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She Said We Could Be Together Forever
I don’t know exactly why I’m writing this.
Maybe because I need to tell someone. Maybe because if I put everything into words, I’ll be able to see this situation a little more clearly. Or maybe, deep down, I’ve already made a decision and I’m looking for someone to convince me to change my mind.
I know how this is going to sound. If you read all the way to the end, you’ll probably think I’m crazy, that I need help, or that I’m making all of this up for attention.
That’s fine. I’d think the same thing.
But I need you to try to understand one thing before you jump to conclusions: she’s never hurt me. Not directly. All these years, she’s been the only person who’s been there for every important moment of my life.
And honestly, I don’t know if I can abandon her just because some things don’t make sense.
It all started when I was seventeen.
Back then, I didn’t have many friends. I wasn’t exactly an outcast, and I wasn’t bullied or anything like that. I was simply the kind of person people overlooked. I’d go to school, come home, play video games, watch something, and go to sleep.
My life wasn’t bad. It was just lonely.
It was on one of those ordinary nights that I dreamed about her for the first time.
I don’t remember how the dream began. I only remember sitting on a wooden bench in a park I’d never seen before. It was nighttime, but it wasn’t dark. There was a kind of bluish light in the sky, as if the sun had just set, even though there was no sun anywhere.
She was sitting beside me.
She was a young woman, maybe in her early twenties. She had dark hair, eyes I can’t quite describe, and a face that, for some reason, seemed familiar.
I can’t remember what she was wearing. I can’t remember the color of her eyes. I’ve tried to reconstruct her appearance countless times, but those details always slip away when I wake up.
Still, if I saw her standing in front of me right now, I’m certain I’d recognize her.
In the dream, we talked for hours.
We talked about ordinary things. Music, movies, school. She made a few jokes that made me laugh. At some point, I told her something about my family that I’d never told anyone else.
She listened without interrupting.
Before I woke up, she told me she hoped we’d meet again.
And then I woke up.
I didn’t think much of it. It was just a strange dream, and I had a test the next morning.
The following night, I dreamed about her again.
We were in the same park.
She smiled when she saw me and asked how my day had been.
That’s how it started.
During the first few months, I didn’t notice anything extraordinary about it. I dreamed about her almost every night, and our conversations felt like the continuation of a friendship that had existed for a long time.
The strangest part was that we never had to introduce ourselves again.
She remembered everything we talked about.
If I told her I’d argued with my father, she’d ask me about it the next night. If I mentioned a difficult exam, she’d want to know how it went the next time we met.
She told me things about herself, too, although her stories were a little vague. She talked about places I’d never been, people whose faces I could never quite picture, and experiences that seemed to belong to another era.
Whenever I asked where she lived, she’d change the subject.
When I asked how old she was, she’d smile and say she’d never really thought much about it.
I assumed it was just the way dreams worked.
After all, I was asleep. Why did everything have to make sense?
Over time, I started telling her things I didn’t tell anyone else.
My fears, my insecurities, my resentments. I told her about my first love, the times I’d felt inadequate, and the shame I felt about certain things I’d done as a child.
She never judged me.
Sometimes, she disagreed with me. Sometimes, she’d tell me I was being unfair to someone or that I needed to stop worrying about things I couldn’t control.
She didn’t agree with everything I said just to please me. I think that’s exactly why I trusted her so much.
She seemed to know me better than I knew myself.
When I turned eighteen, I asked if she knew my birthday was coming up.
She looked at me as if the question were absurd.
\- Of course I do.
\- How?
\- You told me.
I didn’t remember telling her.
She laughed at my expression and changed the subject.
I never thought about it again.
The years went by.
I started college, got a job, and had relationships. Some things worked out. Others didn’t.
She was still there.
When I was twenty, my first serious relationship ended. I spent weeks crying before bed. I didn’t feel like talking to anyone. My friends tried to cheer me up, and my family told me I was young and would find someone else.
She didn’t say any of that.
She just listened.
That night, we sat on the park bench until the sky began to brighten. She held my hand while I talked about everything that had gone wrong.
When I finally calmed down, she rested her head on my shoulder.
“You always come back,” she said.
I laughed, still sniffling.
\- Back here?
\- Back to me.
At the time, I thought it was an expression of affection.
Maybe it was.
When I was twenty-three, I began to realize I was falling in love with her.
It didn’t happen all at once. There wasn’t a specific moment when I looked at her and suddenly understood what I felt.
It happened gradually.
I’d catch myself thinking about her at work. Whenever something funny happened, I’d want to tell her. When I was sad, I’d imagine what she would say.
I started comparing my girlfriends to her.
None of them seemed to understand me in quite the same way.
I know that’s not fair. The women I dated were real people, with their own lives, worries, and flaws. They weren’t obligated to understand me perfectly.
But she always seemed to know exactly what I needed.
I could spend an entire day without talking to anyone and still not feel lonely, because I knew I’d see her that night.
It was ridiculous, I know.
But I loved her.
And for a long time, I thought there was nothing wrong with that.
When I was twenty-six, I started wanting to sleep more.
At first, it was just a matter of convenience. If I went to bed early, I’d have more time to talk to her.
Then I started sleeping later on weekends.
Sometimes, I’d make excuses not to go out with my friends. I’d say I was tired, that I had things to take care of, or that I needed to rest.
I wasn’t exactly lying. I was tired.
Just not from work, or responsibilities, or life in general.
I was tired of being away from her.
My routine began to change.
I’d lie down as soon as I got home, even when it was still early. I’d try to sleep in the afternoon. I started drinking too much coffee just to make it through the workday, which only left me more exhausted by the time I finally got home.
My life began to deteriorate in small, almost imperceptible ways.
I’d forget appointments. I’d snap at people. I stopped doing things I used to enjoy.
But whenever someone asked what was wrong, I couldn’t explain it.
How could I tell them I missed a woman I only saw in my sleep?
How could I explain that the most important part of my day was the part no one else could see?
She noticed before I did.
One night, we were walking through the park. I’d just told her that I’d nearly fallen asleep during an important meeting at work.
She was quiet for a few moments.
“You’re pushing yourself too hard,” she said.
“I know.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“Do what?”
She stopped walking and looked at me.
“Spend so much time away from me.”
I remember feeling an almost childish rush of happiness when I heard that.
She missed me, too.
“I wish I could spend more time here,” I confessed.
She smiled.
“I know.”
That night, I woke up with a strange feeling in my chest. It wasn’t fear or sadness. It was a kind of anticipatory longing, as if I were already grieving the next separation.
I lay there staring at the ceiling until my alarm went off.
For the first time in my life, I genuinely wished I didn’t have to wake up.
I should have sought help back then.
I know that now.
But I didn’t, because I didn’t think there was anything wrong with me. I was in love. People in love do stupid things all the time.
Besides, she’d never asked me to abandon my life.
She’d never told me to end my relationships, quit my job, or distance myself from my friends.
If anything, she encouraged me to take care of myself.
When I complained about work, she’d tell me I should look for something better. When I talked about an argument with a friend, she’d suggest trying to work things out. When I felt insecure, she’d remind me of my good qualities.
It was hard to believe someone like that could want to hurt me.
When I was twenty-nine, something happened that I still can’t explain.
My grandfather died.
I’d been very close to him as a child, but we’d lost touch over the last few years. The news hit me harder than I’d expected.
The night after the funeral, I dreamed about the woman.
We were sitting on our usual bench.
I was crying.
She hugged me and let me cry against her shoulder.
After a while, she began talking about my grandfather.
She told me he had a small scar on his left hand, the result of an accident with a tool when he was young. She described the backyard of the house where he’d grown up and mentioned a tree that had been cut down long before I was born.
I knew about the scar. I remembered it from childhood.
But I’d never told that woman about it.
As for the backyard, I’d never seen it. I’d only seen the house in old photographs, and none of them showed the tree.
I asked her how she knew about those things.
She seemed confused.
“You told me.”
“I didn’t.”
“Yes, you did.”
She said it so naturally that I started doubting my own memory.
Maybe I’d mentioned it in an earlier dream. Maybe I’d told her and forgotten. Maybe I’d seen a photograph and couldn’t remember.
There were possible explanations.
I clung to them.
Before I woke up, I asked one last question.
“Are you real?”
She frowned.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean… do you really exist?”
She cupped my face in her hands.
“I’m here, aren’t I?”
I woke up crying.
For weeks, I tried to find a rational explanation for what had happened. I researched recurring dreams, lucid dreaming, memory, and similar phenomena.
I found nothing that satisfactorily explained what I’d experienced.
But I also found nothing proving she was supernatural.
So I did what I’d always done when I had doubts.
I waited until I could talk to her again.
I was thirty-one when she told me we could be together forever.
It wasn’t a planned conversation. There was no music, no change in the surroundings, no sign that this night would be any different.
We were sitting on the wooden bench, just as we had so many times before.
I’d had a particularly difficult week. I was exhausted, irritable, and frustrated with my life.
I told her I was tired of everything.
She listened in silence.
“Sometimes, I wish I didn’t have to come back,” I said. “I wish I could stay here.”
She rested her head on my shoulder.
“You can.”
I laughed, thinking she was joking.
“Sure. If I had a choice, I’d stay here all day.”
“I’m not joking.”
I turned to look at her.
There was something different about her expression. It wasn’t exactly sadness, but it wasn’t her usual serenity, either.
“What do you mean?”
She took a while to answer.
“There’s a way you wouldn’t have to leave anymore.”
My heart began to race.
“What way?”
She looked me straight in the eyes.
“You could stay with me.”
I was silent for so long that she eventually asked if I was okay.
I wanted to ask a thousand questions. I wanted to know how it was possible, why she’d never mentioned it before, and what would happen to me if I tried.
But there was one question I couldn’t bring myself to ask.
The answer seemed too obvious.
“You mean… forever?”
She smiled.
“Forever.”
I woke up shortly afterward.
I spent the entire day thinking about that conversation.
I tried to convince myself it meant nothing. It was just a dream. A fantasy created by an exhausted mind, a manifestation of my desire to escape the responsibilities of adult life.
But that night, I saw her again.
I asked what she’d meant.
She said she hadn’t wanted to frighten me and that I didn’t have to decide anything right then.
Then she hugged me.
“I just want you to know that you don’t have to be away from me forever,” she whispered.
It was the first time I’d ever been afraid.
Not of her.
Of the possibility that she was telling the truth.
Over the last few months, I’ve been researching people who’ve had similar experiences.
That’s how I found the account of a man who died many years ago.
I won’t give any details that could identify him, but his story deeply disturbed me.
