u/um_marie_me

Okay. I know how this is going to read. I've typed this out like four different ways already, deleted three of them, and I keep landing back here, so I guess this is the version you're getting. I'm not looking for sympathy, and I am begging you, do not comment "have you tried calling them again," because yes, I have tried calling them again, I have called so many times that the hold music has started showing up in my dreams. I'm posting because I think there's a piece of this I'm not seeing, and I'm hoping someone in this sub is the kind of person who notices things. Because clearly I am not.

So. Here's the whole thing, start to now.

It started with a fly. One fly, on the rim of a glass I'd just filled at my own kitchen sink, water still cold enough to ring the glass. It was just sitting there on the rim, rubbing its little front legs together, perched in the exact spot where my mouth was about to go.

I remember it with a total clarity, even better than I remember what I had for dinner two nights ago. I dumped the water. Washed the glass. Got a different one, because once a glass has had a houseguest like that, how can you trust it?

By the time the new glass was full, there were two flies working the faucet, and here's the part that should've tipped me off if I had even one functioning brain cell that day: they weren't doing the normal panicky fly thing, the zip-up-and-vanish-the-second-a-hand-gets-close thing. They were comfortable. One of them kept ducking under the lip of the tap and coming back out, over and over, with the focus of someone checking a peephole before they let you in.

The idea of drinking the water made my stomach turn.

I filed a maintenance request that afternoon, because that's what you do, that's the whole social contract: you pay your rent and in exchange somebody shows up when there's a problem.

Category: Pest control Issue: Flies in kitchen 

Description: There are flies in my unit. I cannot find the source.

It got a maintenance number. But nobody came that day.

I'd stopped wanting to eat almost right away, and I chalked that right up to the flies. I'd ordered a full veggie pizza the night before, extra olives, even though I hate olives but taking them off cost a dollar more than leaving them on which, don’t get me started, is a crime against the consumer. And the flies had gone ahead and claimed the box like it was theirs by eminent domain. Who wants to sit down to a meal with an audience like that?

Everything started smelling wrong, and I don't mean rotten exactly, I mean pungent. The rice in my rice cooker smelled sour clear across the kitchen. The coffee smelled burnt before the water even touched the grounds, and if you’ve ever made coffee, you know that’s not how it’s supposed to work. I opened the fridge and got hit with this thick, sweet smell, like flowers a week past their vase water, and I cleared the whole thing out in one disgusted sweep, didn't even sort it, just bag, bag, trash.

By the second morning there were more flies, and this time they weren't being subtle about anything. Rows of them along the counter, lined up neat as a church pew. A little cluster on the microwave handle, holding what looked like a meeting. I found three in a mug I had personally washed, dried, and put away clean, and one of them walked clear across my phone screen while I was checking the apartment portal, taking its sweet time, and I watched it a half second too long before I flicked it off, because something about the way it moved made me not want to touch it.

The status on my request had changed.

Status: Pending access. Technician unable to confirm entry.

I was home? I had been home the entire time. Nobody knocked. I would've heard a knock, the walls in this building are basically wet cardboard with a paint job, I hear my neighbor's TV through them, I hear her chair scrape when she gets up to pee. There is no version of a knock on my door that gets past me. None.

I left a note in the portal.

I am available for entry. Please knock loudly.

Then I sat down on the couch to wait and must've drifted off, because the next thing I knew the light in the room had gone gray and there was a fly walking up the inside of my wrist, right along the blue vein there, stopping every couple steps to clean its front legs.

I brushed it off.

It came back. Same spot.

Wednesday was the day the smell stopped being a kitchen problem and became a whole-apartment problem.

I searched the entire place. Behind the couch. Every cabinet, the one under the sink, the gap behind the toilet, that shelf in my closet where I keep a tote bag full of other tote bags. I found dust. One earring I'd made peace with losing months ago. A single piece of pasta, fossilized, origin unknown, possibly older than my lease.

I didn't find anything dead. I looked, hard, and there was no body, no mouse behind the stove, no bird that snuck in through a vent. The smell had no address. No source. Just a presence and it was getting bigger by the hour.

The flies followed me. Not all of them. There were always more staying put than coming with me. But I felt like I was being escorted.

I filed a second request. Marked it Urgent, because it was.

Category: Urgent maintenance

Issue: Possible dead animal in unit

Description: Strong odor, increasing fly activity, please send someone today.

The portal threw an error back at me.

Duplicate request detected.

I called the emergency line. Six rings, then voicemail, smooth and unbothered as a customer service rep clocking out at 4:59. I called the leasing office and got the recording. Your call is important to us and will be answered in the order it was received. I called four more times that day.

That evening I knocked on my neighbor's door. I heard her in there!! She was dragging something heavy. And then nothing. Dead stop. I knocked again and I swear she was trying extra hard to be silent. 

When I got back to my own door, there was a fresh line in the portal.

Resident unavailable for entry. Technician unable to complete service.

I read that maybe ten times, trying to find a version where it made sense. Wrong unit. A confused tech, an open door three apartments down. One soft knock mistaken, by some guy with a clipboard who clearly hated his job, for a final answer. 

I left another note.

I am inside the unit. I have not left. Please come back.

That night, something landed on my face while I was half-asleep on the couch. A leg-tap at my upper lip, a second little press at the corner of my eye, a feathery drag along my throat. And I came up swinging at nothing.

In the bathroom mirror, my own face looked like it belonged to someone who'd had the actual worst week of her life. A bruise along my cheekbone I had zero memory of getting, and when I pressed it out of morbid curiosity the way you poke a bruise even though you know better, it didn't hurt the way it should've. It didn't hurt at all, honestly, it really must’ve been the lighting in the bathroom. The lighting's been bad since the day I moved in. Bad light explains a lot.

It did not explain what happened next.

Something moved behind my right nostril.

I stood there at the sink and waited for it to stop being a thing that was happening, the way you wait out a cramp during the middle of the night, white-knuckled and praying to nobody in particular, and instead it kept on happening, and then a fly came out. It was the color of nothing, and dragged itself along my upper lip before I flicked it down into the sink, where it sat there trembling, wings still folded flat and see-through.

I filed another request. It took three tries, because of my shaking hands.

Category: Emergency

Issue: Health hazard

Description: Please send someone. I think something is wrong inside my apartment.

The portal sat there loading for almost a full minute, and then:

This request has been closed. Resident unavailable for entry.

I wrote right back. I am available. I am here.

This request has been closed. Resident unavailable for entry.

I am in the apartment.

This request has been closed. Resident unavailable for entry.

I live here.

Nothing. I thought I'd actually broken the portal. Then the page refreshed on its own, no input from me at all, and a new line came up that I've now read so many times I could say it in my sleep.

Occupancy status pending verification.

I checked my text messages that night, first time in what I'd have sworn was like a day, day and a half tops. Nineteen unread notifications. My mom, four times, the last one nothing but my own name and three question marks, which is somehow worse than actual words. My landlord, once, short: please call me back, we need to confirm something. A coworker asking if I was okay because I'd apparently no-showed two full days.

I tried calling my mom back. It rang and rang and never once dropped to voicemail, which I didn't even know was possible, and then the call just ended on its own.

I typed out a reply to all of them. I'm fine, sorry, phone's been acting weird. I remember my own thumbs moving, the little tap of the keys. When I went back to check if it sent, every thread under every name was just empty. Not unsent. Empty, like the conversation had never once been opened from my end.

The flies had started up a kind of residency on the wall above my couch by then, gathered into a loose, shifting smear that never quite committed to a shape. I'll admit it, some small hopeful part of me kept waiting for them to spell something out. Maybe redrum. At least then I'd have instructions. They never did. They just sat there being a stain with wings, and that was worse than if they'd left me a note.

Tonight there were voices in the hallway below mine. Heavy footsteps. A radio cutting in and out, static then a voice then static. Somebody said a unit number, and it took me a half second longer than it should've to realize the number was mine.

I stood up too fast and had to grab the wall. The room tipped, then righted itself slow, like water finding its level. The smell was everywhere now, sweet and thick. I'd stopped really smelling it days back. I only knew it was bad by the way the air seemed to bend in front of it, the way blacktop shimmers in August.

The voices stopped right outside my door.

A man knocked and said, "Police department. Maintenance is with us. We're coming in."

I tried to answer him. I really did. I opened my mouth to say I'm here, I've been here the whole time, I have the request numbers, I have every note I left, I did everything a person is supposed to do, and what came out was not that. Wasn't anywhere close. A dry click in my throat, that's all, and then every fly in the apartment lifted off the wall and the sink and the couch cushions at once.

The bedroom door was shut. I don't remember shutting it. I don't really go in there anymore to be honest, I've been on the couch, though don't ask me since when, I genuinely couldn't tell you. The flies were coming out from underneath the bedroom door in a thick, steady stream.

