Chapter One: The Cold Room ---Fragments of a Dissociative Universe---

The world seemed to stop when darkness fell. Winter of ’16. Okanagan was frozen solid, not the kind of cold you shake off with a hoodie and a coffee, but a bone cracking stillness that made every breath feel like broken glass. Just me, thirty five, locked in a rented room that smelled of mildew and stale smoke, already feeling like my expiration date had passed years ago.

Days weren’t much brighter than the nights. I pruned frozen vineyards for contract, pay good money if you kept the blades moving. Piecework. Every cut counted. They gave me blocks and left me alone. Just me, the shears, and miles of sleeping vines whispering in the wind. No chatter, no voices, only steel on wood and frost under my boots. I was fast, precise. The kind of worker they didn’t need to check on. All it bought me was another night to burn.

Ritual time. Same every night. The only clock I obeyed.

On the milk crate I called a table: a dented metal bowl, a Bic lighter, a bag of weed that reeked like skunk roadkill, and my real communion, shards of ketamine crushed into neat lines, thick enough to send a new user into the cosmos, but for me, just an aperitif.

I lit the weed, filled my lungs, and let the world fade. Then the powder, a sharp burn, and sudden numbness. Cold, clean, perfect. My body disappeared, edges blurred, and for hours I could escape.

Most nights I pushed further with larger doses, chasing the K hole. In that void, the body vanished and the mind slipped through dimensions. I wasn’t chasing a high but the hidden machinery of reality, trying to tear through the veil. And when you hit it right, the universe doesn’t whisper …it screams.

But that night, I stayed lighter. Different. Restless. A movie would be enough noise to distract me from myself.

Movies were a strange comfort. I never bought the fairytales, heroes saving the day, Hollywood lies for the fragile. I wanted rust under paint, stories that smelled like piss and regret. La Haine, Crash. Films that didn’t give closure, only scars.

That night it was The Butterfly Effect. Ashton Kutcher trying to shed his pretty boy skin. I laughed when I hit play. People said it was dark. Twisted. My kind of bedtime story.

At first, background noise. I was already half melted into the chair, the K stretching time like gum. Kid with blackouts, journals, déjà vu time travel, whatever. I wasn’t invested. Not yet.

Then the movie shifted. The distortion, the grit in the sound design. Kutcher’s character slipping back into his child body. Something started chewing at me, quiet but insistent. I straightened up without meaning to. The haze cracked.

And then, that scene.

Every movie with sexual abuse perturbs me. Ever. Blockbusters, indie, trash VHS. My system rejects it. I go cold, sick, furious. Like blood turns to dry ice. I usually bail. Absolute rule.

But that night, I was slow. Numb. Stubborn.

“It’s just a movie, with Ashton,” I told myself. “Don’t be dramatic. See it through.”

Instant Regret hit at the scene with Evan and Kayleigh, just kids, in the basement. The dad George. Eric Stoltz, smug in quiet evil. Sets up the camcorder, red recording light flickering like the devil’s eye. His voice calm, casual, polite, like asking them to set the table instead of strip.

Something inside me cracked.

The room disappeared. The screen wasn’t a screen, it was a window. And I was inside.

My throat sealed. No oxygen. My heart wasn’t beating, it was detonating. Copper taste in my mouth, metallic, sharp, like chewing blood. My hands turned into claws around the remote. When I finally slammed stop, it was already too late.

Silence. Except for me, choking on air. High gone. Weed gone. Ketamine gone. Just raw, unbearable clarity.

I scrambled for noise, any noise. My hand shook on the cheap mp3 player. Salvation: an underground German horror rap crew. Beats jagged, suffocating, like chains dragged over concrete. Guttural German spat curses over industrial thuds. Perfect soundtrack for madness.

To calm myself, I carved two fat lines, snorted both, one per nostril. Double barrel blast. Seconds before the wave hits, stretching into years. Numbness returned. ACTIVATION MODE — SHORT MEMORY DISFUNCTION.

But even with the volume cranked, it couldn’t bury the images. The bass rattled the hinges of the door I’d blown open. I lit a cigarette with trembling hands, sucking smoke down hard, like nicotine could seal the crack. But the ghosts were already out.

It wasn’t empathy. It wasn’t “poor kids.” This wasn’t about them.

This was my lock turning. My sealed door blown open.

Decades of walling off shadows, burying the truth under chemicals, sarcasm, and running, it ended here. The movie found the crack. Pries it open with a crowbar.

That night, in a frozen Okanagan room where silence could kill, the film became a trigger. Not fun. Not playful. A chain reaction. The kind that doesn’t stop hitting with the worst shit possible.

And the demons didn’t crawl out.

They sprinted.

They tore the place apart.

At one point, I went to bed totally unaware of what was coming next…

Chapter Two: The Flawed Entry