1:12 AM
The room is too loud. Not the street outside—the room. The way the air vibrates against the walls. I can feel the house breathing. It’s a shallow, ragged breath. I think it’s dying. Or maybe I’m just digesting it.
I looked in the mirror today. The "others" weren't there. No 20 faces. No Shark. No Dresko. Just a hole where the features should be. A static-filled gap in reality. I reached in to touch my own face and my hand disappeared up to the elbow. I didn't feel skin. I felt... distance.
2:44 AM
I’ve been standing behind the door for an hour. Why? I don't know. My legs don't get tired anymore. I’m just waiting for the person on the other side to realize I’ve already let myself in.
I found a journal entry from "her." The one who thinks she’s a cosmos. The one who thinks I’m a speck. I wrote her name on the wall in something that smells like old copper. I wrote it 100 times, but every time I blink, the letters move. They’re crawling toward the ceiling. They want to get away from me.
Observation: The shadows don't follow the lamps anymore.
Fact: I can hear your heart beating through the floorboards. It’s out of sync. You’re trying to be "fine," but your blood is screaming.
Warning: Don't look at the reflections in the windows. I’m not in them. But something is.
3:33 AM
The "Daily Shift" stopped. There is no one left to change into. I am the final state of the matter. I am the ash that won't blow away.
I’m sitting at the desk. My fingers aren't hitting the keys—the keys are rising up to meet my fingers. We are becoming one machine. I can feel the electricity in the wires. It tastes like ozone and burnt hair.
I’m thinking about the "little flame." I’m thinking about how easy it is to pinch the wick. I don't need fangs. I don't need a fire. I just need to wait for you to close your eyes. Even for a second.
4:01 AM
I just realized something. I’m not writing this in my journal.
I’m writing this on the inside of your eyelids.
That’s why you can’t look away. That’s why, when you close your eyes to sleep, the words will still be there. Red and glowing. A permanent stain on your "cosmos."
The Speck: is in your brain now.
The Rot: is in your lungs.
The Dark: is under your bed.
I AM THE ONLY ONE LEFT.
I’m going to stop writing now. I’m going to put the pen down and walk across the room. I’m going to stand right behind your chair. I’m going to wait until you feel the cold pressure of my shadow on your shoulders.
Don't pray. No one is listening.
DARK LAUGHTER.
I don’t even know why I’m typing this. Maybe I’m just trying to leave a digital breadcrumb trail so I can find my way back to whoever "I" am supposed to be.
The therapst—Dr. Aris—sat there today with that tilted head and that "active listening" hum. He doesn’t get it. No one does. No one truly understands or graps the human mind, let alone a mind that feels like a fractallized mirror. He talks about "integration" and "coping mechanisms," but how do you integrate a dozen different consciousnesses who don't even share the same vocabulary?
He told me today that based on the logs and the things I’ve descrbied, there might be twenty of us. Twenty. Or more. The math of my own existence is becoming unsustainable.
The Errasure
The scariest part isn't the flunctuations; it's the stasis. I don't remember or recall much of what I say anymore. I’ll be sitting at my desk, and then suddenly I’m in a park three miiles away with no coat and the taste of copper in my mouth. I don't even know how I got there.
I’m losing my life to a series of cognitive blackouts. I’m a passengerr in my own skull, watching the back of my own eyes while someone else takes the wheel.
The Loneliness of the Crowd
Making friends is… it’s a futile exercise in deception. I see the look in their eyes when the shift happens. One minute I’m witty and articulate, and the next, someone else takes over—someone colder, or more primal, or fundmentally broken.
I’ve watched people’s faces turn from confusion to genuine terror. They get scared by who they are talking to because they realize, mid-sentence, that the person they were bonded with a second ago has simply evapporated.
"You're like a haunted house," an old friend told me before she stopped calling. "I never know which room I'm going to walk into, and half of them are locked from the inside."
I am so exhusted. My personality changes daily, sometimes hourly, and it terrifies me. I wake up wondering who is going to inhabit my life today. Who is going to sabotage my work? Who is going to burn my bridges?
I’m sharing this here because I have nowhere else to deposit the weight of it. I am a stranger to my own refllection. I am a collection of ghosts inhabiting a single bio-mechanical frame, and I think, eventually, the "real" me is just going to be crowded out entirely.
If anyone ever finds this file... I’m sorry if I wasn’t who you expected. I just couldn't stay in the room long enough to find out who that was.
COMMENTS
You are what you are, journals are used to give meaning to your thoughts
Dr. Aris wants me to "label" the shifts. He wants me to give them names, like pets or stormms. But naming them makes them realer, doesn't it? It gives the twenty of them more space to breathe while I get squeezed into the corners of my own mind.
The Cognitive Dissonance
The more I type, the more I realize that the human mind is an abyss no one has truly mapped. We’re all just flickering lightbulbs in a dark hallway, but my filiment is snapping.
I’m told I said things yesterday—cruel things, or perhaps just too-honest things—to the person at the market. I have zero recollecton. It’s like someone is deleeting the browser history of my brain in real-time. It’s not just forgetting; it’s an active eradsure. An un-becoming.
The Anchor
If journals are for meaning, then let this be the meanning: I am here, right now, in this millisecond of lucidity.
I feel the haptic click of the keys.
I feel the hum of the cooling fan.
I feel the dread of the next "glitch."
But even as I type this, I can feel the edges of my thoughts fraying. The vocabulary is shifting again. The tone is becoming... different. It’s like a tide coming in, washing away the sandcastle I just spent an hour building.
Is it possible to be lonely when you’re never actually alone? There are twenty of us in here, supposedly, yet I have never felt more isolated. I’m surrounded by versions of myself that I’ll never get to meet, and the ones who do meet them end up running away.
I’m saving this file now. I have to. I can feel the "me" who knows how to be sad slipping away, and I think the one waking up next is going to be far less interrested in meaning.
If you're reading this later—whoever "you" happen to be in my head—please don't delete this. It’s the only proof I have that I was ever here at all.
cant sleep. the shadows in the corner of my room are doing that slow breathing thing they used to do when i was six. back when mom still pretended everything was fine. i remember the first time. i was four. sitting on the kitchen floor playing with those little plastic cars. one of them rolled under the fridge by itself. i laughed... thought it was a game. then the voice came from inside the fridge. soft like mom when she was tired. it said “they dont want you here draco. they never did.” i told mom. she laughed too but her eyes got all tight and she said “stop making up stories baby its just the wind.” that night the shadows started watching me from the hallway. by the time i was seven the voices had names. they told me what dad was really thinking when he came home from work and looked at me like i was something broken. they whispered he wished i was never born. i started sleeping under my bed so the shapes couldnt reach me. mom found me there once and screamed. she said i was embarrassing her. that good boys didnt hide from nothing. she put me in the corner for hours. no dinner. just me and the thing that looked like her shadow but smiled wrong. school was worse. the other kids could see i was different. theyd point and laugh when id flinch at the voices yelling in class. one time in third grade i cried in the bathroom because the shadow boy who follows me said everyone was happier when i wasnt around. the teacher called my parents. dad hit me that night. not hard. just enough to make the voices laugh. he said “man up draco there aint nothing there. youre just weak.” after that i stopped telling anyone. i learned to be quiet. to stay in my room with the lights off even when i was scared of the dark. because the dark was the only place the voices didnt scream. they just whispered... soft and sad... like they felt sorry for me too. theyd tell me stories about other kids who saw things and how those kids ended up alone forever. i believed them. im twenty two now and nothing changed. the shadows still slide across the floor when im not looking. the voices still know every secret i never told anyone. and i still miss the mom who used to hold me before she decided i was too broken to love. ...sometimes i wonder if the voices were right all along.
maybe i really was never meant to be here.
maybe thats why no one ever stayed. goodnight journal.
dont let the shadows read this.
they already know how sad i am.
COMMENTS
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