so entirely.  

In the beginning, I could only focus for five-minute stretches before my mind would wander, and my eyes would jerk to some other point in the room. It was enough time to see the shape of my eyes change, the corners sloping downwards in a way that looked decidedly sad.  

By the time I made it to the ten-minute mark, those sad eyes had turned blue, my cheeks had slimmed, and my hair was lighter. There was almost nothing left of my own face in the mirror.  

I can stare for upwards of an hour at a time, eyes fixed on the ones in the mirror, watching them shift and settle. The details change—blemishes, hairstyle, the hue of the eyebags—but it’s always the same face.  

And it’s so familiar.  

Realistically, I know my brain can’t create an entirely new face, so of course I’ve seen it before. It has to have come from somewhere. But I can feel it in my guts—this isn’t the face of someone I saw on television, or passed in the street, and then forgot about. I know the boy in the mirror. I know him intimately. I’m sure of this, but no matter how much time I spend staring at him, I can never figure out how. There’s no eureka moment. I watch him until my head hurts and my eyes droop enough to break the spell, but nothing ever clicks.  

This hobby has turned into a ritual. Every night, once the rest of my family has gone to bed, I set the mirror up and stare into it until I can’t anymore.  

I’ve started to dream of him. He wears a school uniform I don’t recognise and talks with figures that I do. I’ve met these people before—I remember their faces, their smiles, their teeth—but don’t know who they are. I can’t know who they are, this pervasive voice whispers. They aren’t real. Sometimes it’s my own voice, sometimes it’s someone else’s, and other times I can’t tell. They meld together so perfectly I wonder if it really is all me—my own voice, my own smile, my own face—and I’m going mad. 

Every time a name is on my tongue or an image begins to fade into a memory—faces growing clearer, and younger—the voice is there to intervene.  

They aren’t real.  

They can’t be real.