Fountain Life

In 2004, a college senior named Mitch pursued Kayla, a classmate at a Louisiana university. After a period of courtship, the two graduated, married, and moved into a suburban home with a white picket fence. By 2009, they had built a complete life together, raising a daughter and a son. Their existence was defined by domestic stability, weekend family game nights, and morning playfulness. This idyllic American dream served as the backdrop for a quiet afternoon that would eventually dismantle Mitch’s entire reality. The red lamp begins to warp While watching a football game on his couch, Mitch noticed a mundane red lamp in the corner of his living room. The object appeared strangely blurry, though the rest of the room remained in sharp focus. Despite rubbing his eyes and physically touching the lamp, the distortion persisted. The anomaly escalated when the lamp appeared to flip upside down and began to move on its own. Mitch, paralyzed by a mix of confusion and a strange refusal to seek medical help, spent an entire night staring at the impossible object in total silence. His wife, returning to find him in a catatonic trance, eventually called for medical assistance as the lamp grew to consume his entire field of vision. A brutal return to reality As the lamp's image expanded, Mitch felt a blinding pain and heard the sound of screaming. He opened his eyes to find himself lying on a college campus, surrounded by a crowd of students. A police officer rushed him to a hospital, where the horrifying truth emerged. Mitch had been tackled during a casual football game and knocked unconscious for approximately ten seconds. In that brief window of neurological trauma, his brain had meticulously constructed an entire decade of memories, including a wife and children who never existed. The enduring trauma of phantom loss The aftermath of the incident left Mitch in a state of profound grief for a family that was purely a figment of his imagination. He later detailed his experience in a Reddit AMA, explaining that he still dreams of a son who is perpetually five years old. To Mitch, the loss was as visceral and painful as any real death, forcing him into long-term therapy to cope with the disappearance of a decade that occurred in the blink of an eye. He now lives a private life, still grappling with the weight of memories that have no place in the physical world.