Losing Myself
I am tired, lonely and afraid.
In the dead of night, I was awoken to a muffled voice outside my door. I could not quite make out what they were saying, but I knew I was in trouble. Suddenly, a net was cast over me and in a flash, I found myself transported to another world.
I saw alien creatures with large, bulbous eyes and long fingers tapping at a transparent keyboard in the air. I was hooked into a cylindrical machine and injected with a numbing shot. I could not move and watched as strange lights flickered in front of me. At first, it was white noise, but I slowly began to make out the appearance of a young girl, with light brown hair and hazel eyes. I watched her, mesmerized as her body formed in front of me and suddenly began to realize that this person was none other than a reflection of myself.
My mind began racing as her eyes opened and looked into mine. She smiled and reached her hand out towards me. I unconsciously did the same, and it was then that I truly saw myself for the first time. As it turns out, we were both tired, lonely and afraid.
My arm began to feel heavy and fell to my side as the world around me started to fade. It was then that I realized this person in front of me was not just a reflection of me. It was me.
I had been uploaded into their database and would soon disappear.
Note (not part of the word count): the goal here was to write a story of a girl losing herself. I wanted the last “I” to be her last thought before the end, so it’s exactly 15 “I’s.”
I checked the word count with the following:
perl -0777 -lape's/\s+/\n/g' FILENAME | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr