I do everything I can to make it stop. Music plays constantly, layered and loud enough to blur into noise. The television stays on even when I’m not watching it. I fill the silence until my apartment feels swollen with sound. Sleep comes in shallow fragments. When I wake, my head aches like I’ve been …
Tag: existential dread
Part 3 — The Day It Followed Me
Until now, the whispers have belonged to places. They lived in brick and water and soil. They stayed where grief had been pressed into the world long enough to leave a mark. As long as I kept moving, I could tell myself I was only passing through. That lie doesn’t survive today. I’m standing near …
Part II — The Rules I Didn’t Mean to Learn
My body starts remembering before I do. I hesitate at corners without knowing why. My feet choose longer routes. I cross the street instinctively, my pulse already climbing. It takes time to realize I’m avoiding places that haven’t spoken yet—but feel like they might. Old buildings hum with it.Bridges ache with it. The cemetery is …
Part I — The Places That Speak
The Places That Speak I don’t see anything. No shapes in the corners of rooms. No figures standing where they shouldn’t be. No proof that what I’m hearing belongs to the world at all. That’s what frightens me. The city looks ordinary—brick softened by age, windows reflecting a dull sky—but beneath it there’s a pressure, …
The Sound That Means You Are Leaving
The Sound That Means You Are Leaving The sound begins in my chest like an echo looking for its origin. Not pain. Not fear. A vibration—low and vast—like standing too close to something enormous that hasn’t decided whether to speak yet. My ribs hum around it. My heart stutters, trying to match a rhythm it …
The Last Witness
A city disappears from the map overnight—tell the story from someone who remembers it. I remember the city like a pulse beneath my skin, a heartbeat everyone else seems to have forgotten. Yesterday, it was alive. The market on Alder Row smelled of fresh bread and roasting spices, thick with laughter and the clang of …
The Place That Feeds on Memory
The Place That Feeds on Memory The place does not exist in any way that can be mapped. During the day, it collapses into nonbeing—a thinning of reality so subtle the mind refuses to acknowledge it. A blind spot in the world. A stretch of space where intention falters. People walk past it carrying full …
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