The Backrooms of the mind

My mother could remember everything. She could see someone for the first time in thirty years and recognize them just from their face and be able to recall their name without even a hint. She could remember when it was someone’s birthday who she hadn’t spoken to in over a decade, and she could remember the address to send the greeting card. She could remember how everyone was related to one another in the extended part of the family that we never saw. She could remember every student she ever taught, and would greet them as an old friend if she ran into them again.

Then, something changed. In the beginning, it was little things. She would call my dad, begging him to come home from work because she was scared, but she couldn’t explain why. She would drive halfway to a place we needed to go to, only to turn around because she felt overwhelmed. She would open the door to my bedroom at night, waking me up, and when I asked her what she was doing, she would only apologize and leave, only to do it again the next night. My dad had taken the lock off of my door when I was sixteen because I had run away, but after repeated nights of this disturbance, he put it back on.

It soon escalated to where she would jiggle my doorknob and get frustrated because she couldn’t understand why the door wouldn’t open. She couldn’t remember how to put food back into the refrigerator when she was finished eating, so we had to put a bicycle lock on the door so only my dad and I could get food out for her. She would endanger herself by sitting in the car in the hot garage in the middle of summer, risking heat stroke simply because she thought my dad would drive her somewhere when he wasn’t even home at the time. She would lash out in anger at anyone. We had to stop having visitors over. My boyfriend was the only one who braved the chaos, and she pushed him down the stairs on more than one occasion. The worst was when my dad, once, exhausted from having to work a full-time job and come home to a wife with dementia, had fallen asleep on the floor, and my mom kicked him awake. But every night, when we would all be trying to sleep, she would yell gibberish and cry. I was only nineteen years old. She was fifty-four.

It was confusing and scary for me. My mother was once so stoic. She was always quick to anger, but she hardly ever cried. She complained constantly, but she stayed calm in a crisis. One summer, when I was in my preteens, she was using the bug net to scoop all the dead bugs out of the above-ground pool we had in our backyard. When she went to dump the bugs out over the side, I heard her cry out in pain. A wasp had been hanging out behind the bars that made up the perimeter of the pool and had stung her hand three or four times because that’s what wasps do. She told me that we had a doctor living in our neighborhood who could help. Despite not having spoken to her in over a decade, she could tell me the exact house she lived in. I ran over as fast as I could, still dripping wet from the chlorinated water, and sure enough, the doctor was there. How could a woman like that suddenly forget how to drive to the drugstore five minutes away? How could she forget how locks work?

No one knows what to say to you when you’re in your early-20s and have to deal with your mother raving over things that aren’t real, or potentially hurting herself by leaving the stove on or leaving the house to wander the neighborhood. Because they don’t know what to say, they get uncomfortable, and because they get uncomfortable, they start ignoring the problem. It’s human nature; we feel like we have to control everything, and when we can’t, we shut down. So, my mother and I had to deal with a problem that people our age should never have to deal with, with little support from others. It was isolating. It was cruel. It was hopeless.

I’m glad that we are both in better places now, but being apart doesn’t change the fact that she is slowly deteriorating. She used to at least watch TV, but now she just stares off into space. Who knows what goes through her mind? She does respond when you speak to her, but there’s no way of knowing if it really connects. Even if she smiles when she sees me, does she even recognize me as her daughter? Does she even recognize me as a person she knows?

There is a musical project called The Caretaker which explores the memories of people with Alzheimer’s dementia through ballroom music from the 30s and 40s, but distorted to simulate their declining mental state. Coupled with the album art, which are images of Ivan Seal’s surrealistic paintings, it is meant to instill in the listener the feeling of trying to distinguish something recognizable out of the abstract, but the details are fuzzy. As the music continues, it gets more and more unclear until, finally, it stops. This understandably makes many people upset because it puts this tragic condition into perspective for those who haven’t seen a loved one undergo this slow process. However, I have a second layer of sadness when I listen to it because my mother would not identify with the music samples used for the albums. She wasn’t even alive back then.

I have a third reason why the project upsets me. This condition is hereditary, and I will likely go through the same thing. I fear that I will also be young when it begins. I wish I didn’t have to see the things I saw when I was supposed to be in the prime of my life. I will go the rest of my time on this planet with fear in the back of my mind. It’s possible that I won’t even know who I am in thirty years, and that’s terrifying.