They kept forcing themselves through the gap.

The front door opened behind me. Somebody made a sound like they'd been hit in the stomach.

The bedroom door swung open, on its own or somebody opened it, I honestly cannot tell you which, and there was a shape on the floor by the bed that I have been staring at for what feels like a really long time now.

One of the officers said, "How long has she been here?" and I genuinely cannot understand why he's asking that about whatever's on the floor instead of just asking me, since I am standing right here, since I've been right here the entire six days.

I opened my mouth again to finally, finally lay the whole thing out, the requests, the dates, every note, every duplicate-request error, the whole sorry record of it. But flies kept pouring out.

I don't know why nobody will look at me when I talk. Why is nobody talking to me?

I drive long-haul. I'm a woman, twenty-eight, and I've spent most of the last four years alone in a truck. I eat sunflower seeds and crack the shells with my front teeth, and my dentist told me numerous times that doing so will eventually ruin them. Still, I have to fit into the trucker stereotype somehow.

I know my truck the way you know your own hands. I know what my truck sounds like from outside and from inside. I know the difference between another rig idling two spots over and my own engine turning. I know how my tires sound on gravel. I know how the sleeper moves when I shift my weight.

I'd stopped for my ten-hour reset. There are federal rules about how long you can drive before the law makes you stop and rest, and the Electronic Logging Device is the thing that watches you to make sure you actually do it. It logs the drive time, location, engine status. You can't push through your hours.

I'd already driven most of the day. I pulled into a truck stop off the interstate in West Virginia a little before two in the morning, exhausted.

The trailer attached to my truck was sealed. The paperwork said medical equipment. The seal was intact when I picked it up in Pittsburgh, and you don't break a seal on freight like that. You check the number against the paperwork, you sign, you drive. I did that. So, I set the brakes, logged Sleeper Berth, and went inside.

The truck stop had the texture two AM always has in those places. Fluorescent light with no warmth. Coffee that had been sitting in the pot for hours. Food going slowly gray under heat lamps. There was a moth the size of my palm knocking itself against the window glass by the door, over and over, in the same spot. A handful of drivers moving around with shower bags, faces gone soft and droopy with similar exhaustion. A man near the window watching something on his phone with the sound on, no headphones.

I noticed the two of them by the drink coolers because they didn't fit the hour.

Everyone else looked worn down. They didn't. The woman had dark hair and a red jacket. The man beside her was thin, in a gray zip-up. They were standing very close together without touching, and they were both… too awake.

I got my shower code and went down the hall.

The showers at that chain are better than people expect. They have a locking door, real towels, and water hot enough to hurt a little, which is how I prefer it.

When I came out, the woman in the red jacket was standing at the sinks.

She stood at the sink with her hands resting on the edge of it, doing nothing at all, just facing her own reflection.

I said, "Oops, sorry." (Driving in a truck for most of the year makes an introvert even more socially anxious.)

She smiled at me through the glass without turning around.

I bought water, a protein bar, and a bag of extra salty sunflower seeds. The man was in the same aisle, in front of the beef jerky, holding one bag without looking at it. He was looking at the shelf behind it.

I walked past him. He didn't move. At the register I looked back once, and he was still holding the same bag, in the same place.

I went back to my truck.

The sleeper inside my truck is the one place that's entirely mine. Blackout curtain between the cab and the bunk, a second curtain around the bunk itself because I'm a super light sleeper, a weighted blanket, a satin pillow because of course I want my hair to look nice in the rare occasion I see anyone, a white noise machine the size of my fist, earplugs, a basket of wipes and lip balm and even more sunflower seeds (OK, before you say it, yes. I am basically a hamster now.), a warm little strip of light taped under the shelf. An iPad mounted by the bunk for my allotted hours of brain rot. My phone was charging on the dash, because that outlet works better.

The last thing I remember was watching on my iPad a woman pouring rice into a glass jar for organizational purposes, and I remember thinking, distantly, that she owned more kinds of flour than a person who baked would ever need.

Then I fell asleep.

The thing that woke me was the backup alarm.

Beep... Beep... Beep…

Truck stops are never quiet. There're reefer units, idling engines, air brakes letting go, somebody slamming a side box shut at four in the morning. So I assumed it belonged to someone else. I've slept through worse.

Then the sleeper moved underneath me.

I sat up too fast and hit my shoulder on the cabinet over the bunk.

The white noise machine kept going with its thin fake rain. I pulled one earplug out.

The backup alarm kept beeping. Tires turned over gravel. My gravel, under my truck.

We stopped. The air brakes sighed. Then we moved forward again.

For a few seconds my mind tried to make light of this. Maybe I was getting towed? Did I park in the wrong spot? Did another truck hit me? Was it another truck close enough to feel through the frame?

The curtain between the cab and my sleeper was shut. The dashboard light came around its edges, blue and green, shifting with the turns.

My phone was on the dash. The iPad was beside me.

I opened the curtain about two inches.

There were two people in the cab. The woman was in the driver's seat. The man was beside her. Both facing forward.

Her hands were on the wheel, evenly placed, the way a doll's hands are placed when someone else has set them there, fingers barely wrapped around the wheel. Her shoulders were square to the windshield. She didn't make any of the small, constant adjustments a body makes while actually driving a sixty-thousand-pound vehicle. She didn't glance at the mirrors, she didn't correct the wheel, no shift of weight through the turns threw her sideways. She was simply upright while my truck did the moving.

The man sat the same way. Forward. Still. Hands in his lap, palms up, fingers slightly curled.

I never saw either of them breathe. Neither of them spoke.

I let the curtain fall shut.

I don't know how long I stayed like that. But it was long enough for the gravel to give way to pavement. Long enough for the white noise machine to become the only thing I could hear. That darn machine made everything worse. Because now I couldn't hear the road, or the cab. Or them.

I wanted to turn it off. But I didn't want them to notice I was awake.

I checked the iPad. One bar. My phone was right there a mere three feet away plugged into the dash. Useless.

I opened the curtain again. Nothing had changed. Same posture. Same hands. Only the road outside was different. We were past the truck stop entrance now, angling toward the highway.

I know the route because I've done it dozens of times, the same way you know a hallway in the dark. There was a flat patch. A bend. Then the downward grade starts.

Other drivers don’t love this stretch. Nobody does.

I also knew what came after that.

There's a runaway truck ramp. It's a long bed of gravel and sand cut into the shoulder of a steep decline, built for trucks whose brakes have failed, so the incline and the loose surface can do the stopping that a guardrail can't. They’re meant to save lives.

RUNAWAY TRUCK RAMP 2 MILES.

RUNAWAY VEHICLES ONLY.

My truck isn't speeding. It isn't shaking or swerving. It's not doing anything remotely close to being out of control by any measure. The engine brake is working the way it should. The road is dry and clear. There's no reason for my truck to need that ramp.

I think that's where she's taking it anyway.

I opened the curtain again because I wanted my phone. Why in the hell do I leave it plugged into the dash??? I tried to think of ways to yank it without grabbing their attention. Everything within reach was too short, too soft, or too loud to move quietly.

When I looked up, their heads had started to turn.

Only their heads. Their shoulders stayed exactly where they'd been, square to the windshield. Her hands stayed on the wheel. His stayed in his lap. Just their heads, turning at exactly the same speed. For half a second, when the dashboard lights swept across them. Both sets of eyes caught the light wrong.

I stopped breathing.

Their heads stopped turning before either of them could have seen me. The angle was already wrong by then, somewhere between forward and back, past the point a neck can bend without dragging the shoulders along with it. Without pause, she adjusted the rear-view mirror.

I let the curtain fall and hoped it made no sound at all.

I'm typing this with the brightness down all the way, under the blanket, and I'm really hoping the small noise of my fingers tapping on the screen doesn't carry. I don't know if they can hear me breathing. I don't know why they stopped turning their heads.

We passed the next sign a few minutes ago. I saw the yellow of it through the gap in the curtain.

RUNAWAY TRUCK RAMP 1 MILE.

Again, I know this road. There's another sign at the half-mile mark, and then the ramp itself, coming up fast on the right, a hard climb through deep gravel at a bad angle.

The white noise machine is still running. I hate it now in retrospect. I can't separate the fake rain from the real road underneath anymore. Every change in the tires, I think we've hit the ramp. Every shift of the engine, I think we're turning. Every time the curtain moves with the air from the vents, I think it's a hand.

I looked again just now.

Phone, still on the dash. Her, still driving. Him, still beside her.

RUNAWAY TRUCK RAMP 1/2 MILE.

I'm going to try for my phone.

Update: We reached the ramp. My truck has come to a stop. They're just sitting still.

Sorry if this is the wrong place for this, I just don't really know who else to ask and I've been sitting on it for a few hours not sure if I'm overreacting.

I took a ride home late last night. The app quoted ~40 minutes. It took over an hour. On my end the trip is still sitting there like it's still happening. It doesn’t have a fare breakdown, no rate-your-driver screen, nothing. I’ve forced-closed the app multiple times. 

For context, I live out past the edge of town, off a windy highway through a redwood forest, and my exit is one of those that sneaks up on you right after a curve. Miss it and there's no shoulder to turn around on, you have to go to the next exit and loop back, which adds a good 25–30 minutes. I always mention it up front now because I've had drivers miss it before, and I get a little anxious about it every single time.

This driver mentioned early in the ride that he was deaf in one ear, I don't remember which side it was exactly. I was in the back on the right passenger side, so I made a point of leaning forward when I told him about the exit a second time, loud, like super loud. He still missed the exit. (To be fair, I have a very soft voice so it may have been partly my fault.)

I said "Ack, that was my exit," probably more sharply than I meant to, I think I was already a little on edge about the late-night drive in general. He asked me to repeat it. I repeated it and he apologized, said the app was rerouting. Okay, it happens, I told myself I wasn't going to make a big deal out of it, even though it’d truly put me a little on edge.

Then we got back around to the correct exit and the road into my neighborhood had police cars blocking it. Several of them were lined up at the mouth of the road. My stomach kind of dropped. Tthat's not a normal thing to come home to.

The driver rolled the window down. The officer said the road was closed, they were looking for someone in the area, and told us to stay off the side roads. The driver didn't catch most of that so he turned around and asked me what was said. I told him it was closed and we needed to go around, which, technically, was true, I just didn't say all of it.

There is another way to my home. It’s a backroad through the woods, half gravel, the GPS drops out on it constantly, but it connects if you know the right ways to turn. I almost didn't suggest it, honestly. It's not exactly the kind of road I love being on with a complete stranger in the middle of the night, but it was either that or return to my pick-up spot. So I told him there was another way and started directing him to it.

A couple minutes onto the backroad his phone went off with an emergency alert, played through the car speaker, low volume, road noise stepping all over it. I caught "dark hair," "beige sweater," "last seen near Ridgeview." It might’ve said more, but I was kind of frozen for a second.

He asked what it said. I told him it was the road closure thing again. I don't know why I said that instead of just telling him, I think I freaked out a little at the circumstances and it came out before I'd thought about it.

It repeated a few minutes later. I caught "do not approach" that time. He asked again. I told him same alert. My hands were doing this thing where I kept pressing them flat against my legs to keep them still.

The GPS froze twice on that road, and he kept slowing down, kept asking if I was sure this was the right way. I kept saying yes, almost there. We were only a few minutes away.

At some point he looked at me in the rearview a beat too long. He could’ve been looking at the road behind us, hard to say from where I was sitting, but it scared me. He asked, "you said this is your house?" I said the road goes to my house. He asked if I lived alone. I said yes, and immediately wished I hadn't. I really hate when people ask that question.

Then he slowed down again, said he didn't think he could keep going, the app wasn't showing a road there anymore. I told him it does that out here, and that we were super close. He said he might have to end the ride right where we were in the middle of the woods, and my whole chest went tight.

This is the part where I'm asking for your advice, because I don't know how Uber treats the audio if a ride gets flagged for an unusual route, and I think this one's going to get flagged.

I had a knife in my bag. It was from the house I'd just come from, I didn't want to leave it behind, so I grabbed it on my way out.

His eyes caught on my sweater in the mirror, just a half second, maybe less. I don't actually know if he saw what I thought he saw. My sweater's cream. Supposed to be cream. Some stains. From the back seat, in the dark, I couldn’t tell whether he was looking at the road or my tainted sweater. But I wasn't going to sit there and find out which one it was. I don't even fully remember making that decision, my heart was just suddenly going so fast I could feel it in my ears.

I panicked. I don't remember deciding anything, I just remember the knife wasn't in my bag anymore and then it wasn't really in my hand anymore either, and his throat was the part I went for, mostly because it was the part closest to me leaning forward like that, and I was shaking so badly I don't think I could have aimed for anything more specific even if I'd tried.

The car kept rolling another few seconds, then drifted onto the shoulder, into the brush a little.

His phone was still up on the dash, app still open, some kind of safety screen on it with a little red bar moving, I'm assuming that means it was recording audio? I genuinely don't know how that feature works. I tried to swipe it off, but my fingers kept sliding wrong on the screen, and besides, they were sticky and wet.

It's worse the second time. You'd think familiarity would dull it. It doesn't. If anything you notice more of it, because you're not busy being shocked, you're just listening. People call it a death rattle, but a rattle is dry, something loose shaking around in a box. This isn't that. This is wetter and a lot less rhythmic. Air losing a battle with blood, over and over, in a throat that’s no longer built to let either one through. There’s a bubbling underneath that rises and falls with no pattern, and threaded through that a thinner clicking, like a tongue trying to manage something it doesn't have the coordination left for. Every so often it would catch and go quiet a second too long, and I'd think, there, that's it, and then it wasn't it, and it would start back up again. It went on longer than I expected, which I think about every time, and I don't know why I keep expecting it to be shorter.

I left his phone where it was and walked the rest of the way, and I was shaking so hard by the time I got inside that I had to sit down on my own kitchen floor for a while before I could even think straight.

The trip is still showing as in progress on my end. It says the route was flagged as unusual and that Uber may review safety audio if anything gets reported. I also got charged more than the original quote because he missed the exit and had to loop back, and he didn’t even drop me at my actual pin.

So do I open a fare dispute now, or wait for the trip to close out on its own first? Also, does anyone know if the safety recording thing gets reviewed automatically, or only if the rider or driver flags it?

Hi there! I just graduated with my PhD and suddenly have tons of free time to send out cards, so I’d love to send some happy mail your way! Crafty things are genuinely therapeutic for me, and I really love taking part in this community. :D

I have lots of cards to choose from. Themes include:

• Weird human body anatomy
• Abstract floral art
• Random locations from around the world
• Parisian art

Please comment below with a tiny milestone you’ve reached recently, and let me know what kind of card you’d like (or if you'd like a random one)! Then send me a DM with your mailing info. :)

p.s. You may have seen my other post, but it got taken down because I made a mistake in the title. Truly my bad. <3

p.p.s. WW includes folks in the US as well. :)

How do y'all do it???

I'm trying to fix my sleep schedule, but no matter what I do or what time I wake up, I get so exhausted after a few hours of being awake that I end up needing the longest nap imaginable. I'm talking 4+ hours before I feel even remotely energized again.

Other times, I'll fall asleep at like 3 PM and wake up at 5 AM the next day. I'm very lucky right now that I work from home and can get away with this, but I'll have an in-person job soon.

My psychiatrist prescribed me Modafinil, which is supposed to help with wakefulness. It does help postpone the sleepiness, but without it, I feel sleepy basically from the moment I wake up.

I know this is probably tied to the depressive side of Bipolar 2. I definitely don't have this problem when I'm hypomanic, ha.

I just feel like I'm wasting my life because I'm spending so much of it asleep. (Although I love sleeping.)

Has anyone else dealt with this? How do you manage it? Do you just suffer through it?

Sorry if this is the wrong place for this, I just don't really know who else to ask and I've been sitting on it for a few hours not sure if I'm overreacting.

I took a ride home late last night. The app quoted ~40 minutes. It took over an hour. On my end the trip is still sitting there like it's still happening. It doesn’t have a fare breakdown, no rate-your-driver screen, nothing. I’ve forced-closed the app multiple times. 

For context, I live out past the edge of town, off a windy highway through a redwood forest, and my exit is one of those that sneaks up on you right after a curve. Miss it and there's no shoulder to turn around on, you have to go to the next exit and loop back, which adds a good 25–30 minutes. I always mention it up front now because I've had drivers miss it before, and I get a little anxious about it every single time.

This driver mentioned early in the ride that he was deaf in one ear, I don't remember which side it was exactly. I was in the back on the right passenger side, so I made a point of leaning forward when I told him about the exit a second time, loud, like super loud. He still missed the exit. (To be fair, I have a very soft voice so it may have been partly my fault.)

I said "Ack, that was my exit," probably more sharply than I meant to, I think I was already a little on edge about the late-night drive in general. He asked me to repeat it. I repeated it and he apologized, said the app was rerouting. Okay, it happens, I told myself I wasn't going to make a big deal out of it, even though it’d truly put me a little on edge.

Then we got back around to the correct exit and the road into my neighborhood had police cars blocking it. Several of them were lined up at the mouth of the road. My stomach kind of dropped. Tthat's not a normal thing to come home to.

The driver rolled the window down. The officer said the road was closed, they were looking for someone in the area, and told us to stay off the side roads. The driver didn't catch most of that so he turned around and asked me what was said. I told him it was closed and we needed to go around, which, technically, was true, I just didn't say all of it.

There is another way to my home. It’s a backroad through the woods, half gravel, the GPS drops out on it constantly, but it connects if you know the right ways to turn. I almost didn't suggest it, honestly. It's not exactly the kind of road I love being on with a complete stranger in the middle of the night, but it was either that or return to my pick-up spot. So I told him there was another way and started directing him to it.

A couple minutes onto the backroad his phone went off with an emergency alert, played through the car speaker, low volume, road noise stepping all over it. I caught "dark hair," "beige sweater," "last seen near Ridgeview." It might’ve said more, but I was kind of frozen for a second.

He asked what it said. I told him it was the road closure thing again. I don't know why I said that instead of just telling him, I think I freaked out a little at the circumstances and it came out before I'd thought about it.

It repeated a few minutes later. I caught "do not approach" that time. He asked again. I told him same alert. My hands were doing this thing where I kept pressing them flat against my legs to keep them still.

The GPS froze twice on that road, and he kept slowing down, kept asking if I was sure this was the right way. I kept saying yes, almost there. We were only a few minutes away.

At some point he looked at me in the rearview a beat too long. He could’ve been looking at the road behind us, hard to say from where I was sitting, but it scared me. He asked, "you said this is your house?" I said the road goes to my house. He asked if I lived alone. I said yes, and immediately wished I hadn't. I really hate when people ask that question.

Then he slowed down again, said he didn't think he could keep going, the app wasn't showing a road there anymore. I told him it does that out here, and that we were super close. He said he might have to end the ride right where we were in the middle of the woods, and my whole chest went tight.

This is the part where I'm asking for your advice, because I don't know how Uber treats the audio if a ride gets flagged for an unusual route, and I think this one's going to get flagged.

I had a knife in my bag. It was from the house I'd just come from, I didn't want to leave it behind, so I grabbed it on my way out.

His eyes caught on my sweater in the mirror, just a half second, maybe less. I don't actually know if he saw what I thought he saw. My sweater's cream. Supposed to be cream. Some stains. From the back seat, in the dark, I couldn’t tell whether he was looking at the road or my tainted sweater. But I wasn't going to sit there and find out which one it was. I don't even fully remember making that decision, my heart was just suddenly going so fast I could feel it in my ears.

I panicked. I don't remember deciding anything, I just remember the knife wasn't in my bag anymore and then it wasn't really in my hand anymore either, and his throat was the part I went for, mostly because it was the part closest to me leaning forward like that, and I was shaking so badly I don't think I could have aimed for anything more specific even if I'd tried.

The car kept rolling another few seconds, then drifted onto the shoulder, into the brush a little.

His phone was still up on the dash, app still open, some kind of safety screen on it with a little red bar moving, I'm assuming that means it was recording audio? I genuinely don't know how that feature works. I tried to swipe it off, but my fingers kept sliding wrong on the screen, and besides, they were sticky and wet.

It's worse the second time. You'd think familiarity would dull it. It doesn't. If anything you notice more of it, because you're not busy being shocked, you're just listening. People call it a death rattle, but a rattle is dry, something loose shaking around in a box. This isn't that. This is wetter and a lot less rhythmic. Air losing a battle with blood, over and over, in a throat that’s no longer built to let either one through. There’s a bubbling underneath that rises and falls with no pattern, and threaded through that a thinner clicking, like a tongue trying to manage something it doesn't have the coordination left for. Every so often it would catch and go quiet a second too long, and I'd think, there, that's it, and then it wasn't it, and it would start back up again. It went on longer than I expected, which I think about every time, and I don't know why I keep expecting it to be shorter.

I left his phone where it was and walked the rest of the way, and I was shaking so hard by the time I got inside that I had to sit down on my own kitchen floor for a while before I could even think straight.

The trip is still showing as in progress on my end. It says the route was flagged as unusual and that Uber may review safety audio if anything gets reported. I also got charged more than the original quote because he missed the exit and had to loop back, and he didn’t even drop me at my actual pin.

So do I open a fare dispute now, or wait for the trip to close out on its own first? Also, does anyone know if the safety recording thing gets reviewed automatically, or only if the rider or driver flags it?

Okay. I know how this is going to read. I've typed this out like four different ways already, deleted three of them, and I keep landing back here, so I guess this is the version you're getting. I'm not looking for sympathy, and I am begging you, do not comment "have you tried calling them again," because yes, I have tried calling them again, I have called so many times that the hold music has started showing up in my dreams. I'm posting because I think there's a piece of this I'm not seeing, and I'm hoping someone in this sub is the kind of person who notices things. Because clearly I am not.

So. Here's the whole thing, start to now.

It started with a fly. One fly, on the rim of a glass I'd just filled at my own kitchen sink, water still cold enough to ring the glass. It was just sitting there on the rim, rubbing its little front legs together, perched in the exact spot where my mouth was about to go.

I remember it with a total clarity, even better than I remember what I had for dinner two nights ago. I dumped the water. Washed the glass. Got a different one, because once a glass has had a houseguest like that, how can you trust it?

By the time the new glass was full, there were two flies working the faucet, and here's the part that should've tipped me off if I had even one functioning brain cell that day: they weren't doing the normal panicky fly thing, the zip-up-and-vanish-the-second-a-hand-gets-close thing. They were comfortable. One of them kept ducking under the lip of the tap and coming back out, over and over, with the focus of someone checking a peephole before they let you in.

The idea of drinking the water made my stomach turn.

I filed a maintenance request that afternoon, because that's what you do, that's the whole social contract: you pay your rent and in exchange somebody shows up when there's a problem.

Category: Pest control Issue: Flies in kitchen 

Description: There are flies in my unit. I cannot find the source.

It got a maintenance number. But nobody came that day.

I'd stopped wanting to eat almost right away, and I chalked that right up to the flies. I'd ordered a full veggie pizza the night before, extra olives, even though I hate olives but taking them off cost a dollar more than leaving them on which, don’t get me started, is a crime against the consumer. And the flies had gone ahead and claimed the box like it was theirs by eminent domain. Who wants to sit down to a meal with an audience like that?

Everything started smelling wrong, and I don't mean rotten exactly, I mean pungent. The rice in my rice cooker smelled sour clear across the kitchen. The coffee smelled burnt before the water even touched the grounds, and if you’ve ever made coffee, you know that’s not how it’s supposed to work. I opened the fridge and got hit with this thick, sweet smell, like flowers a week past their vase water, and I cleared the whole thing out in one disgusted sweep, didn't even sort it, just bag, bag, trash.

By the second morning there were more flies, and this time they weren't being subtle about anything. Rows of them along the counter, lined up neat as a church pew. A little cluster on the microwave handle, holding what looked like a meeting. I found three in a mug I had personally washed, dried, and put away clean, and one of them walked clear across my phone screen while I was checking the apartment portal, taking its sweet time, and I watched it a half second too long before I flicked it off, because something about the way it moved made me not want to touch it.

The status on my request had changed.

Status: Pending access. Technician unable to confirm entry.

I was home? I had been home the entire time. Nobody knocked. I would've heard a knock, the walls in this building are basically wet cardboard with a paint job, I hear my neighbor's TV through them, I hear her chair scrape when she gets up to pee. There is no version of a knock on my door that gets past me. None.

I left a note in the portal.

I am available for entry. Please knock loudly.

Then I sat down on the couch to wait and must've drifted off, because the next thing I knew the light in the room had gone gray and there was a fly walking up the inside of my wrist, right along the blue vein there, stopping every couple steps to clean its front legs.

I brushed it off.

It came back. Same spot.

Wednesday was the day the smell stopped being a kitchen problem and became a whole-apartment problem.

I searched the entire place. Behind the couch. Every cabinet, the one under the sink, the gap behind the toilet, that shelf in my closet where I keep a tote bag full of other tote bags. I found dust. One earring I'd made peace with losing months ago. A single piece of pasta, fossilized, origin unknown, possibly older than my lease.

I didn't find anything dead. I looked, hard, and there was no body, no mouse behind the stove, no bird that snuck in through a vent. The smell had no address. No source. Just a presence and it was getting bigger by the hour.

The flies followed me. Not all of them. There were always more staying put than coming with me. But I felt like I was being escorted.

I filed a second request. Marked it Urgent, because it was.

Category: Urgent maintenance

Issue: Possible dead animal in unit

Description: Strong odor, increasing fly activity, please send someone today.

The portal threw an error back at me.

Duplicate request detected.

I called the emergency line. Six rings, then voicemail, smooth and unbothered as a customer service rep clocking out at 4:59. I called the leasing office and got the recording. Your call is important to us and will be answered in the order it was received. I called four more times that day.

