That was terribly close. It seems the longer Derek continued holding off her advances, the harder it becomes to keep pretending like he didn't already know what she wants. It's such a sickening sweetness in the back of your throat, like a the smell of a rotting corpse.
He could not stand it! The extended periods of silent pining, of daydreams resolving blissful romantic passions, it could all be swept away with but a single moment of weakness. Yet, that weakness was one that he could not conscionably abide.
Every morning he hardened his resolve, and every evening, his heart was broken anew at the bitter cost of maintaining his own sanity. It seemed that everyone else in the town had to pass through such a trial, and one by one they lost control of their faculties, or willingly abandoned it to the bizarre unreality of the forest of the Everglades.
Where they all failed, he could not. For the memory of his departed mother only grew more vibrant and powerful with each reflected remembrance. The cost of what had been taken from him did not ever waver. As he grew, so did this secret passionate revolution within his heart of hearts.
He started shallowly, visiting forums on the internet in order to discuss his obscure ideas. Search results like "How do you know if your parents have been replaced?" and "Can you prove that your memories have been falsified?" appeared in the browser history of his personal computer.
Once, his father found him seven pages deep on an alternative history website, filled with conspiracy theories. He didn't exactly believe in lizard people, or anything of the sort, but he was desperate for anything that might explain the nagging feelings he had in his deepest depths of mind. He played it off as a casual boyish curiosity, and fortunately his father had taken the lie in stride. He learned to be a lot more careful after that.
Finding no satisfaction on the digital libraries, he began to ask those around his town if they had any clues about the odd behaviors of the citizens. Nowhere else on earth did they hold such strange celebrations as the Autumn blood harvest, or the pyre they burned on the summer solstice.
His dalliances were often met with a stark rebuttal, as the elderly grew wary of such fervent attention by the locus of a boy so young. His parents celebrated their son's fascination with the culture and history of their small community, but those who seemed to know the most remained unconvinced of the purity of his intentions. There was no way that he could be so wholly committed to their cause.
Whatever this great cause may be, who is to say? It was a mystery.
Many a time, a withered hand would waggle in his face, admonishing him to beware the taxing powers of the knowledge he sought. Once, he received such a ferocious upbraiding by a librarian that he ran home and swore that he would never open a book again, in his life. Yet, every time his spirit was broken, his memory of that doorway locked away high in the stars would burn across his mind like a fulminate artillery round, and his fury would be kindled just as ferociously as before.
How could he ever assuage the pain of what had been taken from him? The longing to see her again, the time that he had been forced to grow without her influence, the worry—the anxiety of knowing naught of whether she was alive or dead—all of this would have to be paid in due time with every ounce of blood, and sweat, that it had cost him to achieve it.
If it was a conspiracy greater than the minds of men were able to singularly dismantle, then he would find forces greater still, in order to dismantle their powers. If it was a country who had taken her away from him, then he would overthrow that governing body, and instill measures that it could never be replicated again, throughout all of history.
If it was a god that desired to punish her for her sins, then he would have to learn the deepest arcane magics in order to slaughter that god; for no mother was as laudable as his own, and he could not live under the judgement of a deity so blinded by their own inherent biases to condemn a woman as beautiful as she had seemed to him.
Eventually, he became so ruefully devoted to the idea that he could no longer be reached by any external individual. His room was buried under a heavy layer of charts, diagrams, runes, and textbooks all strewn about in a haphazard fashion; as he buried himself into a madness just as serene and horrible as the one outside his window every morning.
Every second, every minute, every hour, every day, he meditated on the vestige of that impossibly stretching hallway. The sound of his mother's voice; the echoing, haunting emptiness in the pit of his stomach; the dread and sorrow that permeated the pit of his stomach every time he so much as acknowledged its presence—it all began to knot back in upon itself in similar places. It had a regularity to its terror. The madness it threatened grew to be almost nostalgic, the more time he spent with it.
It gnarled, and writhed, and slithered into the darkness every time he zeroed his vision in on it, but it seemed like from the various glimpses he had caught of its size unawares, he began to notice a similar shape. Several segments of its vast, imperceptible magnitude were so integral to his every day life, that it seemed almost like a natural part of the world.
The sensation of teeth falling out of his mouth, the blank vulnerability of showing up naked in a public space, the sharp realization of his inability to control even the most basic presentations of self as his hair falls out of his scalp, forever—They were dreams that everyone has at one point or another, but no one ever asked themselves why.
No one ever looked closer into that disturbing void, for fear that it would consume them whole... but he had already lost someone to that unfathomable maw, and the closer he drew to the gaping mouth that opened whenever he focused on those terrible possibilities, the closer he felt to her. Soon, he found that enough had aligned in his head, that he could perceive an entire grand contour in the lattice of his mind—The face of god, imprisoned in his imagination. He couldn't look away, even for a single second, or else the image in his brain threatened to vanish in a puff of smoke.
He stared up into the shifting, dangling tendrils of horrid inconsistencies, and unthinkable malice... and so, he wept, for it was grand indeed. To regard the entire form at once would be like to turn your head up into the sky, and attempt to catalogue every single spot of blackness between the stars. It was like peering deep into the ocean below, and piling all of that water onto your back in one great cistern.
To regard this nameless god was to absorb all of the sorrow of the world, and all of its heartbreak, to the point that there would be nothing left for anyone else to feel much of anything at all. In fact, it could be said that a single thought from this great beast would dwarf all the complexities and passionate philosophies of all intellectual thought in all of recorded history.
All of what he assumed was his own thoughts of terror, and trepidation were nothing more than the reflections of this figures movements through the vacuum of space, reflecting off the surface of formerly dead matter. We all were mere ripples across an existential pond, who had the hubris of thinking we were sophic matter.
How can a wave do anything more than wiggle about on the surface of a pond, before petering out with time? A splash doesn't know that it is made of water, nor that its speed and amplitude is caused by the wake of a boat passing mindlessly through the lake that it resides inside, and it has no way of realizing the futility of its efforts to change that course. It was as insignificant, and as temporary, and as mindless as the liquid that it propagated throughout.
Derek gasped, clutching his head, at the unbearable pain his studies had exacted upon his cerebral cortex. He snapped out of his reverie with a blinding flash, as even the imaginary representation proved too powerful for his mortal brain to contain. He collapsed onto the floor of his bedroom in a wash of fluttering papers, and he clutched his chest, breathing rapidly. He had them, for even a moment. Tomorrow, he would make it remain, even a minute longer.