THE ARCHIVE OF IMPOSSIBLE NOISE

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.