That evening I knocked on my neighbor's door. I heard her in there!! She was dragging something heavy. And then nothing. Dead stop. I knocked again and I swear she was trying extra hard to be silent. 

When I got back to my own door, there was a fresh line in the portal.

Resident unavailable for entry. Technician unable to complete service.

I read that maybe ten times, trying to find a version where it made sense. Wrong unit. A confused tech, an open door three apartments down. One soft knock mistaken, by some guy with a clipboard who clearly hated his job, for a final answer. 

I left another note.

I am inside the unit. I have not left. Please come back.

That night, something landed on my face while I was half-asleep on the couch. A leg-tap at my upper lip, a second little press at the corner of my eye, a feathery drag along my throat. And I came up swinging at nothing.

In the bathroom mirror, my own face looked like it belonged to someone who'd had the actual worst week of her life. A bruise along my cheekbone I had zero memory of getting, and when I pressed it out of morbid curiosity the way you poke a bruise even though you know better, it didn't hurt the way it should've. It didn't hurt at all, honestly, it really must’ve been the lighting in the bathroom. The lighting's been bad since the day I moved in. Bad light explains a lot.

It did not explain what happened next.

Something moved behind my right nostril.

I stood there at the sink and waited for it to stop being a thing that was happening, the way you wait out a cramp during the middle of the night, white-knuckled and praying to nobody in particular, and instead it kept on happening, and then a fly came out. It was the color of nothing, and dragged itself along my upper lip before I flicked it down into the sink, where it sat there trembling, wings still folded flat and see-through.

I filed another request. It took three tries, because of my shaking hands.

Category: Emergency

Issue: Health hazard

Description: Please send someone. I think something is wrong inside my apartment.

The portal sat there loading for almost a full minute, and then:

This request has been closed. Resident unavailable for entry.

I wrote right back. I am available. I am here.

This request has been closed. Resident unavailable for entry.

I am in the apartment.

This request has been closed. Resident unavailable for entry.

I live here.

Nothing. I thought I'd actually broken the portal. Then the page refreshed on its own, no input from me at all, and a new line came up that I've now read so many times I could say it in my sleep.

Occupancy status pending verification.

I checked my text messages that night, first time in what I'd have sworn was like a day, day and a half tops. Nineteen unread notifications. My mom, four times, the last one nothing but my own name and three question marks, which is somehow worse than actual words. My landlord, once, short: please call me back, we need to confirm something. A coworker asking if I was okay because I'd apparently no-showed two full days.

I tried calling my mom back. It rang and rang and never once dropped to voicemail, which I didn't even know was possible, and then the call just ended on its own.

I typed out a reply to all of them. I'm fine, sorry, phone's been acting weird. I remember my own thumbs moving, the little tap of the keys. When I went back to check if it sent, every thread under every name was just empty. Not unsent. Empty, like the conversation had never once been opened from my end.

The flies had started up a kind of residency on the wall above my couch by then, gathered into a loose, shifting smear that never quite committed to a shape. I'll admit it, some small hopeful part of me kept waiting for them to spell something out. Maybe redrum. At least then I'd have instructions. They never did. They just sat there being a stain with wings, and that was worse than if they'd left me a note.

Tonight there were voices in the hallway below mine. Heavy footsteps. A radio cutting in and out, static then a voice then static. Somebody said a unit number, and it took me a half second longer than it should've to realize the number was mine.

I stood up too fast and had to grab the wall. The room tipped, then righted itself slow, like water finding its level. The smell was everywhere now, sweet and thick. I'd stopped really smelling it days back. I only knew it was bad by the way the air seemed to bend in front of it, the way blacktop shimmers in August.

The voices stopped right outside my door.

A man knocked and said, "Police department. Maintenance is with us. We're coming in."

I tried to answer him. I really did. I opened my mouth to say I'm here, I've been here the whole time, I have the request numbers, I have every note I left, I did everything a person is supposed to do, and what came out was not that. Wasn't anywhere close. A dry click in my throat, that's all, and then every fly in the apartment lifted off the wall and the sink and the couch cushions at once.

The bedroom door was shut. I don't remember shutting it. I don't really go in there anymore to be honest, I've been on the couch, though don't ask me since when, I genuinely couldn't tell you. The flies were coming out from underneath the bedroom door in a thick, steady stream.

They kept forcing themselves through the gap.

The front door opened behind me. Somebody made a sound like they'd been hit in the stomach.

The bedroom door swung open, on its own or somebody opened it, I honestly cannot tell you which, and there was a shape on the floor by the bed that I have been staring at for what feels like a really long time now.

One of the officers said, "How long has she been here?" and I genuinely cannot understand why he's asking that about whatever's on the floor instead of just asking me, since I am standing right here, since I've been right here the entire six days.

I opened my mouth again to finally, finally lay the whole thing out, the requests, the dates, every note, every duplicate-request error, the whole sorry record of it. But flies kept pouring out.

I don't know why nobody will look at me when I talk. Why is nobody talking to me?

Hi all! I became a doctor in astrophysics just yesterday, and I finally have time to send out more snail mail. :D

I’d love to exchange cards, send some happy mail, or even receive a few congratulatory cards if anyone feels like celebrating with me!

I have a huge variety of cards, including educational postcards, flower cards, cards from different countries, artsy cards, and more.

If you’re interested, please comment below with a tiny accomplishment you’ve had recently, and then send me a DM with your mailing info. Thank you!! :)

Vent post.

I didn’t really notice it until I got home and had time to think about it, but I was sooooo irritable.

Earlier this week, my friends and I went to a celebratory bar crawl (I accomplished a big thing, hehe). But throughout the entire night, I just wanted to go home.

It started with me being annoyed that some of the invitees were people I didn’t know. In retrospect, it's totally fine for friends of friends to attend a celebration. It is not like I explicitly said, “absolutely no strangers whatsoever.”

Then I started getting annoyed at one particular guy. The anger just started boiling up in me. He wasn't even doing anything especially annoying. I think I finally broke when he tried calling me by my “native” name, which I only really reserve for family and very close/intimate friends. But even then, it was not like he did it maliciously, and he had no way of knowing not to call me that. It just set something off.

Then I got annoyed because someone interrupted a story I was telling with a small anecdote of their own. I can understand being mildly annoyed by that, but I was manically PISSED OFF. Like full “I hate you now and forever” levels of angry. And whenever someone tried to talk to me, I felt so frustrated? Like, why are these mere mortals speaking to me when they should be listening to my every word? I know how wild that sounds in retrospect, which is why I’m pretty sure I was having an episode.

Thankfully, I’m pretty good at hiding my true feelings, otherwise I probably would have exploded. I kept excusing myself to the bathroom so I could breathe and calm down.

Anywho, does this happen to anyone else? My anger was so disproportionate to what was actually happening.

I finally found the perfect audience. 

I’ve been afraid of public speaking for as long as I can remember. I don’t mean I get a little nervous and then do fine, AKA what most people mean when they say they hate presentations. I mean I start feeling sick. My hands go cold, my throat tightens, and every thought I’d lined up in my head starts wandering off. By the time I stand up, I’m so aware of myself that I stop behaving normally. I don’t know where to put my hands. I don’t know how long to look at people. I forget how often a person is supposed to swallow.

In fourth grade, I had to give a report on sea turtles. I loved sea turtles!! I had stickers. I had facts. I had a poster board with construction-paper waves and a little green turtle I’d cut out myself, which I was genuinely proud of because I’m not, and have never been, gifted in the art department. The night before, I practiced for my grandmother in the kitchen while she sat at the table sorting dried beans from a plastic bag into a chipped blue bowl. I told her that leatherback turtles could weigh up to two thousand pounds. I explained nesting beaches. I pointed at my poster like a tiny marine biologist. When I finished, she clapped very seriously and told me there was nothing to be afraid of.

Then she made me her favorite recipe for nerves. She made it with hot water, lemon, sugar, and a few drops of something dark from a little glass bottle she kept on the shelf above the stove. It tasted sweet at first, then bitter, then floral.

“Only a little,” she said, tapping the rim of the mug with one fingernail. “It helps people listen.”

I always thought she meant it helped me listen. To my breathing, maybe, to instructions, to my own common sense.

The next morning, I stood in front of my class with my sea turtle poster shaking in my hands and forgot every word I’d ever known. My teacher smiled in an encouraging adult way and told me to take my time. The class stared. I remember seeing their faces change. I told myself later that it was just nerves, obviously. But in that moment their eyes looked too large and too wet, and their mouths hung open, waiting expectantly.

I stood there until my teacher gently took the poster from me and said, “Why don’t we clap for her research?” Everyone clapped. I cried in the bathroom until recess.

It didn’t get better as I got older. In high school, I once repeated the same sentence three times during a history presentation and knocked my group’s note cards off the podium when someone tried to help me. People laughed, probably not in a cruel way, but laughter doesn’t need to be cruel to stay with you.

