⚠️ Content Warnings ⤴
Info
CW: This article contains content involving childhood trauma, domestic violence, and dissociation.
Written by DrAkimoto & DivineAtlas
Critique Credit:
scutoid studios, with an additional thank you for cooking up the cool css stuff.
PrismaticMoose,
centurys lute,
Praetor3005,
CamaradeAlbabar,
Sky3, &
Red-eyes Dragoon
Ataraxia is an absolute nothingness.
Now, I know what you're thinking, but it's not that. That would be something. You don't open a door, and there's some sort of endless emptiness. No, that too would be something. It's not a warped, non-Euclidean this or that. You won't fall through a floor or wall and end up here. No, not this level.
Ataraxia is more like that feeling, from when you were a kid. Do you remember it?
You wake up.
Once again, it's the dull clatter and raised voices muffled through the walls.
The fear returns, gripping your heart, the same fear that races through you whenever they fight. It's different than other fear, existential. The fear that your cozy corner of the world will be ripped apart and that the pieces will drift deep into the unknown.
You slide out of bed, your socks sliding lithely and silently on the hard wood of your floor. You carefully avoid each of your toys. The luminescent, orange glow of your seashell nightlight is your guide as it bathes the floor in its warmth.
Your door is already open; you forgot to close it after your usual late-night bathroom visit.
You cling to the walls, carefully avoiding the photos of you and your family hanging above, sentinels looming over the halls that were once filled with laughter.
Now they echo with hatred.
You wisely step over the creaky board, hiding behind the banister to watch the shadowy silhouettes of your parents stretching out of the kitchen and into the living room. You can now see them arguing. Your father is drunk again for the third night in a row.
"How can you do this to me night after night?" Your mother speaks in a low tone, probably for your sake, though they were most certainly unaware they had an audience.
"You…" His speech wasn't slurred, but he was angry, as he always was. "You don't love me, you only love the kid." He was most certainly drunk, his shadow stumbled a bit, shrinking as he moved towards the living room.
Mother's shadow waves its hands animatedly, "You only love yourself—you're barely even here. And when you are, you're not even here because you bring the entire fucking bar with you!"
Your thumb gingerly rubs the banister, finding a rough chip that you had knocked out of it with one of your spaceships last summer. Your parents were happier then. Your father hadn't lost his job, and your mother still had time for her hobbies instead of picking up extra shifts at the restaurant.
She would always say, "If one of those gross men at the restaurant put their money where their mouth is, I'll take you on a trip anywhere in the world!"—you would settle for a trip to the park if it meant they would stop fighting.
You snap back to reality as the shouting escalates.
"WHAT DID YOU SAY TO ME?"
"What are you doing!? Our kid is asleep upstairs!"
"I don't have any kids, I don't have any wife! I'M JUST A WASTE, RIGHT?!"
"That's not what I…"
She is interrupted by a slapping sound, the harrowing, thunderous peal of skin meeting skin. Her shadow doubles over, his recoiling from its own actions.
"Get back—get the fuck away—"
Another crack echoes through your house. The shadows now a mosaic of misfortune sliding from one side of the living room to the other. Glass breaks, their voices raise even higher, and you can't take another second.
You run back to your room, forgetting the floorboard as it creaks in agony under your weight. You accidentally crush one of your favorite toys underfoot, its brittle pieces scattering behind you like a trail of dust.
You hide in your fort. An old bedsheet on a wire, packed with stuffed animals, books, and a flashlight that somehow had batteries that never needed changing. You sob into your toys, your silent sentinels, the heat rising in your throat and eyes.
You close your eyes tight. Your ears start to ring as you wish, more than anything, that you were still asleep.
Your heart races to keep pace with your mind as you try to make sense of it all.
You squeeze your eyes closed even harder; colors and shapes start to swirl behind your eyelids.
You don't notice the board creaking down the hall.
You barely hear his voice.
"Hey, kid."
But you are already long gone…
The place you imagined in that moment—that is Ataraxia.
It's where you beg to be when you want to be anywhere but here. A half-formed dream in your mind's eye, a shapeless refuge for when reality is too much to bear. It pulls you deep, deep into its warm, cozy darkness. A long ways from the cloying effluvium of the heavens or the simmering rot of perdition—it is your own purgatory.
Ataraxia is an absolute nothingness, and no one should ever want to come here.
