u/EmotionalString7170

I always struggle whenever people ask me to talk about my father.

Not because I hated him, but because I barely remember him at all. I was five years old when he disappeared, and five is an age too young to preserve memories properly.

What remains from that time survives only in fragments: sounds, images, and emotions detached from context.

Most of my childhood feels like looking through fogged glass.

I remember my aunt raising me after that. I remember her small wooden house near the edge of the fields, and the way she always avoided my questions whenever I asked about my father. As a child, I assumed adults simply enjoyed keeping secrets from children.

Whenever I asked where he went, she always answered with the same sentence.

"He was a good person."

Nothing more.

Over time, I stopped asking because I realised the question always changed the mood inside the room. Sometimes my aunt would stare absentmindedly out the window for several seconds before speaking again, as though she had accidentally wandered somewhere painful.

Eventually, I moved overseas and built a life of my own. I accepted that my father would remain a blurry figure in my memory.

Except for one thing.

The mountain trek.

For years, it was the only memory I remember about him. Whenever teachers assigned essays about our parents, or classmates exchanged childhood memories, I always returned to that same happy trek in the mountains.

I never questioned why my father had taken me there in the first place because the memory itself never felt strange.

It felt joyful.

I remember him carrying me on his shoulders along a narrow trail surrounded by tall trees. The wind was cold enough to sting my cheeks, and the mountain path seemed to stretch endlessly into the darkness. Yet my father sounded happier than I had ever heard him before.

Even now, decades later, I still remember that happiness.

He laughed often that night.

I can no longer remember his face clearly, but I remember the feeling of his hands gripping my legs securely while carrying me uphill. I remember the warmth of his voice whenever the forest became too quiet.

And I remember, somewhere beyond the mountains, music and fireworks echoed through the valley.

The sounds drifted through the darkness in waves: drums, brass instruments, voices singing together. The whole valley seemed alive with music. I thought there was a festival happening somewhere far away.

I remember becoming excited.

"Can we go there?"

My father laughed softly.

"No, baby. Too far away."

Then he started singing, following the music.

"Little bird, don't lose your way..."

I repeated the line badly because I was still a child.

Immediately, my father clapped loudly.

"Again! Again!"

So I sang again.

"Little bird, don't lose your way..."

Once more, he applauded loudly.

I remember laughing because his clapping felt exaggerated, as though I had just performed on a stage instead of mumbling nonsense into the dark.

As we continued walking, I began hearing other voices somewhere in the valley.

Men and women singing along to the same melody. In my imagination, there was a huge bonfire beyond the mountains, surrounded by hundreds of people singing beneath lantern light.

Occasionally, my father would squeeze my ankles gleefully and say:

"Louder, kiddo! You're better than that."

Every time I finished another verse, he clapped again. Loudly. Sometimes so loudly that I remember wincing.

Then the memory becomes unclear.

I remember growing sleepy while he carried me. I remember resting my head against his hair while the cold wind brushed my face.

Then, nothing.

My next clear memory is waking up in my aunt's house the following morning. I remember eating a hearty bowl of tofu soup.

After that, my father was simply gone. Strangely, I don't even remember looking for him.

That was the story of him for most of my life. Since then, my aunt was the only parent figure I know.

Then, three months before her death, I returned to my aunt's hometown during a summer break.

Her memory had begun deteriorating by then. Some days she forgot my age. Other days she forgot what year it was. Yet strangely, the closer she came to death, the more vividly she seemed to remember the past.

That evening, she suddenly asked whether I still remembered "the mountain trek."

I laughed softly and told her yes.

Then I noticed tears forming in her eyes, saying it was finally her time to tell the truth.

She told me my father was an ordinary schoolteacher. During a difficult harvest season, he had accepted a food assistance package distributed by the ruling party at the time.

When a new regime came to power, they began purging anyone suspected of sympathising with the old government. As they raided my house, that package was apparently all the evidence they needed.

The soldiers added my father's name to a list and left. My father knew something bad was about to happen the next day.

So on his final night, he carried me through the mountains to my aunt’s village because he believed they might spare me if I wasn't with him when they came.

I could barely speak while listening.

But then my aunt told me the part that still haunts that memory even now.

The music I remembered hearing that night was not a festival. It was the music that the soldiers played during executions so nearby villages wouldn't hear the screaming.

The reason why my father clapped so hard and kept asking me to sing louder was because he was trying to drown out the sound of gunshots.

My father only wanted one thing before he died.

He wanted my final memory of him was a happy one.

I used to joke that the hospital was turning my brain into horror movie soup.

Night shifts at St. Vincent’s were already miserable enough without me spending every break watching ghost clips on my phone with the other nurses. After a few months of that, combined with terrible sleep, becoming paranoid felt like an obvious consequence.

But not actually seeing things that weren’t there.

The first time happened outside Room 814 during a double shift. I was walking medication down the hallway when I noticed a woman standing behind an elderly patient near the nurses’ station.

She wore a pale blue hospital gown, smiling creepily with her tongue completely out, and her head tilted sideways.

At first I thought she had a severe neck injury.

Then I realised, no human can bend their neck far enough for their cheek to rest against a relaxed shoulder.

I stopped walking. The patient continued speaking normally to the nurse in front of him while the woman behind him just stared directly at me, smiling wider every second like she was remembering how.

Then someone bumped my shoulder.

I looked away for half a second.

When I looked back, she was gone.

After that, she started appearing everywhere. Standing behind visitors, watching me from the reflection of dark television screens in empty rooms. Once, at four in the morning, I even saw her at the far end of my bedroom.

The fluorescent lights flickered overhead, and for a brief second I noticed her bare feet weren’t quite touching the ground.

I stopped sleeping properly after that.

Eventually, my supervisor pulled me aside and suggested I speak to the psychiatric department.

“Visual perceptual disturbance,” the psychiatrist said after a long pause. “Definitely stress-induced."

"But I keep seeing the same thing!" I protested.

“Do not try to fight the perception,” he added. “Instead, ground yourself and continue functioning as normally as possible. Apparitions can't hurt you.”

I remember laughing nervously. “So...ignore the creepy smiling woman?”

“Downplay it,” he corrected. “Do not escalate it in your mind.”

He prescribed sleep medication and adjusted my workload.

And strangely, it worked.

I slept. I functioned. For almost a week, I stopped reacting when I saw her. Sometimes I would notice her standing in a corridor, and I would simply breathe, look away, and continue my shift.

I even joked about it in my head.

There she is again. Great. Very persistent. 10/10 for commitment.

Then last Thursday, I stepped into the lift during a night shift and saw her standing behind a man in a wheelchair.

With the same pale gown, same smile, and same neck bent sideways at that inhuman angle.

I exhaled slowly.

“Oh good,” I mumbled. “You again.”

The smiling woman tilted her head further, as if amused I was no longer afraid.

I looked away and smiled at the man in the wheelchair instead.

The man looked up at me, pale and confused.

“Wait. So you can see her too?”

The call came on a Tuesday while I was at work. The woman on the line spoke carefully, with that sort of diplomatic tone people use when they are about to deliver bad news.

“Ms. Piper? I’m calling regarding Daniel Williams. Your name was listed as his emergency contact.”

“Huh? Daniel who?”

For a moment, I genuinely couldn’t remember him. Then the memories slowly returned. It was that quiet Daniel from the uni, the awkward guy who always sat in the back row of lectures, barely speaking to anyone unless someone spoke to him first.

We were in the same group during the orientation week. He confessed to me during our second year, and although I rejected him as gently as I could, things were never quite normal afterwards.

Eventually, he became one of those people I assumed I would never hear about again.

“I’m sorry,” the woman continued softly, “but Mr. Williams passed away yesterday morning.”

The news unsettled me more than I expected. I had not spoken to Daniel in years, yet somehow I was still the only person listed for the hospital to contact. Soon after, the woman gave me his address.

Two days later, I stood inside his apartment while the landlord handed me a cardboard box with visible discomfort.

“He specifically said you should receive this,” the man explained.

Daniel’s apartment felt painfully empty. There was barely any furniture besides a folding table, a single chair, and an old stained coffee mug from our university sitting beside the sink. On top of the box sat a sticky note written in Daniel’s handwriting.

FOR LAUREN. IF ANYTHING HAPPENS TO ME.

I brought the box home and opened it at my kitchen table that evening. Inside, the contents seemed harmless enough: calendars, books, newspaper clippings.

"Weird, why would he give me these stuffs?" I mumbled to myself.

Then, at the bottom of the box, I found his notebooks. There were dozens of them, all carefully dated. Every single one contained cryptic details.

September 14. Left apartment at 7:42 PM. Wearing blue shirt.

January 8. Coworker walked her to parking garage.

March 2. Appeared nervous entering apartment alone.

“What the fuck, Daniel?” I muttered under my breath. Did he write about ME?

My stomach dropped with every page. There were printed photographs of me carrying groceries, maps with circles drawn around apartment buildings I had lived in, and pages filled entirely with license plate numbers.

The longer I read, the more it felt like my privacy had been violated without me ever noticing.

Then, I found a photograph of my apartment building late at night.

That's where I slammed the notebook shut so hard it nearly slid off the table.

For almost an hour, I sat there trying to process the idea that Daniel had spent years obsessing over me after graduation. Part of me even wondered whether I had accidentally encouraged him somehow without realising it.

Eventually, I shoved everything back into the box and pushed it into the corner of my living room.

I didn’t open it again.

But the next night, something began to feel wrong.

At first, I heard footsteps shuffling around my apartment hall late at night. Then, I saw a figure standing near the mailboxes downstairs before disappearing when I looked directly at it.

Once, while taking out the trash, I noticed a grey pickup parked across the street with its headlights off.

By the time I looked again, it was gone.

I barely slept that week. Every creak in the hallway made me think about Daniel’s notebooks sitting unopened in my apartment. Part of me even started wondering whether grief and paranoia were getting tangled together in my head, or whether the ghost of Daniel is haunting my apartment.

Then, three nights later, I woke at 2 a.m. to the sound of tires crunching slowly outside my building.

I sat in bed staring into the darkness for nearly ten minutes before finally getting up. The box was still sitting in the corner exactly where I had left it.

This time, I forced myself to read the last notebook.

Grey pickup returned at 11:14 PM.

Male in baseball cap remained outside building for 38 minutes.

Unknown male followed her through grocery store.

Then I realised something.

The entries were not about me.

They were about people around me.

My chest felt heavy as I turned more pages.

Called landlord anonymously. Cameras installed Thursday, thank God.

Suddenly I remembered the day cameras were installed at my apartment entrance. When I asked about it, my landlord casually mentioned that a former tenant had reported suspicious activity near the building.

Another entry appeared several pages later.

Slashed all four tires. Hope she is safe now.

My pulse quickened. I don't even own a car!

Could it be...

Eric?

Eric was my ex-boyfriend.

I broke up with him after discovering he cheated on me with a classmate. After that, he became obsessive in ways I spent years trying to minimise in my own head.

Eric once waited outside my student dorm for six hours because I refused to answer his calls. I blocked his number afterwards, but every now and then I still had the strange feeling that he hasn't moved on.

The earliest notebook entries mentioning him dated back five years. Folded between the pages were copies of Daniel’s attempts to report Eric to the authorities. Most ended the same way: insufficient evidence. Daniel had underlined those words repeatedly in frustration, leaving dents pressed deep into the paper.

The realisation rearranged everything inside my head.

Daniel had not spent five years stalking me.

He had spent five years intercepting Eric.

My hands shook as I opened the final notebook. Folded inside the back cover was a final note addressed to me.

I unfolded it slowly.

If you’re reading this, I finally failed to stop him. Run.

As I finished reading, three heavy bangs suddenly rattled my front door.