In college, I took one of those required communications classes where the professor insisted that public speaking was a skill like any other, which is something only people who enjoy public speaking say. The final was a five-minute persuasive speech. I chose recycling because I thought absolutely nobody could be mad at recycling.

Halfway through, I lost my place and clicked to the next slide by accident. Then the next. Then the next. Clicking my little remote became the only thing my hand knew how to do. A bar graph. A landfill photo. A concluding slide that said THANK YOU while I was still somewhere near my introduction. The class watched me advance through my own humiliation in silence. Their eyes widened. Their mouths loosened. The room felt very bright and very far away.

Afterward, a girl I barely knew found me outside and said, “Hey, don’t worry. That was unforgettable.” I know she meant it kindly. Unforgettable isn’t always a compliment.

Anyway, I survived school by arranging my life around not presenting. I picked classes with final papers instead of final talks. I volunteered for behind-the-scenes roles in group projects. I became excellent at making slides for other people. Slides that said, I’m definitely a thoughtful and organized person, but please don’t ask me to stand beside them.

For a while, this worked. But then I got my first real job.

I mean like real-real. Badge access. Health insurance. A desk that adjusted up and down. A Slack workspace with too many channels. A manager who said “circle back” unironically. I’d spent months applying to jobs that either ghosted me or sent rejection emails, so when I got the offer, I cried at my kitchen table with my laptop open and a microwaved TV meal cooling beside me.

The company was a small but growing software startup. I was hired as a junior product analyst, which sounded much more sophisticated than what I actually did, which was mostly stare at dashboards, make spreadsheets, and write summaries about why users clicked one button instead of another. I liked it. I liked turning messy behavior into patterns. I liked having numbers to hide behind.

My manager, Elise, was kind in a way that made it very hard to refuse her. She had one of those calm voices that made every request sound reasonable until you realized you had agreed to something terrible. On my second day, she told me that every other Friday we did team updates. Nothing formal, she said. Just five minutes on what I was working on.

“It’s really low pressure,” she said.

That was when I knew it would ruin me.

The team was twelve people, which is too many people to speak in front of and not enough people to disappear among. There was Elise, my manager. Two engineers named Chris and Christopher, which felt unnecessary. A designer named Veronica who wore tiny gold earrings and always looked like she had slept well. A data scientist named Morgan who had never once used an exclamation point in Slack. A customer success lead named Jen who said “love that” to everything. A few others whose names I was still learning. And Megan.

Megan sat two desks away from me and seemed to survive entirely on iced water, rice crackers, and moral fortitude. She was vegan, gluten-free, soy-free, and possibly joy-free, though that last one might be unfair because she had once laughed at a dog video in the break room. I liked her, or at least I wanted to. She had a way of looking directly at people when they spoke that felt either respectful or prosecutorial, depending on your blood sugar.

My first team update was scheduled for my third Friday, and I started worrying about it the moment Elise put it on my calendar. At first, I tried to convince myself I was being ridiculous. It was five minutes. I wasn’t defending a dissertation. I wasn’t giving a TED Talk. I wasn’t standing before a jury of my enemies while they decided whether I lived or died. I was explaining user onboarding metrics to twelve people in a conference room named after a tree. Still, my body didn’t care that the room was called Cedar.

A week before the presentation, I stopped sleeping normally. At first, the dreams were ordinary anxiety dreams: no slides, wrong slides, a laptop that kept asking me to install updates while everyone waited. Then they started to change. I dreamed I was back in fourth grade with my sea turtle poster, except all the children were wearing my coworkers’ lanyards, and when I tried to speak, their faces went loose with attention. Their eyes looked too wet. Their mouths hung open. They leaned forward a little every time I stopped talking, waiting for the next word like they could pull it out of me if they stared hard enough.

In the last dream, I looked at my slides and every bullet point said KEEP GOING.

I told Elise about the public speaking fear the following Monday, which was in part strategic because I thought maybe she would tell me I could skip the first one while I was still getting settled.

Instead, she thanked me for telling her and said it was really common. In other words, she wasn’t going to let me skip.

“We’re a very supportive team,” she continued. “No one is there to judge you.”

I nodded, because it seemed rude to say, actually, the fact that everyone keeps saying that makes me feel worse.

Jen overheard us from the kitchenette and said, “Honestly, just bring donuts and everyone will love you.”

“Donuts?” I asked.

“Oh, absolutely. Nobody asks hard questions when they’re eating.” She winked.

The idea stayed with me. I thought about it while building my slides. I thought about it while making little speaker notes I knew I wouldn’t be able to read because my vision would go blurry. I thought about it on Wednesday night when I woke from a dream where Christopher’s jaw clicked open while he applauded without blinking.

Bring donuts and everyone will love you. Nobody asks hard questions when they’re eating.

By Thursday, I’d barely eaten anything all week. My stomach had become a decorative organ. I bought coffee in the morning and carried it around until it went cold. I heated soup for dinner and stood in front of the microwave until it beeped, then put the bowl in the fridge untouched.

That night, I called my grandmother. She’s old now. Her voice on the phone sounded smaller than it used to, but she still had the habit of answering like she’d been expecting you to call and was disappointed it had taken you so long.

“Mija,” she said. “What’s wrong?”

I said nothing, which of course meant something, and she waited me out because she’s known me my entire life and would label my evasiveness amateur work.

“I have to give a presentation tomorrow,” I finally said.

“Oh,” she said. “Your nerves.”

“My nerves,” I said, and almost started crying because she said it like it was a thing we both knew.

“Do you still have the little bottle?” she asked.

I was standing in my kitchen, looking at a sink full of dishes I’d been ignoring for three days. “What little bottle?”

“The bottle for nerves. I gave it to you when you moved.”

I’d forgotten about that. It had become part of the clutter of my life, probably tucked somewhere between old lipsticks and expired cough drops and the emergency safety pins I never used. When I moved into my apartment, my grandmother had sent me home with a grocery bag full of things she thought I needed: tortillas wrapped in foil, a jar of salsa, a roll of paper towels, two candles, and a little plastic container with a white cap.

I found it in my purse five minutes after we hung up, buried beneath receipts, a dead pen, a loose cough drop, and three lip balms.

It was smaller than I remembered. Smooth, hard plastic, no label. Inside was the same dark liquid she used to keep in the glass bottle above the stove, thick enough to move slowly when I tilted it under the kitchen light. It was my lucky charm, basically. Some people carry crystals. Some people wear the same socks on test days. I carry my grandmother’s nerves recipe in a tiny container with no label.

I put it beside my laptop while I finished my slides. I thought about drinking some, but I didn’t. My stomach was too tight for even water, and besides, just knowing it was there helped. That’s the thing about charms. You don’t always need to use them. Sometimes you only need to know they’re by your side.

The next morning, I got to work early enough that the lights in our part of the office were still motion-activated. They clicked on row by row as I walked past the desks, carrying donuts, coffee pods, and the kind of fragile optimism you can only have before 8 a.m.

The conference room was empty. I set the donuts on the table and tried to make them look casual, which is hard to do with grocery store donuts in a plastic clamshell. I made coffee in the kitchenette and poured it into the big insulated carafe we used for meetings. My hands were shaking, so some of it splashed onto the counter.

The little container was in my purse. I kept touching the side pocket to make sure.

People started arriving around 8:55.

Jen came in first and said, “Oh my god, you brought donuts? Iconic.”

That made me feel good.

Chris took a maple bar. Christopher took two glazed donuts and said, “Don’t tell my wife,” even though I’d never met his wife and had no plans to speak with her. Veronica cut a chocolate donut in half and then came back for the other half thirty seconds later. Respect.

Morgan took coffee and no donut. Elise took coffee and said, “This is very sweet, but you didn’t have to.”

“I wanted to,” I said. My voice sounded almost normal.

Megan came in last, carrying her glass water bottle and a container of rice crackers. She looked at the donuts, then at the coffee.

“Are those from the grocery store?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Ah.” Just ah.

“There’s coffee too,” I offered.

“I’m good,” she said, lifting her water bottle.

The meeting started with Elise doing announcements. Someone’s project timeline had shifted. Someone else was out next week. There was a reminder about filling out some HR form I’d already forgotten existed. While Elise spoke, people ate. Normal chewing sounds. Napkins crinkling. Coffee cups being set down. Jen licking sugar from her thumb. Christopher wiping glaze from his keyboard and pretending nobody saw.

I couldn’t eat anything. My mouth was too dry. I’d taken a coffee earlier and set it beside my laptop, untouched.

Then Elise said, “Okay, let’s have our newest team member kick us off. No pressure. Just walk us through what you found.”

No pressure. Right.

I stood.