He’d also dreamed about a woman.
She’d also stayed with him for years.
He’d also begun neglecting his life to spend more time with her.
And in the end, he died after believing he could stay with her forever.
What kept me awake wasn’t the similarity between our stories.
It was a sentence I found in one of the accounts.
According to the report, shortly before he died, the man told someone that the woman he dreamed about wasn’t human.
That she was a creature that lived in people’s dreams and somehow managed to convince them never to wake up again.
The text called her a dream demon.
I read that sentence dozens of times.
Then I started researching other stories.
I found accounts of women who appeared repeatedly in people’s dreams, people who developed intense emotional attachments to strangers who existed only while they slept, and men and women who seemed to lose interest in their waking lives.
I found no proof that these stories were connected.
I didn’t find a single reliable piece of evidence that an entity like the one described in that account existed.
And yet, ever since I read it, I’ve been thinking about the same question.
What if she’s the same woman?
What if she’s doing to me exactly what she did to that man?
When I finally worked up the courage to ask her, her answer wasn’t what I’d expected.
“You think I’m a demon?” she asked.
I hadn’t used that word. Not in that dream.
I stared at her.
“How do you know what I’m thinking?”
She seemed genuinely surprised.
“Because you’re afraid of me.”
I was.
For the first time in all those years, I was afraid of losing control of the situation.
I asked if she knew who the man in the account was.
She said she didn’t.
I asked if she’d ever made that promise to anyone else.
She fell silent.
I don’t know how much time passed. It’s difficult to measure those things in dreams.
Finally, she took my hand.
“Do you really believe I’d do anything to hurt you?”
I couldn’t answer.
She lowered her eyes.
“After everything we’ve been through?”
I woke up with a terrible sense of guilt.
I spent the entire day thinking about the look on her face.
I’d known her for fourteen years. She’d been there for moments in my life that no one else knew about. She knew things about me I would never have the courage to tell another person.
And now I was considering the possibility that everything had been a lie.
I couldn’t accept that idea.
But I couldn’t forget the story of that man, either.
Today, I didn’t go to work.
I couldn’t sleep last night, and I’m not sure I’d have been able to do my job if I’d tried.
I’m writing this on my phone because I need to hear from someone who isn’t her.
I don’t want you to tell me dreams are just dreams. I know that. I know what science says about the subject, and I know there’s no reliable evidence that a woman can live inside someone’s dreams.
I also know I’ve spent fourteen years talking to someone I’ve never met while awake.
I’m not asking you to believe me.
I just want you to listen.
I’m on the rooftop of the building where I live. I came up here because I needed somewhere quiet to think. I’m sitting on a bench against the wall, away from the access door, with my phone in my hands.
I’m not sure what I’ll do when I finish writing this.
I don’t want to die.
I need to make that clear.
What I want is to stop feeling this anguish. I want to know if she’s telling me the truth. I want to know if there’s any way to keep living my life without losing the person I love.
And above all, I want to go to sleep tonight without being afraid of what I’ll find when I close my eyes.
#entertainment
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I don’t know exactly why I’m writing this.
Maybe because I need to tell someone. Maybe because if I put everything into words, I’ll be able to see this situation a little more clearly. Or maybe, deep down, I’ve already made a decision and I’m looking for someone to convince me to change my mind.
I know how this is going to sound. If you read all the way to the end, you’ll probably think I’m crazy, that I need help, or that I’m making all of this up for attention.
That’s fine. I’d think the same thing.
But I need you to try to understand one thing before you jump to conclusions: she’s never hurt me. Not directly. All these years, she’s been the only person who’s been there for every important moment of my life.
And honestly, I don’t know if I can abandon her just because some things don’t make sense.
It all started when I was seventeen.
Back then, I didn’t have many friends. I wasn’t exactly an outcast, and I wasn’t bullied or anything like that. I was simply the kind of person people overlooked. I’d go to school, come home, play video games, watch something, and go to sleep.
My life wasn’t bad. It was just lonely.
It was on one of those ordinary nights that I dreamed about her for the first time.
I don’t remember how the dream began. I only remember sitting on a wooden bench in a park I’d never seen before. It was nighttime, but it wasn’t dark. There was a kind of bluish light in the sky, as if the sun had just set, even though there was no sun anywhere.
She was sitting beside me.
She was a young woman, maybe in her early twenties. She had dark hair, eyes I can’t quite describe, and a face that, for some reason, seemed familiar.
I can’t remember what she was wearing. I can’t remember the color of her eyes. I’ve tried to reconstruct her appearance countless times, but those details always slip away when I wake up.
Still, if I saw her standing in front of me right now, I’m certain I’d recognize her.
In the dream, we talked for hours.
We talked about ordinary things. Music, movies, school. She made a few jokes that made me laugh. At some point, I told her something about my family that I’d never told anyone else.
She listened without interrupting.
Before I woke up, she told me she hoped we’d meet again.
And then I woke up.
I didn’t think much of it. It was just a strange dream, and I had a test the next morning.
The following night, I dreamed about her again.
We were in the same park.
She smiled when she saw me and asked how my day had been.
That’s how it started.
During the first few months, I didn’t notice anything extraordinary about it. I dreamed about her almost every night, and our conversations felt like the continuation of a friendship that had existed for a long time.
The strangest part was that we never had to introduce ourselves again.
She remembered everything we talked about.
If I told her I’d argued with my father, she’d ask me about it the next night. If I mentioned a difficult exam, she’d want to know how it went the next time we met.
She told me things about herself, too, although her stories were a little vague. She talked about places I’d never been, people whose faces I could never quite picture, and experiences that seemed to belong to another era.
Whenever I asked where she lived, she’d change the subject.
When I asked how old she was, she’d smile and say she’d never really thought much about it.
I assumed it was just the way dreams worked.
After all, I was asleep. Why did everything have to make sense?
Over time, I started telling her things I didn’t tell anyone else.
My fears, my insecurities, my resentments. I told her about my first love, the times I’d felt inadequate, and the shame I felt about certain things I’d done as a child.
She never judged me.
Sometimes, she disagreed with me. Sometimes, she’d tell me I was being unfair to someone or that I needed to stop worrying about things I couldn’t control.
She didn’t agree with everything I said just to please me. I think that’s exactly why I trusted her so much.
She seemed to know me better than I knew myself.
When I turned eighteen, I asked if she knew my birthday was coming up.
She looked at me as if the question were absurd.
\- Of course I do.
\- How?
\- You told me.
I didn’t remember telling her.
She laughed at my expression and changed the subject.
I never thought about it again.
The years went by.
I started college, got a job, and had relationships. Some things worked out. Others didn’t.
She was still there.
When I was twenty, my first serious relationship ended. I spent weeks crying before bed. I didn’t feel like talking to anyone. My friends tried to cheer me up, and my family told me I was young and would find someone else.
She didn’t say any of that.
She just listened.
That night, we sat on the park bench until the sky began to brighten. She held my hand while I talked about everything that had gone wrong.
When I finally calmed down, she rested her head on my shoulder.
“You always come back,” she said.
I laughed, still sniffling.
\- Back here?
\- Back to me.
At the time, I thought it was an expression of affection.
Maybe it was.
When I was twenty-three, I began to realize I was falling in love with her.
It didn’t happen all at once. There wasn’t a specific moment when I looked at her and suddenly understood what I felt.
It happened gradually.
I’d catch myself thinking about her at work. Whenever something funny happened, I’d want to tell her. When I was sad, I’d imagine what she would say.
I started comparing my girlfriends to her.
None of them seemed to understand me in quite the same way.
I know that’s not fair. The women I dated were real people, with their own lives, worries, and flaws. They weren’t obligated to understand me perfectly.
But she always seemed to know exactly what I needed.
I could spend an entire day without talking to anyone and still not feel lonely, because I knew I’d see her that night.
It was ridiculous, I know.
But I loved her.
And for a long time, I thought there was nothing wrong with that.
When I was twenty-six, I started wanting to sleep more.
At first, it was just a matter of convenience. If I went to bed early, I’d have more time to talk to her.
Then I started sleeping later on weekends.
Sometimes, I’d make excuses not to go out with my friends. I’d say I was tired, that I had things to take care of, or that I needed to rest.
I wasn’t exactly lying. I was tired.
Just not from work, or responsibilities, or life in general.
I was tired of being away from her.
My routine began to change.
I’d lie down as soon as I got home, even when it was still early. I’d try to sleep in the afternoon. I started drinking too much coffee just to make it through the workday, which only left me more exhausted by the time I finally got home.
My life began to deteriorate in small, almost imperceptible ways.
I’d forget appointments. I’d snap at people. I stopped doing things I used to enjoy.
But whenever someone asked what was wrong, I couldn’t explain it.
How could I tell them I missed a woman I only saw in my sleep?
How could I explain that the most important part of my day was the part no one else could see?
She noticed before I did.
One night, we were walking through the park. I’d just told her that I’d nearly fallen asleep during an important meeting at work.
She was quiet for a few moments.
“You’re pushing yourself too hard,” she said.
“I know.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“Do what?”
She stopped walking and looked at me.
“Spend so much time away from me.”
I remember feeling an almost childish rush of happiness when I heard that.
She missed me, too.
“I wish I could spend more time here,” I confessed.
She smiled.
“I know.”
That night, I woke up with a strange feeling in my chest. It wasn’t fear or sadness. It was a kind of anticipatory longing, as if I were already grieving the next separation.
I lay there staring at the ceiling until my alarm went off.
For the first time in my life, I genuinely wished I didn’t have to wake up.
I should have sought help back then.
I know that now.
But I didn’t, because I didn’t think there was anything wrong with me. I was in love. People in love do stupid things all the time.
Besides, she’d never asked me to abandon my life.
She’d never told me to end my relationships, quit my job, or distance myself from my friends.
If anything, she encouraged me to take care of myself.
When I complained about work, she’d tell me I should look for something better. When I talked about an argument with a friend, she’d suggest trying to work things out. When I felt insecure, she’d remind me of my good qualities.
It was hard to believe someone like that could want to hurt me.
When I was twenty-nine, something happened that I still can’t explain.
My grandfather died.
I’d been very close to him as a child, but we’d lost touch over the last few years. The news hit me harder than I’d expected.
The night after the funeral, I dreamed about the woman.
We were sitting on our usual bench.
I was crying.
She hugged me and let me cry against her shoulder.
After a while, she began talking about my grandfather.
She told me he had a small scar on his left hand, the result of an accident with a tool when he was young. She described the backyard of the house where he’d grown up and mentioned a tree that had been cut down long before I was born.
