There was something wrong with the hallway exiting the treatment room.

For starters, she was unsure if the walls were even real. She kept seeing something shimmer in the corner of her eye, like those mirages of puddles you see out on hot asphalt.  She tried to touch them, but somehow never succeeded, though what that meant was hard to explain. It certainly looked like she was touching the walls, but no sensation seemed to accompany the gesture. Come to think of it, her hands started looking real weird if she stared at them too long.

The hallway, though. It never seemed to end. She'd walk and walk and walk, and speedwalk, and walk some more, without ever making progress.  She didn't remember it being so long the last time she'd been here. Was she really so high when she left here that she never noticed how long this hallway was?

There was something on her head. It was rough and it itched at her temples. She tried to pull it off but it wasn't budging.  Much like the walls, her hands seemed completely devoid of sensation when touching that, too, which was the final straw that made her decide she needed to get out now.

She got a running start, just in time for the walls to part and give way to thin air. It was suddenly dark, too dark to see anything. And...the floor was gone. She was tumbling and flailing, or at least, attempting to. Ever since the walls had cleared she felt her movement restricted, like there was something around her. Arms wrapped uncomfortably tight. A warmth against her face. And then, a kiss. A kiss that tasted like static.

The buzzing of the alarm clock jolted her awake. 7:30am.  She hit the "Snooze" button so hard the clock fell off her nightstand. She froze like that, propped up on one arm, the other outstretched to where the clock used to be on the nightstand, unsettled in the sudden silence. A mounting pain in her chest made her realize she'd been holding her breath, so finally she drew a shaky one in, retracting her hand and sitting up in the bed.

She wasn't sure how long she sat there, staring at the folds of the bedsheets covering her lap. The faint morning light crept in through the blinds, giving the entire room a greyish hue. Her right thumb rubbed her left knuckles absently. She'd felt out of sorts yesterday, and sleep did not seem to have helped the mood fade. 

Over breakfast - a sad-looking bowl of cereal - she scrolled through the previous day's messaging history with Mitski. Bright and early in the morning, her friend had texted inquiring about how the date had gone the night before.

Mitski 6:03am

How did it go~?! 😊❤️

The ping from her phone had actually woken Lily up, but she'd waited to respond.

Lily 8:36am

Haha I think it went well! You are such an early bird 

Mitski had reacted to that message with the red heart emoji.

Mitski 8:41am

TELL ME EVERYTHING!!! 🙌🙌🙌

She'd groaned at that. 

Lily 8:43am

hahahaha oh that would take a lot of time

Mitski 8:45am

A lot of time?? It was one date! 😇 What did you get up to that it would take sooo long to tell me? 😏 

Lily 8:47am

Oh geez idk

Mitski 8:48am

!!! Did you hook up??

Lily 8:50am

Mits! no! It was a first date! 

Everything but...

Mitski 8:51am

Hey it's 2022! People have sex on the first date! It would have been out of character for you though

Was he nice? Did you have fun? When did you get back home?

Lily 8:59am

Yes, and yes. We had some coffee and went walking outside. About 9pm

Closer to 12:30am, in truth.  The kiss at the streetlight would have been a nice point to end the date, but for some reason she found herself unable to.  He just seemed so...into her. He kept looking at her in this way she couldn't describe. After a while they both got cold and he mentioned he lived nearby and would she like to come in and warm up a little bit?

It's not like he had come on too strong or anything. Up in his apartment he'd made some tea and they had curled up on the couch to resume their chat. He was sitting on the opposite end of the small two-seater, facing her, hugging one of the couch cushions as he talked. It would have been a nice, quiet time to unwind and warm up, had she been able to temper the restless energy inside her body. 

She tried hard, too. She couldn't pay attention to what he was saying, so she focused on punctuating his sentences with polite listening noises, nods, and smiles. But after a while, even that became difficult to continue.  The touch barrier had been broken and her mind kept wandering to how it might feel for him to touch her more.