The room tilted slightly, then corrected itself. My slides appeared on the screen. The title slide looked too bright. My name sat beneath the project title in clean black text.

“Hi,” I said.

My voice cracked, and I felt my face get hot.

Everyone looked at me.

For a second, I thought I might actually pass out. There was a chart on the next slide. A simple chart. I knew this chart. I’d made this chart. I’d spent three hours choosing between two shades of blue for this chart. And yet when it appeared on the screen, it became completely meaningless. Lines. Dots. Numbers.

“So, um,” I said. My throat closed.

Then I noticed Jen.

She was smiling at me, which should’ve helped, except her smile didn’t look right. Her lips were parted. Too parted. Her lower lip glistened, and a thin line of saliva had gathered at the corner of her mouth.

I looked away too quickly and found Chris.

His eyes were open very wide. Not impossibly wide. Just wide enough that I thought, huh, he looks really focused. Weirdly, that helped.

I said the first sentence from my notes. Then the second.

No one interrupted.

I explained that users were dropping off during the second step of onboarding. I showed the funnel. I pointed out that people who completed the profile prompt were significantly more likely to return within seven days.

Everyone watched. Their faces were so still.

I kept going.

By the third slide, my voice had stopped shaking. By the fourth, I realized that nobody was checking Slack. Nobody was glancing at their phones. Nobody was doing that fake listening nod people do while waiting for their turn to talk. They were all looking directly at me. Completely locked in.

A warm, impossible feeling moved through my chest. This was what presenters felt, I realized. This was why people did this on purpose. The room was mine. Their attention was mine. Every eye. Every open mouth. Every breath.

I clicked to the next slide.

Morgan’s mouth had fallen open enough to show his lower teeth. His head had tipped to one side while I was talking, almost politely, like he was trying very hard to understand me. A string of drool stretched from his lip to his quarter-zip, and his eyes had begun to sag at the bottom, the skin beneath them pulling downward in two shining arcs.

I stopped talking.

The room didn’t move.

“Morgan?” Megan said.

Her voice came from the far end of the table. I looked over and saw her sitting very straight, both hands around her water bottle.

Morgan didn’t answer. He kept looking at me with his head tilted, mouth open, eyes wet and too low in his face.

“Morgan,” she said again.

Elise turned toward Megan slowly. Too slowly. Her own head tilted as she moved. Her eyes had changed too. The lower lids dragged down her face in pale, wet folds, and her mouth hung open in a long dark oval. It was too deep. That was what my brain noticed first, before the coffee spilled down her blouse or the strand of saliva hanging from her lower lip. There was too much darkness inside her mouth, more than a person should be able to hold.

Megan stood up so fast her chair rolled backward and hit the wall.

“What the fuck?” she whispered.

I hated her for interrupting.

That was my first clear thought. I’d finally found my rhythm. I’d finally reached slide five without wanting to crawl under the table and become carpet. Everyone was listening. Everyone except Megan.

“Megan,” I said, trying to keep my voice professional. “Can I just finish this section?”

She stared at me.

Behind her, Christopher’s jaw clicked. His mouth lengthened, the corners pulling down as if something inside his face had hooked them and was drawing them slowly toward his collarbones. His lips stretched thin around the opening. His tongue shifted forward, swollen and pale, then slipped back into the dark. His head tilted to match Morgan’s. Then Jen’s did too. Then Chris’. One by one, all around the table, their heads cocked to the same side.

They were still in their office chairs. They still had badges clipped to their shirts and crumbs on their napkins and laptops open in front of them. Jen still had powdered sugar on her thumb. Elise still had one hand resting beside her coffee cup. Everything about them was normal except their faces, which had started to look unfinished, like attention was melting them from the inside.

Their eyes sagged lower. Their mouths opened longer. The dark inside those mouths seemed to deepen as I watched, and for one awful second I had the thought that if I stood close enough, I might hear something moving around down there.

Jen nodded.

Once.

Then again.

Then again.

Her head kept bobbing gently, obediently, still tilted at that same unnatural angle, as if she were agreeing with every word I hadn’t yet said. Drool threaded onto the conference table. Someone’s coffee cup tipped over and rolled in a slow half circle before stopping against a laptop, and no one reached for it.

They watched me like starving things.

I should’ve been terrified, I should’ve screamed, and I should’ve run with Megan, who was now backing toward the door, making a thin gagging sound behind her hand. Instead, I felt calm. Relieved, even. Because the thing I’d always feared about audiences, I realized, was never that they might become monstrous. It was that they might stay completely, unbearably human, with all their little human habits of judging and interrupting and pitying you, of laughing when they don’t mean to, of remembering the worst thing you’ve ever done in front of them, of raising their hands and asking questions you can’t answer.

Whatever sat around that conference table now was better than human.

They wanted nothing from me except to continue.

So I did.

I turned back to my slides and said, “As I was saying, the biggest drop-off happens here.”

Megan made it to the door and fumbled with the handle. I heard her breathing hard. I heard her whispering no, no, no.

No one looked at her.

I finished all nine slides. I even took questions. Well, sort of. At the end, Elise raised one hand halfway off the table. Her fingers hung limp from the wrist.

“Yes?” I said.

Her mouth worked soundlessly for a moment. The long dark opening folded and stretched around a shape it could barely remember how to make.

“Good,” she said.

It came out thick and slow, like the word had been pulled up from very far down.

Then Jen said, “Good.”

Chris said, “Good.”

Christopher tried to say it too, but his mouth had stretched too far by then, and the sound came out as a low, pleased breath. One by one, they all tried. Veronica’s sounded almost normal. Morgan’s was mostly air.

Then their heads turned toward me together. A slow, synchronized movement around the table, all those tilted faces settling back on me, eyes hanging wet and low, mouths open and dark, waiting to be told what to think next.

Megan threw up into the trash can by the door.

I frowned because, honestly, dramatic much?

After that, things moved quickly. Megan ran out. I heard her yelling for someone from HR, then security, then anyone. People came. There was confusion. Someone pulled the fire alarm, though there was no fire. Paramedics arrived. Elise and the others were led out or carried out or followed instructions in that loose, obedient way. One of the paramedics kept asking Jen if she could hear him, if she could look at him, if she knew where she was. Jen kept looking at me instead.

I stood in the conference room with my laptop still open, the final slide glowing behind me.

THANK YOU.

Megan pointed at me from the hallway and said, “She did something.”

I said, “I brought donuts.”

They sent everyone home for the day. Nobody knew what had happened. Food poisoning, carbon monoxide, some kind of mass allergic reaction; there was a lot of maybe. The coffee was tested. The donuts were tested. The HVAC was tested. I was asked if I had noticed anything strange.

I said everyone seemed very attentive.

Megan didn’t come back the next week. Or the week after that.

There were rumors. She’d quit. She was on medical leave. She was considering legal action. She’d been traumatized by the incident, which people said in sympathetic voices for about three days before deciding she had always been a little intense.

The others came back gradually. They were mostly fine. Elise’s left eye still sits lower than the right now, and sometimes when she’s tired, her mouth hangs open for a second before she remembers to close it. Jen drools when she concentrates, but only a little. Morgan doesn’t speak much in meetings anymore. Chris and Christopher both nod along to everything I say, which is confusing for other people because they used to disagree constantly.

No one has been able to explain it.

My second team update was two weeks later. Elise asked if I wanted to skip it, given everything that had happened. I said no. I said I thought it would be good to get back to normal.

That Friday, I brought bagels. I made sure there were gluten-free ones this time, just in case Megan came back. She didn’t, which was probably for the best, because the team seemed tense before I started. I talked for seven minutes instead of five. No one minded. No one interrupted. Everyone watched. Their eyes softened and stretched. Their mouths opened. A few people made that low breathing sound I remembered from my dreams, but it didn’t bother me anymore. If anything, it helped.

I’m still afraid of public speaking. Every other Friday, I still wake up with my stomach twisted into a small, useless knot. I still rehearse in the shower. I still change my outfit twice. I still worry my slides are dumb, my voice is annoying, my coworkers secretly hate me, and my manager regrets hiring me.

But then I get to the office early. I set out the coffee, or the bagels, or the little muffins from the bakery near my apartment. I make sure there are options for everyone, because that’s what a considerate coworker does. And by the time I stand at the front of the conference room, they’re already waiting, eyes wet, mouths open, completely unforgettable.

Another presentation in the books.

After the last one, I went to the bathroom and checked my reflection under the fluorescent lights. My lipstick had held up pretty well, all things considered. My hands were still shaking, but not as badly as they used to. I was getting better! That was the important thing. People always say exposure therapy works eventually, and maybe they’re right.

I reached into my purse for my keys and felt the little container at the bottom.

My grandmother’s nerves recipe.

I took it out and held it in my palm for a second. Tiny white cap. No label. There was still a little left inside, dark and slow-moving when I tilted it toward the light.