I knew about the scar. I remembered it from childhood.
But I’d never told that woman about it.
As for the backyard, I’d never seen it. I’d only seen the house in old photographs, and none of them showed the tree.
I asked her how she knew about those things.
She seemed confused.
“You told me.”
“I didn’t.”
“Yes, you did.”
She said it so naturally that I started doubting my own memory.
Maybe I’d mentioned it in an earlier dream. Maybe I’d told her and forgotten. Maybe I’d seen a photograph and couldn’t remember.
There were possible explanations.
I clung to them.
Before I woke up, I asked one last question.
“Are you real?”
She frowned.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean… do you really exist?”
She cupped my face in her hands.
“I’m here, aren’t I?”
I woke up crying.
For weeks, I tried to find a rational explanation for what had happened. I researched recurring dreams, lucid dreaming, memory, and similar phenomena.
I found nothing that satisfactorily explained what I’d experienced.
But I also found nothing proving she was supernatural.
So I did what I’d always done when I had doubts.
I waited until I could talk to her again.
I was thirty-one when she told me we could be together forever.
It wasn’t a planned conversation. There was no music, no change in the surroundings, no sign that this night would be any different.
We were sitting on the wooden bench, just as we had so many times before.
I’d had a particularly difficult week. I was exhausted, irritable, and frustrated with my life.
I told her I was tired of everything.
She listened in silence.
“Sometimes, I wish I didn’t have to come back,” I said. “I wish I could stay here.”
She rested her head on my shoulder.
“You can.”
I laughed, thinking she was joking.
“Sure. If I had a choice, I’d stay here all day.”
“I’m not joking.”
I turned to look at her.
There was something different about her expression. It wasn’t exactly sadness, but it wasn’t her usual serenity, either.
“What do you mean?”
She took a while to answer.
“There’s a way you wouldn’t have to leave anymore.”
My heart began to race.
“What way?”
She looked me straight in the eyes.
“You could stay with me.”
I was silent for so long that she eventually asked if I was okay.
I wanted to ask a thousand questions. I wanted to know how it was possible, why she’d never mentioned it before, and what would happen to me if I tried.
But there was one question I couldn’t bring myself to ask.
The answer seemed too obvious.
“You mean… forever?”
She smiled.
“Forever.”
I woke up shortly afterward.
I spent the entire day thinking about that conversation.
I tried to convince myself it meant nothing. It was just a dream. A fantasy created by an exhausted mind, a manifestation of my desire to escape the responsibilities of adult life.
But that night, I saw her again.
I asked what she’d meant.
She said she hadn’t wanted to frighten me and that I didn’t have to decide anything right then.
Then she hugged me.
“I just want you to know that you don’t have to be away from me forever,” she whispered.
It was the first time I’d ever been afraid.
Not of her.
Of the possibility that she was telling the truth.
Over the last few months, I’ve been researching people who’ve had similar experiences.
That’s how I found the account of a man who died many years ago.
I won’t give any details that could identify him, but his story deeply disturbed me.
He’d also dreamed about a woman.
She’d also stayed with him for years.
He’d also begun neglecting his life to spend more time with her.
And in the end, he died after believing he could stay with her forever.
What kept me awake wasn’t the similarity between our stories.
It was a sentence I found in one of the accounts.
According to the report, shortly before he died, the man told someone that the woman he dreamed about wasn’t human.
That she was a creature that lived in people’s dreams and somehow managed to convince them never to wake up again.
The text called her a dream demon.
I read that sentence dozens of times.
Then I started researching other stories.
I found accounts of women who appeared repeatedly in people’s dreams, people who developed intense emotional attachments to strangers who existed only while they slept, and men and women who seemed to lose interest in their waking lives.
I found no proof that these stories were connected.
I didn’t find a single reliable piece of evidence that an entity like the one described in that account existed.
And yet, ever since I read it, I’ve been thinking about the same question.
What if she’s the same woman?
What if she’s doing to me exactly what she did to that man?
When I finally worked up the courage to ask her, her answer wasn’t what I’d expected.
“You think I’m a demon?” she asked.
I hadn’t used that word. Not in that dream.
I stared at her.
“How do you know what I’m thinking?”
She seemed genuinely surprised.
“Because you’re afraid of me.”
I was.
For the first time in all those years, I was afraid of losing control of the situation.
I asked if she knew who the man in the account was.
She said she didn’t.
I asked if she’d ever made that promise to anyone else.
She fell silent.
I don’t know how much time passed. It’s difficult to measure those things in dreams.
Finally, she took my hand.
“Do you really believe I’d do anything to hurt you?”
I couldn’t answer.
She lowered her eyes.
“After everything we’ve been through?”
I woke up with a terrible sense of guilt.
I spent the entire day thinking about the look on her face.
I’d known her for fourteen years. She’d been there for moments in my life that no one else knew about. She knew things about me I would never have the courage to tell another person.
And now I was considering the possibility that everything had been a lie.
I couldn’t accept that idea.
But I couldn’t forget the story of that man, either.
Today, I didn’t go to work.
I couldn’t sleep last night, and I’m not sure I’d have been able to do my job if I’d tried.
I’m writing this on my phone because I need to hear from someone who isn’t her.
I don’t want you to tell me dreams are just dreams. I know that. I know what science says about the subject, and I know there’s no reliable evidence that a woman can live inside someone’s dreams.
I also know I’ve spent fourteen years talking to someone I’ve never met while awake.
I’m not asking you to believe me.
I just want you to listen.
I’m on the rooftop of the building where I live. I came up here because I needed somewhere quiet to think. I’m sitting on a bench against the wall, away from the access door, with my phone in my hands.
I’m not sure what I’ll do when I finish writing this.
I don’t want to die.
I need to make that clear.
What I want is to stop feeling this anguish. I want to know if she’s telling me the truth. I want to know if there’s any way to keep living my life without losing the person I love.
And above all, I want to go to sleep tonight without being afraid of what I’ll find when I close my eyes.
#entertainment
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I'm the lone astronomer at a remote observatory. I can't stop looking at this star.
The greatest astronomical discovery of all time was made by Edwin Hubble between 1925 and 1929, when he discovered redshift. Redshift occurs when a celestial body producing light is accelerating away from the point of observation, in our case, Earth. The light is shifted/stretched to a lower energy level on the electromagnetic spectrum, towards the red end and away from the blue end. This may seem trivial, but it was this theory that led to the discovery of an expanding universe, all pointing to one thing: a beginning. The big bang.
Every distant celestial body in the night sky is redshifted. At least, it’s supposed to be. If not, then I’ve discovered the first blueshifted deep space object. That, if you hadn’t guessed, means it’s accelerating toward us.
I had been observing the object in question for a week. It was a star far beyond the Angel Nebula that I hadn’t found anywhere on the star charts I had consulted, nor the national database.
It was the seventh day of observation when I went over to the computer terminal and pulled up the chat log. I work at a remote observatory in the American Southwest and the only connection with the outside world is a wire to another observatory twenty miles away and a satellite phone for emergencies.
The previous six chats in green text remained unanswered. I typed another time, the mechanical keyboard clacks echoing in the observation dome.
“Echo Base, do you read me?”
A message in red text replied. “Loud and clear, rogue leader.”
“Hey I love Star Wars!”
“Me too. Sorry I haven’t replied yet. I just started my time here. The grant money finally came through.”
“Congrats. Glad to finally have a friend out here.”
“Glad I can be your friend. I’m Angela.”
“Nice to meet you Angela. I’m Edwin.”
“Don’t tell me your last name is Hubble.”
“Yeah I get that a lot.”
“Cool. You sound like you’re already cut out for this job.”
“Thanks. It’s nice to have someone on here to talk to. Feel like I’m going crazy out here by myself.”
"Yeah I was wondering what that’s like.”
“Just wait until the lizards start talking to you.”
“Oh yeah I found one in my fridge.”
“Ha that’s funny.”
“Maybe for you. It was dead.”
“Yikes.”
“Yeah I finally got it cleaned up.”
“Hey do you have anything at the following coordinates? I’m seeing something weird and I want to know if you see it too.”
“What kind of weird?”
“I can’t say for certain, but I think it’s blueshifted.”
“Woah. It’s not a comet or a planet or a nearby galaxy?”
“I’m pretty sure I know where those are.”
“Just making sure. Give me a minute to finish this up, then I’ll get back to you.”
“Sounds good.”
I wheeled my chair over to the newer computer that controlled the telescope. I punched in the coordinates of the blue star and listened as the motors ground to life, servos clicking and steel groaning as the dome overhead rotated to match the correct positioning in the western sky. The giant steel tube moved like a giant grey tree trunk around several axes, tilting and groaning without branches to shake in the wind.
I walked into the only other room that served as my living quarters and grabbed a diet Mountain Dew from the fridge and two Tylenol from the medicine cabinet. The first was a nightly ritual that helped me stay awake through the early hours of the morning, the second was for the headache I had been unsuccessfully ignoring.
The grinding of steel had stopped when I reentered the telescope room. I re-positioned the stairs and climbed them to the eyepiece. I set my Dew on the railing and took a look through the eyepiece, focusing the lens into the blackness until a ball of blue light appeared in the center of my view. Faint tendrils trailed around it, remnants of an ancient formation. I wondered if it notated possible rotation, and my mind swelled with the desire to continue looking for planets and other celestial bodies orbiting it.
I stared at the sphere of blue. The colors morphed through shades. The surface looked like an octopus trying to blend into a Picasso. I stepped back and rubbed my eyes, then looked again. Its same brilliance met me at the lens, and I was mesmerized.
The terminal pinged. I stepped back and walked down the stairs to read the red text.
“I see it!”
“You do?”
“Yeah this is amazing!”
“It looks cool.”
“Congrats! This is so cool! What are you gonna name it?”
“What do you mean?”
“You discovered a new star, maybe a solar system! This is huge!”
“Yeah I guess.”
“Aren’t you excited?”
“I just thought something that visible would have been mapped already.”
“Maybe it’s new.”
“Like a white hole?”
“You said it was blue shifted.”
“So it entered the visible universe?”
“I don’t know, but this could change astronomy as we know it. We could be studying the formation of a new star in real time. Please tell me you’ve been taking pictures of this thing.”
“Of course I have. For the past week.”
“Keep photographing it! Once you have enough evidence you can send your findings in and get credit!”
“Ok.”
“Be excited! This is amazing!”
“Ok, ok, I will be. I just want to make sure.”
“Don’t trust your eyes?”
“I guess I’m just skeptical.”
“What’s it feel like to be a famous astronomer?”
