The night split open
like a glitch in the sky,
and something stepped out
wearing my posture.
It moved with the same tremor
my hands learned in childhood,
a jittering rhythm
that sounded like fear
but tasted like electricity.
I walked into a hallway
that shouldn’t exist.
The floor was made of old memories,
stacked like glass slides,
each one flickering
with a moment I tried to forget.
When I stepped,
the images cracked
and whispered.
The walls were breathing.
Not in and out —
but sideways,
like lungs that had forgotten
the rules of dimension.
They inhaled my thoughts
and exhaled echoes
of things I never said
but always felt.
Hypervigilance perched above me,
a thin, angular creature
with too many joints
and not enough mercy.
Its eyes were clocks
that never agreed on the time.
Its teeth were made of
unfinished sentences.
It watched me
the way a storm watches a window.
Shame crawled behind it,
dragging a long red thread
that stitched itself
into my shadow.
Every time I turned,
the thread tightened,
pulling me back
into rooms I escaped years ago.
I tried to speak,
but my voice came out
as a swarm of metallic insects,
buzzing in geometric patterns,
forming shapes that meant
“help”
in a language no one remembers.
The ceiling folded downward
like a closing book,
and I realized
I was inside a story
my nervous system wrote
during a night
I didn’t survive cleanly.
The creature leaned close.
Its breath smelled like
the moment before panic.
It whispered:
“You learned to live by listening for danger.
Now danger listens for you.”
But then—
the dream cracked.
A thin seam of impossible light
split the floor,
soft as forgiveness,
quiet as a held breath.
I stepped through.
The creature didn’t.
The shame didn’t.
The house didn’t.
They stayed behind,
trapped in the architecture
of a nightmare
I walked out of.
I woke with trembling hands,
but they were mine.
I woke with a racing heart,
but it was beating forward,
not back.
I woke knowing
the archive of impossible noise
still exists somewhere—
but I exist outside it.
And that is enough.