She thought she could keep it subtle and low-key, at first.  She inched a bit closer to him, then took one of his hands into hers and began idly tracing the lines inside his palm with her index finger. He went quiet, and it wasn't that she didn't like to hear him talk, but she appreciated that she could finally drop the act that she was listening.  At that point, the energy she had been trying to hold back became an avalanche. The palm in her hand became his hand sliding over her shoulder, and his fingers running through her hair, and her feeling the fabric of his shirt...her recollection past then was a tangle of sensory memories she could not make sense of, until hours later where she was getting dressed, bristling at how cold her clothes had gotten, strewn across the floor. 

The trip home had felt neverending. It took her all of 13 seconds after entering her apartment to make it into a boiling hot shower, desperate as she was to wash the night - and the smell of her own arousal - off her skin.

Mitski 9:02am

CUUUUUUTE!!!! Awwhh babes that sounds like an adorable date. You are taking your time and doing it your way. So happy for you 🥰 

Lily 9:21am

Thanks Mits

And thanks for setting it up. I appreciate you thinking of me

Mitski 9:23am

❤️~!!

A long sigh escaped her mouth as she put the phone down. Finally, she rose from the kitchen table.  She changed from her pajamas into her not-much-more-formal-but-at-least-appropriate-for-day-wear sweats,  grabbed the laptop from the couch in the next room and set herself up to start her day.  She peered through the daily job posting lists in her email and started flagging the positions for which she was qualified. 

She glanced at the clock at the bottom corner of the screen: 8:30am sharp. The third time this week - like clockwork.

"We'll begin today with some patient-reported outcomes, and then go on to our session as usual. You remember these from your screening visit, right? Just a quick questionnaire."

Lily wondered briefly if there was an "off" setting to the smooth, radio-host polish of John's prosody.  Not that she didn't like it - it just seemed so inhumanly perfect.  She watched as he prepared the tablet on which the questionnaires were recorded, seeing in him an amount of put-togetherness she felt was entirely inaccessible to her.

She was used to the questionnaires they used to assess and measure progress on treatment.  She had lost count of how many doctors, therapists, psychiatrists and wellness apps she had provided with details about her disturbed sleep, her feelings of hopelessness, her constant worrying, the fluctuations in her propensity for suicidal ideation. 

The first few times she answered them, the sheer realization of the severity of her symptoms had brought her to tears.  There was something so raw about the directness of the questions. Outside of the therapeutic context, she had only experienced people skirting the issue or couching every question in myriad softening qualifiers, if they even asked at all.  Almost as if they hoped it wouldn't exist if it wasn't spoken about.

Nowadays, she could get through them reasonably well if she focused on answering quickly. Better not to dwell on her dysfunction. She was in the process of fixing it, anyway.

"I'll leave you in private to answer these, and I'll be back in a little while, okay?" he asked.  She nodded, watched him leave the room, then looked down at the tablet. 

Patient Recent Symptom Inventory (PRSI-6)

Please select the statement that applies to you:

1. I am working full time.
2. I am working part time due to my symptoms.
3. I am working part time for reasons other than my symptoms.
4. I am not presently working due to my symptoms.
5. I am not presently working for reasons other than my symptoms.

She selected '4' and clicked to move on to the next page.

On a scale of 1 to 5, 1 being 'not at all,' and 5 being 'every day', please indicate how often you have experienced the following in the past two weeks:

1. I have felt hopeless.
2. I have felt overwhelmed.
3. I have had difficulty enjoying daily life.
4. I have had to miss work due to my symptoms. (Note: if you are not presently working, please select Not Applicable).
5. I have experienced decreased productivity due to my symptoms. (Note: if you are not presently working, please select Not Applicable).
6. I have been unable to contribute to household tasks (washing dishes, doing laundry, paying bills) due to my symptoms.

2, 2, 3, NA, NA, 2. She finalized her answers and set the tablet on the table next to the Within, sitting pretty in its little case. At the screening visit, the lowest value she had provided on the questionnaire was a lone 4, though she could not remember which question she had indicated that for. It had only been three weeks and yet it felt like a lifetime ago; the change in such a short timespan had been massive.

John came back a few minutes later and commenced the usual process of positioning the device.  She wasn't sure, but she felt as though he was getting quicker. Maybe he was getting to know the shape of her head better.  Maybe time flew by quicker without the awkwardness she had felt in earlier sessions. It was still odd to let someone into her personal space bubble like that, but by this point it felt no more intimate than getting a haircut.  She nodded at John as he finished up, plugged the machine in, and left the room.

"Within Protocol Session 3. Welcome back. Block one will begin shortly. The duration of the block is five minutes. Please sit quietly with your eyes closed."

She spent block one in her habitual silence.  She was tired today, she realized, as she struggled to stay awake in the dim, quiet room.  She must have dozed off, because she jumped when the voice came back on, blinking rapidly in what was now complete darkness.

"Block two will begin imminently. The duration of the block is eighteen to twenty-nine minutes. It will end when the system achieves target coherence level. Please close your eyes and listen to the audio narrative."

This time, she was calm enough to close them right away. The voice resumed.

"Humans are creatures of habit.  By adulthood, the nervous system is largely stabilized and significant changes are hard to achieve. We take on our entire adult life with whatever coping mechanisms we developed as teenagers and attachment lessons we learned in the first five years of life. We are drawn to the familiar rather than the good. The known, rather than the unknown. The potential for danger is enough to keep us bound to our current reality, even when that reality no longer serves us. Within was devised to remedy this flaw in human development. You are working to undo the knots that have left you feeling stuck. Previously stabilized networks are rendered labile so that you may shift your behaviour and attain your true potential."

Strangely philosophical today, thought Lily. She wasn't sure she had it in her to truly pay attention. She came here to fix her problems, not listen to an AI's pontification regarding why humans were miserable. In all her years attempting to claw her way out of the hole, she'd grown allergic to discussions about maximizing "human potential." She wasn't a machine.

"Even with the powerful forces of the Within protocol assisting you, it is common to experience discomfort in the face of shifting behaviour patterns. Self-preservation is encoded deeply into the makeup of your brain, even when growth would be preferable. Fortunately, alleviating this discomfort is within your control. You are by now familiar with the well-being that comes with this treatment. Recall the relaxation and pleasure you have felt the previous times you were in this room, wearing this device. We recreate the feeling now."

She wasn't sure what the voice meant by "recreate." She attempted to recall the feeling and found it to spring suddenly back to life with startling vividness.  A wave of liquid heat swiftly coated her limbs, loosening every muscle fiber. While last time the feeling had built over the entire duration of the session, today its full intensity hit her in the span of mere seconds.

"There is no reason for change to feel anything but utterly pleasurable. From now on, this is the feeling you associate with exiting your comfort zone.  You can bask in the glow of alterations, relish the loss of patterns that do not serve."

A part of her felt like something was happening that was not quite right. There was maybe a bit of fear peeking through - her heart was beating faster, and she could feel the chill of sweat on the back of her neck. But the pleasure was so insistent. It lingered over her body, heavy and warm and sapping it of any capacity for tension. If this was fear, being afraid had never felt this good. It was at once soft and overwhelming.

"When the self-preservation instinct emerges amidst these transitions, neural connections will ensure these pleasure pathways are once again activated. You are held, supported, and guided. You comply, you act serenely. You are rendered entirely moldable. Savor this rebirth."

On some level, she knew softness could engender great change. Water carved through canyons, after all. But it took hundreds of years of steady current. Within felt like it was compounding those years and years of change into mere hours. It was closer to pouring boiling water through a bank of snow.  She could feel her metaphorical edges dissolving, and she only hoped those edges were parts of her she would not miss.

Faintly, she wondered whether she would even be capable of missing them once the protocol ended.