“I don’t know. Doesn’t feel different.”
“Playing it cool, then? I like that. Have you done any spectroscopy on it yet?”
“No, I was trying to do the calculations for the blue shift.”
“I can help with that!”
“Ok, thanks. I’ll start setting up my stuff.”
Spectroscopy involves separating the colors of light coming from a star through a prism. Different elements give off distinctly different wavelengths of light. That can be used to determine the elements a star is made of, as well as determining the atmospheric and surface makeups of any celestial bodies orbiting the stars. There’s more to it than that, including a whole equipment setup that involves projecting the starlight onto the dome of the observatory and then comparing it with the light from sample vacuum tubes with a specific element or gas in them.
I took the rest of the hour to get the spectroscopy setup. Strangely enough, I couldn’t find the mercury vacuum tube. I figured I must have misplaced it somewhere in the storage closet. Hopefully it wouldn’t come out of my paycheck.
With the set up complete, I started comparing the distinctly colored lines of the star to a few tubes from the periodic table. All of them checked out, fairly normal things for a star: Hydrogen, Helium, Neon.
The terminal pinged. Angela got back to me.
“Hey it’s gonna take me a little while on these calculations.”
“That’s ok. I’m just starting on spectroscopy.”
“Cool. What have you checked so far?”
“Hydrogen, Helium, Argon, Neon. We’ll see if I can get any more done before the sunrise.”
“Sounds awesome. I’m so excited to watch my first sunrise here.”
“Really? That’s cool.”
“Yeah, we could watch it together!”
“Not sure how that’d work, but ok.”
“Well just watch it and know I’ll be there in spirit.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
“See you at sunrise.”
I went back to the computer and finished writing up my notes before I sent them off to some cybernetic wasteland to languish where no one would read them. I shut down the computer for the day, put away the vacuum tubes, and stepped outside into the quiet desert as the light in the east began to grow. The stars winked out one by one. The blue turned to pink and then orange as the mountains started to blaze. As the golden glow of the sun peaked over the horizon and bid the milky way good morning, I felt like there was something different. I looked twenty miles across the flat desert to the north and imagined Angela watching the sunrise. It felt good to not be alone.
I hopped in my beat up Jeep and drove on the bumpy one lane path into town. I was running low on microwave meals and diet Mountain Dew, and I still had a lingering headache that the sunlight was making worse.
I got to the nearest paved road in half an hour, then crossed the mountain range to the west. After thirty minutes, I pulled into a general store that was the only thing in miles. The lady in her late 50s who ran the place gave me a somewhat friendly expression as the bell over the door rang out my entrance.
“What are you smiling about?” she said, as I put a case of soda and a bunch of microwave meals on the the counter.
“There’s another researcher at the other observatory north of me.”
“The empty one?”
“Yeah a new girl.”
“Haven’t seen her yet.”
“I’m sure she’ll be around. It’s nice to have someone to talk to while I’m on the job.”
“I bet. Want these in a bag?”
By the end of the drive back, my eyelids were creeping downwards in protest of the warm morning sun. I threw my food in the fridge, took a quick shower, and popped some painkillers before drawing the blackout curtains and falling asleep.
The spectroscopy investigation continued for the next four weeks. Angela and I did calculations. We did them over and over and over and over until I felt like my head was going to explode. We posited theories about why the light was blue shifted. We postulated everything from comets to the Northern lights to aliens, and none of it stuck.
One morning, I was drawn out of dreams of swirling galaxies and planets by the grinding of metal on metal. I stumbled out of my living quarters to see that the telescope had moved. I must have left the tracking software on again, making the telescope follow the rotation of the earth. I probably fat-fingered the keyboard and it moved the wrong way all at once.
I still had my spectroscopy equipment set up, and before getting out the next tube, I took a peak at the star. I could have sworn it was bigger and brighter than it had been the day before.
“Hey, does it look closer to you?” I typed into the terminal.
“Good morning to you too.”
“Sorry, just thought it looks brighter.”
“Want me to run some distance calculations? Again?”
“Sure, why not?”
I continued my spectroscopy analysis. Neon, Carbon Dioxide, Chlorine. I hadn’t expected Chlorine. More noble gases. Maybe those were the leftovers of the nebula that had formed it.
The terminal pinged.
“I think I did my calculations wrong last time” is what Angela had written.
“What?” was my reply.
“It’s closer than I thought.”
“Well I guess by the definition of blue shift, sure, but it shouldn’t be noticeable, unless it’s close, like in the Milky Way.”
“Maybe I just did them wrong. Maybe we’ve just been staring at this for too long.”
“Something feels off about this. I’m still not sure what’s going on.”
“Any spectroscopy results?”
“I mean, normal stuff, plus noble gases. No signs of planets or gas clouds or asteroid belts.”
“Have you tried mercury?”
I spent the next thirty minutes checking the various vacuum tubes, but it seemed that mercury was missing.
“Can’t find mercury. Must have left it somewhere.”
All at once, a more intense headache washed over me. Trying to focus through the telescope eyepiece was nearly impossible.
I figured I had better let Angela know. “Hey I’m going to take a break. My head is killing me.”
“Oh no! Hope you feel better.”
I went to my room and popped some more Advil before laying down. It didn’t take me long to fall asleep.
I dreamed. I was standing in the desert looking up at the stars. The constellations were bright across the visible Milky Way. I could actually see all the planets. Or at least I thought I did.
Venus was the wrong color, now blue in hue. Mars had streaks of blue light swirling around it. Jupiter looked like it had been sucked into a whirlwind, Saturn was in the asteroid belt. Uranus and Neptune had switched places, long strands of asteroid belt connecting them. Mercury was missing.
I looked directly above me. The sun was like a dark pupil eclipsed by the brilliant blue light from the blue shifted star behind it, now gargantuan, residing in our solar system. It was turning at an incredible speed. Flares of blue shot off into space. As one of them passed over the sun, it smeared it like orange paint on a black canvas. The remains of the sun dimmed, and the blue flares grew more frequent. Massive waves of light flew into space and struck the planets, burning and cracking their surfaces, shattering them to pieces.
I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe. The ground started to shake. Grains of sand on the desert floor around me started to float. The blue light of the star grew brighter. The moon rose up over the horizon, as if shielding earth, and the wave of light washed over it. It was smashed and pulverized, burning into space dust. Another wave of light followed it, carrying the remaining chunks of the moon into earth’s atmosphere. They burned blue on one side and yellow on the other. The atmosphere burned blue as I watched the light wave wash over the ground. It shattered the mountains on the horizon. It raced over the desert, turning sand to molten stone, then plasma, then nothing.
The light covered me, engulfed me, and burned me away.
I woke up gasping for air, covered in sweat.
I got up and chugged a mountain dew to parch the desert in my throat. My head felt better, but not right. Not like the pain was gone, but like the part that felt the pain was gone.
The sound of metal on concrete ground behind my eyes as I heard the telescope adjust. I left the tracking software on again.
A message blinked on the terminal in blue: “You should see this.”
“Hey sorry, what’s going on?”
“You were asleep for a long time.”
“Yeah sorry.” I looked at the telescope computer.
I had been asleep for two days.
More blue text. “The spectroscopy came back. I did some of my own work and it seems like something is wrong.”
“What do you mean?”
“These elements, I didn’t have the tubes to check them so I used digital copies. Cesium, Uranium, Iron.”
“Those don’t exist in stars. Something’s got to be wrong with our equipment.”
I turned around. I could have sworn the telescope was five degrees towards the vertical when I last checked, not twenty five degrees.
I fiddled with the spectroscopy prism, cleaning it with a microfiber cloth. As I put it back in place, the sharp edge caught my fingertip. Blood immediately sprang from it, dripping on the prism. I held my finger in a fist as I tried to wipe the blood off the prism’s surface, but it kept spreading and wouldn’t soak into the cloth.
Blood was gushing from my hand. I retreated to my living quarters for the first aid kit.
I finally got my hand to stop bleeding and returned to the spectroscopy equipment. As much as I wiped the blood on the prism, I only succeeded in smearing it around. I set about searching for the replacement. I was sure there was an extra one in the case when I set it up. It baffled me that I couldn’t find it now. I shuffled through the box, putting the prism down. Why was it so dark? I went to my room to grab a flashlight, popped two Advil for good measure, then found the red flashlight next to my bed. Glass clinked from the other room. Why was my fridge running so loud? The terminal dinged.
I went back to the observatory dome. There wasn’t a message on the terminal screen. I clicked the flashlight off. The spectroscopy tube for helium lit up the room. And why was the prism...no, I had put it back in the machine, but why was it showing so much blue light? It glowed brighter and brighter the closer I stepped. My feet tripped over the case of vacuum tubes. My knee crunched into broken glass. One of the tubes. The label on the box said Hg. Mercury.
I bolted to the terminal. There was a blank red message from Angela. My fingers flew over the keyboard.
“Angela, something is very wrong.”
“What?” came a reply in blue.
“I just found the broken mercury tube, and the telescope is moving on its own.”
“Don’t worry, it will all be ok.”
“What should I do?”
“Look at the light.”
I stumbled over to the telescope and hastily removed the spectroscopy equipment. Blue light emanated from the eyepiece.
The star was strangely brighter. I could see flares of blue branching to other stars in the sky. The light drew me in. My eyes fixated on it, but my brain peeled my gaze away.
“We’ve got to do something,” I typed into the terminal.
“What could you do to resist it?” came the reply.
Metallic tapping sounded from somewhere in the observatory. It echoed off the dome and pressed on the base of my skull. I looked around for some loose piece of sheet metal hanging from the dome, some piece of equipment swaying in the non-existent wind. Tap tap tap. Where was it? Tap tap tap. I needed to wake up. Tap tap tap. The maintenance hatch on the telescope slightly moved.
I rotated the telescope so I could get to the hatch. The tapping reverberated into banging. Something in there wanted out.
Through labored breathing, I undid the latches, but the door wouldn’t fall open. I pulled at the edge of the door as the vibrations coursed through my fingertips through each consecutive knock. The noise echoed in the dome like a drum beat. My ears started to ring. The door wouldn’t budge. Pushing and pulling, straining with every muscle in my body, each adjustment of my grip made the noise louder and more frantic.
The door shifted, the hinge moving a fraction of an inch. In a flash of blue light, the hinge came unglued. The door smacked me in the forehead. Falling backwards, I hit my head on the solid floor. Blackness engulfed the blue stars above me as I lost consciousness.
I woke up an hour ago. I don’t know how long I’ve been unconscious. The telescope is back in its upright position, the maintenance hatch hanging open toward me. Strange blue light is reflecting off the mirror. It plays like mist across the surface of a pond in the dust in the air.
