Tall glass window. Hard wooden seats. Backs of heads. They were all in front of my eyes as my brain fully processed them. Reality and not reality were clear to me for a few seconds before warping into a blur of what I previously knew. What had happened? Why did it have to come to that? It went from nothing to a “something” and that something grew bigger and bigger until I could barely take it anymore. 

  It all started with a singular tall glass window that sat in front of me and my mother, who had forced me into the church we were sitting in as of that moment. I stared at the heads that were behind the window, something that bestowed the sights of the activities behind in front of my seat. See, my mother and I were sitting in a room secluded from the rest, since it was made for younger children who cried and yelled a lot, so they don’t disturb the church. Anyway, I was staring at the window in front of me when I had started to focus on the window itself, and not what was happening behind it.

  A window, something that shows you something behind it. It seems you can actually touch what is behind the window, but you can’t. You can reach out to touch it, but your touch will only be met with glass. Sometimes you assume the window isn’t there, but reflections in front of the window always show up in the end. After all, you can look at others, but you should look at yourself to figure out who you truly are.

  I was staring at the glass window when a thought that would end up creating a false reality just from words came into the existence of my brain, similarly to a singular raindrop hitting the surface of a peaceful pond. But, just as all of the previous ones did, and what the future ones will do, a raindrop hitting the pond creates small ripples that spread over time, and the peace is disturbed. "It seems you can actually touch what is behind the window, but you can’t... Never being able to reach what was behind the window, perhaps," my brain said to itself, "that nothing was really behind it in the first place. Or maybe," I paused, "It is you who was never truly there in the first place."

  Who was I? The me, or mes, who I was, weren’t in this world, or even universe, were they? Fake people created in a fake reality created from words, showed to a real person who really believed all of that, and definitely was not handling it well. Pretending you were fine in the middle of what you believed to be a false reality, where everything you knew was fake, what you believed was fake and everything you saw and once believed was thought to be fake was hard, yeah?

  An image in the window that started my thought process unintentionally surfaced on the glass, perhaps condensation or some other not odd explanation, and I thought that image solved my issue. An image of what I thought showed the current situation of who I really was. Cold laboratory. Wires hanging from the ceiling similar to vines, attached to me as if I was in a hospital in critical condition. Or was I actually in critical condition? I carefully looked at myself in my reflection. My reflection stared back as I observed the small details in it that weren’t on me as of that moment. A reflection of the reflection? Lines outlining a smaller shape? Critical condition? What did those lines mean... were they just something easily explained by science... or something more? Perhaps I was not okay?

  I believed I was in danger. Starving, on the verge of death, nowhere to go or hide. There was nobody to tell, after all, I was just an imaginative child, yeah? What was real and what was fake? Everything I thought I knew felt as if it had been shattered like glass hitting the ground, and I would go and stare at the broken reflection staring back at me, and ask, “Who are you?” It felt like raindrops hitting a once peaceful pond over and over again, and the ripples never stopped forming and growing. A repeated cycle, over and over and over again without any reassurance or answer or anything at that matter. In the distance, I heard my mother’s voice. She was sitting next to me, but it felt far away, like she wasn’t actually there. Mom scolded me for not sitting up straight because my posture wasn’t good, and it made me wonder how she could act so calm while there was a storm wrecking my pond so much it was overflowing with water. 

 I was rocking back and forth while quickly letting in air and exhaling it out. Time seemed to stop in those moments, or maybe the minute and hour hands on a clock were ticking so slowly they practically ceased to move. I couldn’t look at my reflection in the window, no matter how hard I tried to move my eyes to face the glass in front of me. But wait. Then, who was I supposed to be, exactly? What is an identity, and what was mine?

  Identity: the distinguishing character or personality of an individual. Quoted from Merriam Webster. How was I distinguished from other people? My unique fingerprints on my fingers and the small lines crossing each other on my hands like someone scribbled all over them with pencil is one, details that not even the human brain could comprehend and recreate in dreams, yet no matter how much I looked at my hands, that feeling of not being real was not evaporating. 

  I knew what anybody would say if I told them what happened that day. Why couldn't I just used logic? It’s something that’s hard to describe, and something that not everyone may not understand. That feeling still haunts me some of these days, because the raindrops and the ripples come back. But sometimes it didn’t feel that way. Sometimes I’m aware of who I truly am: me.

  It was all blurry. I don’t remember much after that. It is like a blank canvas, nothing to see. But I’m still me. I’m not from another universe, or other universes. The reality I am in is the reality I live in. It is not a fake program created by scientists, but a real universe created by the causes and effects of space and time. Maybe no matter how hard I tried I could never always feel like that: feel real. And in the end, I’ll realize that I was safe.