I already have memory problems. I’m not sure if it’s just because of my autism or because I’ve blocked certain things from my mind, but I can’t remember much of my childhood. When I was very young, about five or so, I could recall anything—even events from when I was a baby—but that talent faded so fast. Now, I remember places more than people, which is sad because the people are still out there somewhere, but the places have been torn down long ago.

As we get older, our bodies get weaker, and our minds get weaker. I can’t stand the idea of being weak. My right arm is in terrible pain as I type this, and I fear the day I won’t be able to use it anymore. I won’t be able to write, I won’t be able to sew, I won’t be able to play video games. It must be even more awful to not be able to use your brain anymore.

Our memories are what make us individuals. Without them, who are we? Often, our memories of specific events are completely different from the memories of someone else who was present. This could be because of what we were feeling at the time—a happy event could be sad for someone else, like a birthday party where you’re being ignored while the other kids are having fun. It could be because our even earlier memories have shaped our worldview, so your own opinions or trauma make you see a completely different perspective. Most of the time, though, it’s because we remember what we want to remember, what we think is important. That’s why you can’t remember the color of the paper hats everyone wore at that party, only that you felt lonely. I wonder if it’s the same with forgetting who you are. You’re just not important anymore. When someone loses their identity, we also lose that different perspective. Their history fades with them. We lose a piece of the puzzle.

Photos have been passed around the internet within the last year or so about places called “The Backrooms.” They’re a bunch of plain, modern locations, such as empty office building hallways with dim, buzzing lights, maintenance basements with concrete walls and large pipes, or parking garages with no cars that seem to stretch out infinitely, but something is just a little bit off. They are at once familiar and alien. The images look like places you’ve been before, but you know you haven’t. There’s a debate if these places even exist or if the images were made by artificial intelligence. Some even claimed to have visited these Backrooms in their dreams.

Everyone in the comments of these photos states how frightening these places are. Perhaps it is because they have the atmosphere of being abandoned for some unknown reason, or perhaps it is because they feel claustrophobic, despite being largely empty, open spaces. Your brain tries to make sense of the strange nostalgic feeling because you can’t be nostalgic for a place you’ve never been, and because your brain cannot completely recognize it, the feeling becomes uneasy. Your mind is used to places that look like this being populated with people. There are none, but you expect there to be.

One might make the mistake of thinking these Backrooms are just abandoned buildings, structures that, for one reason or another, have long gone untouched. The difference with a place that has been abandoned, though, is that there’s usually something to draw your eye: a spot in the wood that is rotting from age and exposure to moisture, wallpaper that is peeling off, a graffiti tag left behind by someone who had previously explored the space, a rat scurrying into the corner of the room. The Backrooms have nothing. Plain walls, no furniture, nothing to distinguish one hallway from another, and no windows. All you have is the sickly yellow light of fluorescent bulbs, accompanied by the hum of the electric current, and the tump-tump of your footsteps on carpet, or tomp-tomp if it’s tile.

But I’m not afraid of the Backrooms. I’m afraid of losing my way. I imagine a mind with Alzheimer’s looks similar to these empty spaces, with no memories to call forward to fill the void. No familiar faces because the people are all gone, forgotten. No sense of direction or point of reference for where you should go. When you’re in the Backrooms, you have no sense of time. With no windows or clocks, and the lights always buzzing above you; you don’t know where you are or how long you’ve been there. If you do find a door, a spark of recognition, you open it just to find another empty room with the same bare walls and the same faded carpet and the same yellow lights. There are no exits.

People have tried to equate the Backrooms to “liminal space,” which is a space of crossing over. It’s a space where you have left somewhere behind, but haven’t fully entered somewhere else yet. The comparison makes some sense because many Backroom images are hallways, areas designed to take you from one room which you left to another room which you wish to enter. The problem with equating those two is that liminal space is an in-between. You have somewhere to go, a destination to which you are heading. The Backrooms doesn’t have that. Once you’re there, you’re there forever. There is no destination, no matter how badly you want there to be. There’s nowhere for you to go but to wander aimlessly until you can’t wander anymore.

Clover S. Laurel is a dark fantasy and horror writer, currently residing in Delaware. Clover developed her love for literature at an early age and began writing when she was eight years old. Now twenty-seven, she has self-published three books and has worked with several clients through freelance editing. Clover advocates for those with mental illnesses and those on the autism spectrum, and she uses her writing as an outlet for these attributes. She also enjoys using nature as a theme in her work. Her other hobbies include Japanese fashion, embroidery, and video games. You can follow her @clover.s.laurel on Instagram