Angela won’t answer anything on the terminal.
I looked through the eyepiece one last time. The sky is completely black except for the blue shifted star. It’s getting brighter by the second. It’s coming for earth. For me.
I won’t keep it waiting. There’s nothing left in the night sky anymore. I only have one star left to study.
I will climb into the telescope. I will bathe in the beautiful blue light. I will wait for it to come get me. When it comes, I will let the light in.
Look for me in the stars. Don’t worry. You’ll join me there soon enough.
#entertainment
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The greatest astronomical discovery of all time was made by Edwin Hubble between 1925 and 1929, when he discovered redshift. Redshift occurs when a celestial body producing light is accelerating away from the point of observation, in our case, Earth. The light is shifted/stretched to a lower energy level on the electromagnetic spectrum, towards the red end and away from the blue end. This may seem trivial, but it was this theory that led to the discovery of an expanding universe, all pointing to one thing: a beginning. The big bang.
Every distant celestial body in the night sky is redshifted. At least, it’s supposed to be. If not, then I’ve discovered the first blueshifted deep space object. That, if you hadn’t guessed, means it’s accelerating toward us.
I had been observing the object in question for a week. It was a star far beyond the Angel Nebula that I hadn’t found anywhere on the star charts I had consulted, nor the national database.
It was the seventh day of observation when I went over to the computer terminal and pulled up the chat log. I work at a remote observatory in the American Southwest and the only connection with the outside world is a wire to another observatory twenty miles away and a satellite phone for emergencies.
The previous six chats in green text remained unanswered. I typed another time, the mechanical keyboard clacks echoing in the observation dome.
“Echo Base, do you read me?”
A message in red text replied. “Loud and clear, rogue leader.”
“Hey I love Star Wars!”
“Me too. Sorry I haven’t replied yet. I just started my time here. The grant money finally came through.”
“Congrats. Glad to finally have a friend out here.”
“Glad I can be your friend. I’m Angela.”
“Nice to meet you Angela. I’m Edwin.”
“Don’t tell me your last name is Hubble.”
“Yeah I get that a lot.”
“Cool. You sound like you’re already cut out for this job.”
“Thanks. It’s nice to have someone on here to talk to. Feel like I’m going crazy out here by myself.”
"Yeah I was wondering what that’s like.”
“Just wait until the lizards start talking to you.”
“Oh yeah I found one in my fridge.”
“Ha that’s funny.”
“Maybe for you. It was dead.”
“Yikes.”
“Yeah I finally got it cleaned up.”
“Hey do you have anything at the following coordinates? I’m seeing something weird and I want to know if you see it too.”
“What kind of weird?”
“I can’t say for certain, but I think it’s blueshifted.”
“Woah. It’s not a comet or a planet or a nearby galaxy?”
“I’m pretty sure I know where those are.”
“Just making sure. Give me a minute to finish this up, then I’ll get back to you.”
“Sounds good.”
I wheeled my chair over to the newer computer that controlled the telescope. I punched in the coordinates of the blue star and listened as the motors ground to life, servos clicking and steel groaning as the dome overhead rotated to match the correct positioning in the western sky. The giant steel tube moved like a giant grey tree trunk around several axes, tilting and groaning without branches to shake in the wind.
I walked into the only other room that served as my living quarters and grabbed a diet Mountain Dew from the fridge and two Tylenol from the medicine cabinet. The first was a nightly ritual that helped me stay awake through the early hours of the morning, the second was for the headache I had been unsuccessfully ignoring.
The grinding of steel had stopped when I reentered the telescope room. I re-positioned the stairs and climbed them to the eyepiece. I set my Dew on the railing and took a look through the eyepiece, focusing the lens into the blackness until a ball of blue light appeared in the center of my view. Faint tendrils trailed around it, remnants of an ancient formation. I wondered if it notated possible rotation, and my mind swelled with the desire to continue looking for planets and other celestial bodies orbiting it.
I stared at the sphere of blue. The colors morphed through shades. The surface looked like an octopus trying to blend into a Picasso. I stepped back and rubbed my eyes, then looked again. Its same brilliance met me at the lens, and I was mesmerized.
The terminal pinged. I stepped back and walked down the stairs to read the red text.
“I see it!”
“You do?”
“Yeah this is amazing!”
“It looks cool.”
“Congrats! This is so cool! What are you gonna name it?”
“What do you mean?”
“You discovered a new star, maybe a solar system! This is huge!”
“Yeah I guess.”
“Aren’t you excited?”
“I just thought something that visible would have been mapped already.”
“Maybe it’s new.”
“Like a white hole?”
“You said it was blue shifted.”
“So it entered the visible universe?”
“I don’t know, but this could change astronomy as we know it. We could be studying the formation of a new star in real time. Please tell me you’ve been taking pictures of this thing.”
“Of course I have. For the past week.”
“Keep photographing it! Once you have enough evidence you can send your findings in and get credit!”
“Ok.”
“Be excited! This is amazing!”
“Ok, ok, I will be. I just want to make sure.”
“Don’t trust your eyes?”
“I guess I’m just skeptical.”
“What’s it feel like to be a famous astronomer?”
“I don’t know. Doesn’t feel different.”
“Playing it cool, then? I like that. Have you done any spectroscopy on it yet?”
“No, I was trying to do the calculations for the blue shift.”
“I can help with that!”
“Ok, thanks. I’ll start setting up my stuff.”
Spectroscopy involves separating the colors of light coming from a star through a prism. Different elements give off distinctly different wavelengths of light. That can be used to determine the elements a star is made of, as well as determining the atmospheric and surface makeups of any celestial bodies orbiting the stars. There’s more to it than that, including a whole equipment setup that involves projecting the starlight onto the dome of the observatory and then comparing it with the light from sample vacuum tubes with a specific element or gas in them.
I took the rest of the hour to get the spectroscopy setup. Strangely enough, I couldn’t find the mercury vacuum tube. I figured I must have misplaced it somewhere in the storage closet. Hopefully it wouldn’t come out of my paycheck.
With the set up complete, I started comparing the distinctly colored lines of the star to a few tubes from the periodic table. All of them checked out, fairly normal things for a star: Hydrogen, Helium, Neon.
The terminal pinged. Angela got back to me.
“Hey it’s gonna take me a little while on these calculations.”
“That’s ok. I’m just starting on spectroscopy.”
“Cool. What have you checked so far?”
“Hydrogen, Helium, Argon, Neon. We’ll see if I can get any more done before the sunrise.”
“Sounds awesome. I’m so excited to watch my first sunrise here.”
“Really? That’s cool.”
“Yeah, we could watch it together!”
“Not sure how that’d work, but ok.”
“Well just watch it and know I’ll be there in spirit.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
“See you at sunrise.”
I went back to the computer and finished writing up my notes before I sent them off to some cybernetic wasteland to languish where no one would read them. I shut down the computer for the day, put away the vacuum tubes, and stepped outside into the quiet desert as the light in the east began to grow. The stars winked out one by one. The blue turned to pink and then orange as the mountains started to blaze. As the golden glow of the sun peaked over the horizon and bid the milky way good morning, I felt like there was something different. I looked twenty miles across the flat desert to the north and imagined Angela watching the sunrise. It felt good to not be alone.
I hopped in my beat up Jeep and drove on the bumpy one lane path into town. I was running low on microwave meals and diet Mountain Dew, and I still had a lingering headache that the sunlight was making worse.
I got to the nearest paved road in half an hour, then crossed the mountain range to the west. After thirty minutes, I pulled into a general store that was the only thing in miles. The lady in her late 50s who ran the place gave me a somewhat friendly expression as the bell over the door rang out my entrance.
“What are you smiling about?” she said, as I put a case of soda and a bunch of microwave meals on the the counter.
“There’s another researcher at the other observatory north of me.”
“The empty one?”
“Yeah a new girl.”
“Haven’t seen her yet.”
“I’m sure she’ll be around. It’s nice to have someone to talk to while I’m on the job.”
“I bet. Want these in a bag?”
By the end of the drive back, my eyelids were creeping downwards in protest of the warm morning sun. I threw my food in the fridge, took a quick shower, and popped some painkillers before drawing the blackout curtains and falling asleep.
The spectroscopy investigation continued for the next four weeks. Angela and I did calculations. We did them over and over and over and over until I felt like my head was going to explode. We posited theories about why the light was blue shifted. We postulated everything from comets to the Northern lights to aliens, and none of it stuck.
One morning, I was drawn out of dreams of swirling galaxies and planets by the grinding of metal on metal. I stumbled out of my living quarters to see that the telescope had moved. I must have left the tracking software on again, making the telescope follow the rotation of the earth. I probably fat-fingered the keyboard and it moved the wrong way all at once.
I still had my spectroscopy equipment set up, and before getting out the next tube, I took a peak at the star. I could have sworn it was bigger and brighter than it had been the day before.
“Hey, does it look closer to you?” I typed into the terminal.
“Good morning to you too.”
“Sorry, just thought it looks brighter.”
“Want me to run some distance calculations? Again?”
“Sure, why not?”
I continued my spectroscopy analysis. Neon, Carbon Dioxide, Chlorine. I hadn’t expected Chlorine. More noble gases. Maybe those were the leftovers of the nebula that had formed it.
The terminal pinged.
“I think I did my calculations wrong last time” is what Angela had written.
“What?” was my reply.
“It’s closer than I thought.”
“Well I guess by the definition of blue shift, sure, but it shouldn’t be noticeable, unless it’s close, like in the Milky Way.”
“Maybe I just did them wrong. Maybe we’ve just been staring at this for too long.”
“Something feels off about this. I’m still not sure what’s going on.”
“Any spectroscopy results?”
“I mean, normal stuff, plus noble gases. No signs of planets or gas clouds or asteroid belts.”
“Have you tried mercury?”
I spent the next thirty minutes checking the various vacuum tubes, but it seemed that mercury was missing.
“Can’t find mercury. Must have left it somewhere.”
All at once, a more intense headache washed over me. Trying to focus through the telescope eyepiece was nearly impossible.
I figured I had better let Angela know. “Hey I’m going to take a break. My head is killing me.”
“Oh no! Hope you feel better.”
I went to my room and popped some more Advil before laying down. It didn’t take me long to fall asleep.
I dreamed. I was standing in the desert looking up at the stars. The constellations were bright across the visible Milky Way. I could actually see all the planets. Or at least I thought I did.
Venus was the wrong color, now blue in hue. Mars had streaks of blue light swirling around it. Jupiter looked like it had been sucked into a whirlwind, Saturn was in the asteroid belt. Uranus and Neptune had switched places, long strands of asteroid belt connecting them. Mercury was missing.
I looked directly above me. The sun was like a dark pupil eclipsed by the brilliant blue light from the blue shifted star behind it, now gargantuan, residing in our solar system. It was turning at an incredible speed. Flares of blue shot off into space. As one of them passed over the sun, it smeared it like orange paint on a black canvas. The remains of the sun dimmed, and the blue flares grew more frequent. Massive waves of light flew into space and struck the planets, burning and cracking their surfaces, shattering them to pieces.
I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe. The ground started to shake. Grains of sand on the desert floor around me started to float. The blue light of the star grew brighter. The moon rose up over the horizon, as if shielding earth, and the wave of light washed over it. It was smashed and pulverized, burning into space dust. Another wave of light followed it, carrying the remaining chunks of the moon into earth’s atmosphere. They burned blue on one side and yellow on the other. The atmosphere burned blue as I watched the light wave wash over the ground. It shattered the mountains on the horizon. It raced over the desert, turning sand to molten stone, then plasma, then nothing.
The light covered me, engulfed me, and burned me away.
I woke up gasping for air, covered in sweat.
I got up and chugged a mountain dew to parch the desert in my throat. My head felt better, but not right. Not like the pain was gone, but like the part that felt the pain was gone.
The sound of metal on concrete ground behind my eyes as I heard the telescope adjust. I left the tracking software on again.
A message blinked on the terminal in blue: “You should see this.”
“Hey sorry, what’s going on?”
“You were asleep for a long time.”
“Yeah sorry.” I looked at the telescope computer.
I had been asleep for two days.
More blue text. “The spectroscopy came back. I did some of my own work and it seems like something is wrong.”
“What do you mean?”
“These elements, I didn’t have the tubes to check them so I used digital copies. Cesium, Uranium, Iron.”
“Those don’t exist in stars. Something’s got to be wrong with our equipment.”
I turned around. I could have sworn the telescope was five degrees towards the vertical when I last checked, not twenty five degrees.
I fiddled with the spectroscopy prism, cleaning it with a microfiber cloth. As I put it back in place, the sharp edge caught my fingertip. Blood immediately sprang from it, dripping on the prism. I held my finger in a fist as I tried to wipe the blood off the prism’s surface, but it kept spreading and wouldn’t soak into the cloth.
Blood was gushing from my hand. I retreated to my living quarters for the first aid kit.
I finally got my hand to stop bleeding and returned to the spectroscopy equipment. As much as I wiped the blood on the prism, I only succeeded in smearing it around. I set about searching for the replacement. I was sure there was an extra one in the case when I set it up. It baffled me that I couldn’t find it now. I shuffled through the box, putting the prism down. Why was it so dark? I went to my room to grab a flashlight, popped two Advil for good measure, then found the red flashlight next to my bed. Glass clinked from the other room. Why was my fridge running so loud? The terminal dinged.
I went back to the observatory dome. There wasn’t a message on the terminal screen. I clicked the flashlight off. The spectroscopy tube for helium lit up the room. And why was the prism...no, I had put it back in the machine, but why was it showing so much blue light? It glowed brighter and brighter the closer I stepped. My feet tripped over the case of vacuum tubes. My knee crunched into broken glass. One of the tubes. The label on the box said Hg. Mercury.
I bolted to the terminal. There was a blank red message from Angela. My fingers flew over the keyboard.
“Angela, something is very wrong.”
“What?” came a reply in blue.
“I just found the broken mercury tube, and the telescope is moving on its own.”
“Don’t worry, it will all be ok.”
“What should I do?”
“Look at the light.”
I stumbled over to the telescope and hastily removed the spectroscopy equipment. Blue light emanated from the eyepiece.
The star was strangely brighter. I could see flares of blue branching to other stars in the sky. The light drew me in. My eyes fixated on it, but my brain peeled my gaze away.
“We’ve got to do something,” I typed into the terminal.
“What could you do to resist it?” came the reply.
Metallic tapping sounded from somewhere in the observatory. It echoed off the dome and pressed on the base of my skull. I looked around for some loose piece of sheet metal hanging from the dome, some piece of equipment swaying in the non-existent wind. Tap tap tap. Where was it? Tap tap tap. I needed to wake up. Tap tap tap. The maintenance hatch on the telescope slightly moved.
I rotated the telescope so I could get to the hatch. The tapping reverberated into banging. Something in there wanted out.
Through labored breathing, I undid the latches, but the door wouldn’t fall open. I pulled at the edge of the door as the vibrations coursed through my fingertips through each consecutive knock. The noise echoed in the dome like a drum beat. My ears started to ring. The door wouldn’t budge. Pushing and pulling, straining with every muscle in my body, each adjustment of my grip made the noise louder and more frantic.
The door shifted, the hinge moving a fraction of an inch. In a flash of blue light, the hinge came unglued. The door smacked me in the forehead. Falling backwards, I hit my head on the solid floor. Blackness engulfed the blue stars above me as I lost consciousness.
I woke up an hour ago. I don’t know how long I’ve been unconscious. The telescope is back in its upright position, the maintenance hatch hanging open toward me. Strange blue light is reflecting off the mirror. It plays like mist across the surface of a pond in the dust in the air.
Angela won’t answer anything on the terminal.
I looked through the eyepiece one last time. The sky is completely black except for the blue shifted star. It’s getting brighter by the second. It’s coming for earth. For me.
I won’t keep it waiting. There’s nothing left in the night sky anymore. I only have one star left to study.
I will climb into the telescope. I will bathe in the beautiful blue light. I will wait for it to come get me. When it comes, I will let the light in.
Look for me in the stars. Don’t worry. You’ll join me there soon enough.
#entertainment
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If Your Flight Lands Earlier Than Expected, Do NOT Collect Your Luggage.
WARNING!
Please, if you read this and you’re at an airport. DO NOT PICK UP YOUR LUGGAGE.
If you arrive earlier than expected, don’t pick it up! I’m serious. Please believe me. I’m currently at an airport, stuck in these… loop things that keep fucking happening. This goes out as a lifeline to anyone who finds themselves in the same situation as me. Or anyone who ever decides to travel by plane.
My name is… Just call me Chris. And this isn’t the first time this has happened to me.
If you’re confused, let me explain. If you arrive earlier than you’re supposed to when you travel by air. You did not arrive at your destination.
You are not at an airport.
It may look like an airport, it may feel like an airport, but I can guarantee you it’s not. It’s some fucked up liminal space where nothing makes sense and if you do the wrong thing, well… I’ll get into that. Let me give you some warning signs and some rules you should follow if you ever find yourself in this pocket Hell. Please keep in mind, what you ABSOLUTELY must do if you want to survive.
Let me start with the landing.
Once someone boards a plane, everything will feel normal. You’ll have a snack, watch a movie, it doesn’t matter. Pay attention to how long your flight is. ALWAYS pay attention to how long it is.
That’s the only sign that you’re about to end up here. If a flight is supposed to be 5-10 hours but you arrive ten minutes earlier, that’s not an issue. It’s not something as minuscule as being five minutes earlier. But if you arrive one, two or even three hours earlier than expected then something is wrong.
Once you notice you’ve arrived way earlier than you’re supposed to, do not panic. Do not fight it, you are locked out. You have to enter this airport. A clear way to know if you’re going to get stuck, like I am, is to look at the stewardesses’ faces.
Two beautiful plane stewardesses, typically a blonde and a brunette, will be near the exit of the plane, waving you off with farewells, and “Thanks for flying with our company” blah blah blah.
Notice their faces. The same pattern repeats over and over.
One will have a massive fake smile and the other will be crying.
Don’t be surprised by how quickly people will start getting off the plane. Calmly and quickly pick up your bags and leave.
DO NOT FIGHT ANYONE. Do not attempt to stay inside the plane.
Last time this happened to me, I saw it coming. I saw the crying blonde, wishing me a happy vacation in Boca and I immediately flipped. At that time, it was the fourth time I had found myself in this scenario. So, I ran back onto the plane.
It was at this point that both the staff and the rest of the passengers started to work together to grab me and push me off the plane. It doesn’t matter how strong or fast or great you think you are. You will not be able to outfight or outmaneuver fifty people in a small, confined space who want you gone.
I was kicked off the plane with a black eye and a sprained ankle. That was last year.
Don’t do what I did. Don’t fight. Just peacefully and calmly leave.
You’ll be overpowered by even a couple of grandmas with the help of a normal dude.
Now let’s talk about the “airport” and people of interest.
Once you’re in, that’s it, you’re in it for the long haul. Don’t despair, don’t panic. Go to the designated waiting room after customs, and wait it out there.
When you pass through customs, DO NOT ask any questions. The “man” will simply ask you if you’re there for “work” or “pleasure”.
Either DO NOT respond or simply state.
“I’ll be here for just a bit.”
That’s it. Do not make small talk, do not ask where you are.
The more questions you ask, the longer you have to stay in the airport. When I got trapped the second time, I had to stay there for fifteen hours.
Just don’t talk to him.
A brisk “I’ll be here for just a bit” or any variation of that phrase will land you a quick 15-to-50-minute stay in the airport.
And now you’re in.
Walk calmly and quietly into the middle of the airport and into the main lobby. There will be “people” walking around you apparently going about their day. Do not talk to them. They do not have your best interests at heart. If you can even find any that speak any human languages.
Once you’re in the middle of the lobby you’ll find a small rolling mat where your luggage is supposed to come from. The linoleum floors will be unnaturally clean, it will smell of nothing but feel “stuffy”, like not enough air comes in.
The airport resembles something plucked from the 1990s more than anything from the current day. All the TV sets are old CRT monitors and whatever channel is on will be largely gibberish. Avoid looking at them since there’s nothing of worth on.
The area reeks of oppressive normality. Like it’s trying too hard to look average.
The only thing worth noticing is that the large conveyor belt that brings in your luggage. I’ll get to that in a bit. First, you’ll have to look out for a certain character. Sit down and wait for your time at the airport to be over.
DO NOT check your watch, or any time displaying device. And once a man who looks like some 1950s detective comes up to you to ask what time it is. DO NOT RESPOND.
There is a large scar on my right hand as a consequence of ignoring that rule.
The first time I came to this God-forsaken place, that man came up to me. Called himself the “Ferryman”. Short, annoying, sounded Italian, like from the Bronx or something. I asked him where I was and he refused to answer. Just kept asking the same thing over and over again.
