decomposed.org


2012, Setp.
22

In the Realm of the Demon Queen

I found myself in a tinychat room with a Hail_lamasthu aka the demon queen™ aka the internet presence of teenage girl going through a nervous breakdown. She hadn't slept for days and wasn't eating until twitter saint gabetwee convinced her to. Her eyes were wide, her voice was a low stumbling whisper, and her head, severed by the frame of the screen, would drift in slow circular movements as fragmented stories involving past loves, stale mushroom pizza, and the feeling of impossibility streamed in dull monotony out from her pixelated lips. In the video broadcasting div Hail_lamasthu was flanked by three other livestreams: gabetwee, sprewellimz, and me under the temporary guest handle slargmofr. But when she talked she wasn't talking to us, she was talking to someone inside tinychat. Gabe and her internet friend sprewell, a depressed insomniac recovering from a leg amputation, were attempting to convince the demon queen™ of the merits of sleep, while I, stunned by this nightmare, felt absolutely powerless as my eyes, sunk into the grey-blue skin of my motionless real-time me, stared back in paralyzing self-consciousness. We were trapped. We couldn't sleep unless she, she the teenage hopped up on adderall "it makes me focus" broke body clock girl slept too. So there we lay, all four of us together, blankets up to our necks, faces illuminated only by the off-white of the millions of RGB cells inches from our heavy eyelids until we all drifted away into our own separate dreams, and, as our computers fell to sleep too, we lost the connection. I awoke to an empty room, chat history gone with no signs of the past except for one screen capture .jpeg remaining in my random access memory as a drag it deep into my pictures folder. Of course the teenage queen is out there too, somewhere, in some city, in some condition. 3m ago she tweeted "lol who plays solitaire with real cards anyways"


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