“What time is it?” he’d repeat.
Who fucking cares about the time? I wanted to know where the fuck I was.
After repeatedly asking me the same thing over and over again I finally relented.
I… didn’t even see it. It was so fast. I just felt a burning sensation on my arm as the skin around started bleeding red.
He cut me.
So fast and so cleanly that I barely felt it. The cut was deep, I screamed.
I quickly jumped away from the man. He just looked at me, smiling.
I have no idea who or what that man is. All I know is that every time I find myself back here, I ignore him, and you should too.
There’s something very pernicious about him. Something that’s wrong. It’s not just the fact that he cut me, that’s obvious. It’s the fact that he did it so effortlessly. Like, I’m butter to him. He looks at me like he knows. And I know it too. The primal instinct of a cornered animal. Something that is about to become prey.
He could kill me without breaking a sweat.
But he chooses not to. Or maybe he can’t? I don’t know. It’s like he’s asking for permission, like his eyes are begging for consent to do more.
I’d rather not think about it too much. Just don’t talk to him.
Next up, “fakes”.
I would like to preface this part of my explanation by highlighting a certain type of… entities I’ve encountered in the airport, that I feel deserves special attention.
I’m not sure how to say this, but out of all the times I’ve been stuck in this fucking airport, there’s one event that I can’t actually confirm was real or not. I might just be losing my mind at this point.
When I first came to this airport, I wasn’t alone. I was with my wife.
We were both going to travel to Europe. We packed our bags and left, when we arrived sooner than expected that’s when our Hell started. I was inexperienced at the time, and although I talked to the customs man when I shouldn’t have, and I told the “ferryman” the time, there was also one person besides me and my wife at the airport. Someone I recognized.
My grandma was at the airport. Like my dead grandma. Dead for fifteen years now.
I couldn’t really believe it, and as I approached her, she didn’t speak. She just stood quietly.
“Grandma?” I asked.
She didn’t answer. She just stood still.
“Nan?” I repeated.
She turned to me.
“Come. Let’s go board the plane, honey.”
What the fuck was she on about? What plane?
I realized there was an archway that led to a boarding zone. Boarding zone A-1. She probably meant going there to board a plane.
I tried to tell her that I wasn’t coming and tried to tell her not to go as well. She just ignored me and went on her own. I should have appreciated my instincts when I decided to walk away.
It really didn’t make sense. Boarding zone A-1? It was my first time there but I didn’t want to board some random plane.
I can’t explain why I think that wasn’t my grandma, besides the obvious fact that she’s dead. It’s… different when you see someone that’s not supposed to be alive. It’s surreal. You don’t really believe it’s fake.
But something else was off. I only realized it later.
The “detective-looking” monster, the customs guy, the weird janitor with one arm, and everything or everyone that resembles people in that clusterfuck of a place. Everyone, everything that inhabited that hellscape, was afraid.
They were afraid of her.
I don’t understand what insane, impossible thing would ever make these… these creatures afraid of anything. But I’m not going to risk finding out. Not now, not ever.
These things are fake. They’re not real people. I suspect they take the shape of people you love or people you lost. I’m not sure.
Like I said it’s only happened once. But be aware.
Ever since that day, I haven’t seen boarding zone in here again.
And lastly, the luggage and the bathroom.
So, to finish my warning, I’ll end with the most dangerous elements of this entire area. This post is long so if you take anything from it, take this.
Don’t pick up your luggage. Don’t even go near it.
That is not luggage. That is not an inanimate object.
DO NOT TOUCH IT.
They are very good at mimicking your luggage. Don’t try to interact with it, don’t reach out or try to get a better look. It doesn’t matter if it looks like your bag; believe me, it’s not.
It's difficult enough getting all this down. I hope you have some sympathy, it’s quite hard to type on a keyboard with only seven fingers.
And I’m not mentioning this for no reason. I wasn’t born with seven fingers. I lost them.
My luggage took my fingers.
I… I’ll spare you the details. But I hope you understand why I opened my post talking about the luggage.
And now comes the hard part.
Damn it.
If you recall, when I first came to this airport, I wasn’t alone. I was with my wife.
I was… with my wife.
There’s a bathroom, off to the side, which has the stereotypical women’s symbol (a stick figure wearing some sort of dress). It’s obviously the women’s bathroom. Or at least, it was the first time I was there with my wife.
It changed. Whenever I’m alone, it’s always the men’s bathroom. I can tell because there are now basically two men’s bathrooms in this airport now.
I… She wanted to cry, I think. We’d been stuck in the airport for ten hours by that point. There are no outside doors in here and if you try to go back to the airport runway, you will be tackled by security.
We thought we were stuck here forever. She just… She wanted some time to be alone with her thoughts.
I saw it. I saw her standing in front of that fucking door. Just standing still. Arm stretched out, holding the handle.
I just… I don’t know why I didn’t stop her. It was like she was hypnotized.
That door pulls you in somehow. I can’t quite describe it. She wanted time to process.
She went in. Didn’t say a word, not a peep.
She was there for fifty minutes, before I walked up to the door. I asked if she was alright. I called for her.
I knocked on that door for minutes. I slammed my arms against it. I felt my body pushing against me, everything screaming as I tried to push further in. Like every cell in my body was crying out to leave. But when I finally gathered enough strength and was about to go in, a security guard stopped me.
I was yelling at this point, trying to get in. He just turned to me and said:
“That’s the women’s restroom. You can’t go in.”
I…I… To this day I don’t understand what happened. What happened to me, what happened to my wife. I just don’t know.
I couldn’t move.
I was stuck there, in front of that door, paralyzed. My brain screaming to storm in and get Linda back, but the rest of my body was not complying. I stood there for fifty minutes, shaking and crying.
And then I was back.
Back at the regular airport, back in the real world.
I won’t disclose much more of what happened… Security had to drag me out of the airport afterwards.
I never saw my wife again.
This was five years ago. Yet somehow, in some fucked up way, I keep finding myself back here. To this hellhole. The place that took Linda from me. I never found my wife again, even when I return here. But this place, this Hell keeps finding me.
Don’t go to the bathroom. Piss on the ground if you have to.
Fuck this place.
I’m sitting down. It’s been almost three hours. Shouldn’t have told the customs guy to “fuck off” I suppose. But yeah, I guess that’s it. After your time is up, you return to the real world.
Hopefully you can make it out without losing half of your hand like I did.
I’ll sign off soon. It’s becoming like a routine at this point. Goddamn place, I just wait here. I’m hungry, I’m tired, I’m cold. And I’m not falling for this thing’s tricks anymore.
I’m alone here, it’s just me and some woman across the room.
I should be getting out soon.
Edit 1:
I’m back at a normal airport. Thank God.
Just wanted to give a heads-up that everything is fine. I’m out of that place, and I’m back here. So, I wanted to leave this post up just to…
Wait hold on, is that the woman that was with me?
Wait… why is she coming closer?
What? Is that?
Linda!?
Edit 2:
It’s been five hours.
I talked to my wife; I’m still processing this. The shock, the happiness, the confusion. I asked her where she’s been all these years.
Suspended time, she tells me. Says time was different for her; it felt like a few days at best. I’m just… I’m scared to be happy. This feels like a dream. Like something impossible.
I’m waiting for her so we can go back home. I didn’t mention this, but I was on a connecting flight before this happened. Just one more flight until I get home. So now, I guess I’m going back home, with my wife.
What the hell? I can’t stop smiling. My eyes hurt from crying.
I guess we can talk more back home. I’m still processing what’s happening. I can’t believe I’m back in the real world and she’s here with me.
I don’t even know where I’m supposed to go. She went ahead to deal with our tickets. Where’s the boarding area?
Right. So yeah, I’ll leave my warning here. I’m actually still shell-shocked. I’ll still leave this post up still as a warning. I don’t want anyone to suffer the same fate as me. Happy ending or not.
Oh, right, I’m supposed to go to boarding zone A. And the number is… one.
So again, if your flight arrives earlier than expected, watch out for the signs. Hopefully it just won’t happen.
And hopefully, this is the last plane I board in my life. I’ll check on this post later when I land. Good luck.
Oh, hold on, my wife is coming back.
Okay, I was told we’re going.
She just told me:
“Come. Let’s go board the plane, honey.”
#entertainment
source
WARNING!
Please, if you read this and you’re at an airport. DO NOT PICK UP YOUR LUGGAGE.
If you arrive earlier than expected, don’t pick it up! I’m serious. Please believe me. I’m currently at an airport, stuck in these… loop things that keep fucking happening. This goes out as a lifeline to anyone who finds themselves in the same situation as me. Or anyone who ever decides to travel by plane.
My name is… Just call me Chris. And this isn’t the first time this has happened to me.
If you’re confused, let me explain. If you arrive earlier than you’re supposed to when you travel by air. You did not arrive at your destination.
You are not at an airport.
It may look like an airport, it may feel like an airport, but I can guarantee you it’s not. It’s some fucked up liminal space where nothing makes sense and if you do the wrong thing, well… I’ll get into that. Let me give you some warning signs and some rules you should follow if you ever find yourself in this pocket Hell. Please keep in mind, what you ABSOLUTELY must do if you want to survive.
Let me start with the landing.
Once someone boards a plane, everything will feel normal. You’ll have a snack, watch a movie, it doesn’t matter. Pay attention to how long your flight is. ALWAYS pay attention to how long it is.
That’s the only sign that you’re about to end up here. If a flight is supposed to be 5-10 hours but you arrive ten minutes earlier, that’s not an issue. It’s not something as minuscule as being five minutes earlier. But if you arrive one, two or even three hours earlier than expected then something is wrong.
Once you notice you’ve arrived way earlier than you’re supposed to, do not panic. Do not fight it, you are locked out. You have to enter this airport. A clear way to know if you’re going to get stuck, like I am, is to look at the stewardesses’ faces.
Two beautiful plane stewardesses, typically a blonde and a brunette, will be near the exit of the plane, waving you off with farewells, and “Thanks for flying with our company” blah blah blah.
Notice their faces. The same pattern repeats over and over.
One will have a massive fake smile and the other will be crying.
Don’t be surprised by how quickly people will start getting off the plane. Calmly and quickly pick up your bags and leave.
DO NOT FIGHT ANYONE. Do not attempt to stay inside the plane.
Last time this happened to me, I saw it coming. I saw the crying blonde, wishing me a happy vacation in Boca and I immediately flipped. At that time, it was the fourth time I had found myself in this scenario. So, I ran back onto the plane.
It was at this point that both the staff and the rest of the passengers started to work together to grab me and push me off the plane. It doesn’t matter how strong or fast or great you think you are. You will not be able to outfight or outmaneuver fifty people in a small, confined space who want you gone.
I was kicked off the plane with a black eye and a sprained ankle. That was last year.
Don’t do what I did. Don’t fight. Just peacefully and calmly leave.
You’ll be overpowered by even a couple of grandmas with the help of a normal dude.
Now let’s talk about the “airport” and people of interest.
Once you’re in, that’s it, you’re in it for the long haul. Don’t despair, don’t panic. Go to the designated waiting room after customs, and wait it out there.
When you pass through customs, DO NOT ask any questions. The “man” will simply ask you if you’re there for “work” or “pleasure”.
Either DO NOT respond or simply state.
“I’ll be here for just a bit.”
That’s it. Do not make small talk, do not ask where you are.
The more questions you ask, the longer you have to stay in the airport. When I got trapped the second time, I had to stay there for fifteen hours.
Just don’t talk to him.
A brisk “I’ll be here for just a bit” or any variation of that phrase will land you a quick 15-to-50-minute stay in the airport.
And now you’re in.
Walk calmly and quietly into the middle of the airport and into the main lobby. There will be “people” walking around you apparently going about their day. Do not talk to them. They do not have your best interests at heart. If you can even find any that speak any human languages.
Once you’re in the middle of the lobby you’ll find a small rolling mat where your luggage is supposed to come from. The linoleum floors will be unnaturally clean, it will smell of nothing but feel “stuffy”, like not enough air comes in.
The airport resembles something plucked from the 1990s more than anything from the current day. All the TV sets are old CRT monitors and whatever channel is on will be largely gibberish. Avoid looking at them since there’s nothing of worth on.
The area reeks of oppressive normality. Like it’s trying too hard to look average.
The only thing worth noticing is that the large conveyor belt that brings in your luggage. I’ll get to that in a bit. First, you’ll have to look out for a certain character. Sit down and wait for your time at the airport to be over.
DO NOT check your watch, or any time displaying device. And once a man who looks like some 1950s detective comes up to you to ask what time it is. DO NOT RESPOND.
There is a large scar on my right hand as a consequence of ignoring that rule.
The first time I came to this God-forsaken place, that man came up to me. Called himself the “Ferryman”. Short, annoying, sounded Italian, like from the Bronx or something. I asked him where I was and he refused to answer. Just kept asking the same thing over and over again.
“What time is it?” he’d repeat.
Who fucking cares about the time? I wanted to know where the fuck I was.
After repeatedly asking me the same thing over and over again I finally relented.
I… didn’t even see it. It was so fast. I just felt a burning sensation on my arm as the skin around started bleeding red.
He cut me.
So fast and so cleanly that I barely felt it. The cut was deep, I screamed.
I quickly jumped away from the man. He just looked at me, smiling.
I have no idea who or what that man is. All I know is that every time I find myself back here, I ignore him, and you should too.
There’s something very pernicious about him. Something that’s wrong. It’s not just the fact that he cut me, that’s obvious. It’s the fact that he did it so effortlessly. Like, I’m butter to him. He looks at me like he knows. And I know it too. The primal instinct of a cornered animal. Something that is about to become prey.
He could kill me without breaking a sweat.
But he chooses not to. Or maybe he can’t? I don’t know. It’s like he’s asking for permission, like his eyes are begging for consent to do more.
I’d rather not think about it too much. Just don’t talk to him.
Next up, “fakes”.
I would like to preface this part of my explanation by highlighting a certain type of… entities I’ve encountered in the airport, that I feel deserves special attention.
I’m not sure how to say this, but out of all the times I’ve been stuck in this fucking airport, there’s one event that I can’t actually confirm was real or not. I might just be losing my mind at this point.
When I first came to this airport, I wasn’t alone. I was with my wife.
We were both going to travel to Europe. We packed our bags and left, when we arrived sooner than expected that’s when our Hell started. I was inexperienced at the time, and although I talked to the customs man when I shouldn’t have, and I told the “ferryman” the time, there was also one person besides me and my wife at the airport. Someone I recognized.
My grandma was at the airport. Like my dead grandma. Dead for fifteen years now.
I couldn’t really believe it, and as I approached her, she didn’t speak. She just stood quietly.
“Grandma?” I asked.
She didn’t answer. She just stood still.
“Nan?” I repeated.
She turned to me.
“Come. Let’s go board the plane, honey.”
What the fuck was she on about? What plane?
I realized there was an archway that led to a boarding zone. Boarding zone A-1. She probably meant going there to board a plane.
I tried to tell her that I wasn’t coming and tried to tell her not to go as well. She just ignored me and went on her own. I should have appreciated my instincts when I decided to walk away.
It really didn’t make sense. Boarding zone A-1? It was my first time there but I didn’t want to board some random plane.
I can’t explain why I think that wasn’t my grandma, besides the obvious fact that she’s dead. It’s… different when you see someone that’s not supposed to be alive. It’s surreal. You don’t really believe it’s fake.
But something else was off. I only realized it later.
The “detective-looking” monster, the customs guy, the weird janitor with one arm, and everything or everyone that resembles people in that clusterfuck of a place. Everyone, everything that inhabited that hellscape, was afraid.
They were afraid of her.
I don’t understand what insane, impossible thing would ever make these… these creatures afraid of anything. But I’m not going to risk finding out. Not now, not ever.
These things are fake. They’re not real people. I suspect they take the shape of people you love or people you lost. I’m not sure.
Like I said it’s only happened once. But be aware.
Ever since that day, I haven’t seen boarding zone in here again.
And lastly, the luggage and the bathroom.
So, to finish my warning, I’ll end with the most dangerous elements of this entire area. This post is long so if you take anything from it, take this.
Don’t pick up your luggage. Don’t even go near it.
That is not luggage. That is not an inanimate object.
DO NOT TOUCH IT.
They are very good at mimicking your luggage. Don’t try to interact with it, don’t reach out or try to get a better look. It doesn’t matter if it looks like your bag; believe me, it’s not.
It's difficult enough getting all this down. I hope you have some sympathy, it’s quite hard to type on a keyboard with only seven fingers.
And I’m not mentioning this for no reason. I wasn’t born with seven fingers. I lost them.
My luggage took my fingers.
I… I’ll spare you the details. But I hope you understand why I opened my post talking about the luggage.
And now comes the hard part.
Damn it.
If you recall, when I first came to this airport, I wasn’t alone. I was with my wife.
I was… with my wife.
There’s a bathroom, off to the side, which has the stereotypical women’s symbol (a stick figure wearing some sort of dress). It’s obviously the women’s bathroom. Or at least, it was the first time I was there with my wife.
It changed. Whenever I’m alone, it’s always the men’s bathroom. I can tell because there are now basically two men’s bathrooms in this airport now.
I… She wanted to cry, I think. We’d been stuck in the airport for ten hours by that point. There are no outside doors in here and if you try to go back to the airport runway, you will be tackled by security.
We thought we were stuck here forever. She just… She wanted some time to be alone with her thoughts.
I saw it. I saw her standing in front of that fucking door. Just standing still. Arm stretched out, holding the handle.
I just… I don’t know why I didn’t stop her. It was like she was hypnotized.
That door pulls you in somehow. I can’t quite describe it. She wanted time to process.
She went in. Didn’t say a word, not a peep.
She was there for fifty minutes, before I walked up to the door. I asked if she was alright. I called for her.
I knocked on that door for minutes. I slammed my arms against it. I felt my body pushing against me, everything screaming as I tried to push further in. Like every cell in my body was crying out to leave. But when I finally gathered enough strength and was about to go in, a security guard stopped me.
I was yelling at this point, trying to get in. He just turned to me and said:
“That’s the women’s restroom. You can’t go in.”
I…I… To this day I don’t understand what happened. What happened to me, what happened to my wife. I just don’t know.
I couldn’t move.
I was stuck there, in front of that door, paralyzed. My brain screaming to storm in and get Linda back, but the rest of my body was not complying. I stood there for fifty minutes, shaking and crying.
And then I was back.
Back at the regular airport, back in the real world.
I won’t disclose much more of what happened… Security had to drag me out of the airport afterwards.
I never saw my wife again.
This was five years ago. Yet somehow, in some fucked up way, I keep finding myself back here. To this hellhole. The place that took Linda from me. I never found my wife again, even when I return here. But this place, this Hell keeps finding me.
Don’t go to the bathroom. Piss on the ground if you have to.
Fuck this place.
I’m sitting down. It’s been almost three hours. Shouldn’t have told the customs guy to “fuck off” I suppose. But yeah, I guess that’s it. After your time is up, you return to the real world.
Hopefully you can make it out without losing half of your hand like I did.
I’ll sign off soon. It’s becoming like a routine at this point. Goddamn place, I just wait here. I’m hungry, I’m tired, I’m cold. And I’m not falling for this thing’s tricks anymore.
I’m alone here, it’s just me and some woman across the room.
I should be getting out soon.
Edit 1:
I’m back at a normal airport. Thank God.
Just wanted to give a heads-up that everything is fine. I’m out of that place, and I’m back here. So, I wanted to leave this post up just to…
Wait hold on, is that the woman that was with me?
Wait… why is she coming closer?
What? Is that?
Linda!?
Edit 2:
It’s been five hours.
I talked to my wife; I’m still processing this. The shock, the happiness, the confusion. I asked her where she’s been all these years.
Suspended time, she tells me. Says time was different for her; it felt like a few days at best. I’m just… I’m scared to be happy. This feels like a dream. Like something impossible.
I’m waiting for her so we can go back home. I didn’t mention this, but I was on a connecting flight before this happened. Just one more flight until I get home. So now, I guess I’m going back home, with my wife.
What the hell? I can’t stop smiling. My eyes hurt from crying.
I guess we can talk more back home. I’m still processing what’s happening. I can’t believe I’m back in the real world and she’s here with me.
I don’t even know where I’m supposed to go. She went ahead to deal with our tickets. Where’s the boarding area?
Right. So yeah, I’ll leave my warning here. I’m actually still shell-shocked. I’ll still leave this post up still as a warning. I don’t want anyone to suffer the same fate as me. Happy ending or not.
Oh, right, I’m supposed to go to boarding zone A. And the number is… one.
So again, if your flight arrives earlier than expected, watch out for the signs. Hopefully it just won’t happen.
And hopefully, this is the last plane I board in my life. I’ll check on this post later when I land. Good luck.
Oh, hold on, my wife is coming back.
Okay, I was told we’re going.
She just told me:
“Come. Let’s go board the plane, honey.”
#entertainment
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