Only a little, my grandmother used to say. It helps people listen. I put the container back in my purse, washed my hands, and went out to clean up the conference room.

Next time, I think I’ll bring muffins.

I knew that before I made the post. I knew that while I was typing “platonic only please,” and I definitely knew that when I added a selfie, which wasn’t my smartest choice, but I’d just gotten a cute haircut and I'd finally gotten my eyeliner to match on both eyes(!!).

I was bored and restless and lonely and I was tired of bothering the same three friends with the same three complaints. I said I was looking for platonic friendships because the last person I met hurt me more than I wanted to admit.

The post was on r/MakeNewFriendsHere. I said I was 28F, looking for friends between 25 and 30. Within an hour, I had more than a hundred DMs.

Most were from men.

Some were normal for a few messages before becoming really weird. Some were lonely in a way that made me feel guilty for not answering. Some weren’t trying to be normal at all. They asked if I was single, where I lived, what I slept in, and what platonic meant, as if they could talk me out of my own request.

Two women messaged me. One ghosted after asking what shows I liked, and the other invited me to a Discord server with too many channels and a long list of rules, so I wished her good luck and closed the app.

Then he messaged me. His first message was:

where are your features from?

I almost clicked, “Ignore”.

I’ve gotten that question in one form or another my entire life. Where are you from? Where are you really from? Are you Native? Are you Spanish? Are you mixed? Have you done a DNA test? You look like my cousin. You look like a painting I once saw. You look exotic. People always think they’re being original when they ask, but they never really are.

Then he sent another message.

I’m sorry. That was badly asked. Your face reminds me of icons from my grandmother’s house. 

I stared at that for a long time.

It made me uncomfortable, which was probably why I answered.

My family history has always been a room where everyone talks over each other. Mexican, yes. Indigenous, probably. Spanish, maybe? Mestizo, likely. A great-grandmother nobody liked to describe. A grandfather who changed the subject. No one agrees on anything, and everyone acts like they know more than they’re saying.

So I asked him what he meant.

His name’s Andreas, but he asked me to call him Ari. He’s Greek by origin, born in Thessaloniki, raised partly in Finland, and living in a city whose name I couldn’t pronounce without feeling like my mouth was full of snow. He’s twenty-one, which was under the age range I’d put in the post.

He told me that immediately. I should’ve stopped there, but he apologized so plainly that it made me feel like I was still in control of the conversation.

I know I’m too young for your post, he wrote. I only wanted to ask the question. You don’t have to answer anything else.

That was the second reason I answered.

He didn’t try to be charming. He was almost a bit formal. He asked questions and waited for the answers. He didn’t fill the silence when I took too long. He didn’t send shirtless pics or late-night messages pretending to be casual. When he finally sent a picture of himself, he was standing far from the mirror with both hands visible, as if proving he had nothing to hide.

He looked kind.

He also looked tired. His face was narrow, his hair was dark and curly, and his eyes seemed older than the rest of him. In the second picture he sent me, snow was pressed against the window behind him, and a little blue charm hung over the doorway.

I asked what it was.

“For the evil eye,” he said.

“Do you believe in that?”

He paused before answering. “My mother does.”

That’s how he talked about anything strange. He never said he particularly believed something himself. He always gave the belief to somebody else. My mother says. My grandmother used to tell us. “People know better than to…” Etc. Etc. 

I thought it was interesting and probably cultural. 

At first, we talked about ancestry. Mine, because he’d asked. His, because I asked back. He told me about Greece and Finland in alternating pieces, as if neither place had fully claimed him yet. He sent pictures of food his mother made and dishes he tried to recreate, albeit terribly. He sent snow from his window. He sent voice notes while walking home, his breath catching in the cold.

I started waiting for the voice notes. But slowly, I started needing them.

There’s no dignified way to describe becoming attached to someone through a screen. You start by replying when you have time. Then you start making time. Then you realize your day has quietly rearranged itself around a person who isn’t physically in it. You learn the sound of his kettle, his radiator, the way his voice changes when he’s lying in bed and trying not to fall asleep before you finish an anecdote.

Ari learned me quickly.

He noticed when I was pretending to be fine. He remembered names I mentioned once. He asked about the person I’d lost before him, the one from Reddit, the one I told him had broken my heart.

His name was Owen.

I told him we’d met the same way, through a friendship post. I said we’d talked for months. We went on two dates and then he disappeared. He deleted his account, stopped answering, and vanished so completely that I started to wonder if I had invented the whole thing.

Ari was quiet after I told him.

Then he said, “Did he say goodbye?”

“He didn't.”

He looked down for a second. “I’m sorry,” he said.

I smiled at the screen because I thought he meant the usual thing people mean when they say that. “It’s fine,” I said. “People leave.”

Ari nodded, but his face had gone strange. 

That was Ari. He could be sweet for an hour, and then one sentence would make the room around me feel colder. He could talk about lemon soup or Finnish licorice or the neighbor upstairs who vacuumed every Sunday like she was trying to punish the floor. Then I’d say something ordinary, and his eyes would move past the camera toward the blue charm above his door.

Once, during a video call, he asked me to turn my camera away from the mirror behind me.

“Why?”

“I don’t like seeing you twice.”

I teased him for that and he smiled.

Another time, I woke up to a message he’d sent at four in the morning his time.

Marie, do you ever wake up hungry?

I typed back: Every single day??? I’m Mexican. 

He didn’t answer for six hours. And when he finally did, he wrote: Forget I asked. I was half asleep.

By month three, our conversations weren’t platonic anymore.

By month four, I was making jokes about being a crib-robber. I’m twenty-eight, which isn’t actually old (please don’t tell me otherwise), but twenty-one-year-olds have a way of making you feel like you should be buying retinol in bulk and discussing retirement.

He hated the jokes. “You’re not that old?” he said, his voice rising at the word “that.” He smiled then, but his smile never lasted as long as it should’ve.

By month six, I was going to Finland.

Before anyone says it, I did the safety things, OK. I booked my own hotel. I sent my friend his full name, address, phone number, social media, and every screenshot I had. She made a folder called IF MARIE DIES IN FINLAND. Ha.

We were supposed to meet in public. Dinner first. No going straight to his apartment. No airport pickup. 

I wanted to see the auroras with him. That was the image that did it. I wanted to stand somewhere freezing and dark while the sky moved purple and green above us, with Ari beside me, real and warm and no longer flattened into pixels. He promised to take me to the frozen harbor, the little Greek grocery where the owner overfed him, the café with korvapuusti, Finnish cinnamon-cardamom buns shaped like little folded ears. They sounded delicious. Eventually, if everything felt normal, his apartment, where he said he’d make avgolemono if I swore not to judge his kitchen.

I landed on a Friday.

He was waiting at the airport even though we’d agreed he wouldn’t be. I was annoyed for maybe three seconds, and then I saw the flowers and his nervous face. He stood near the arrivals gate, shifting the little paper-wrapped bouquet from one hand to the other like he didn’t know what to do with it anymore. He looked exactly like himself and not like himself at all. He was taller than I expected, thinner than I expected, and more beautiful in the way real people are beautiful when you can see how badly they’ve been sleeping.

“You came,” he said.

“You keep saying that like I broke into the country.”

For a moment he smiled like the man I knew. Then he looked at the blank space between my jaw and shoulder. I turned, but there was no one there.

The first day was almost perfect. We walked through snow. We drank coffee too hot to taste. He bought me a pastry and laughed when powdered sugar got on my coat. He showed me the harbor and the church his mother liked and the grocery where a man behind the counter said something in Greek that made Ari flush to his ears. He held my hand. 

At dinner, he ordered too much food and ate almost none of it.

“You okay?” I asked.

He looked at my mouth before answering. “Yes.”

“That wasn’t convincing.”

“I’m nervous.”

“Because I’m older, wiser, and more powerful?” I joked.

“No.” His fork tapped once against the plate. “Because you’re really here,” he said.

“Well, that was the plan.”

“I know.”

“You’re acting like I showed up unannounced.”

He looked at me then, quick and almost guilty. “I know,” he said again.

I remembered him saying one day. I remembered him saying if you were here. I remembered him sending apartment photos and aurora forecasts and telling me which month would be best.

“I thought you wanted me here,” I said.

He opened his mouth like he was going to answer, then looked down at his plate instead.

After dinner, he walked me back to my hotel.

The snow had gotten softer by then. Bigger flakes, slower falling. I kept brushing my shoulder against his because I wanted him to stop being so strange. I wanted him to turn back into the man from my phone.

At the hotel entrance, he stopped.

“You should go inside,” he said.

“You’re sending me to bed? Alone?” I responded. I know, I know. No hanging out in private places with the internet man you flew across an ocean to meet. But by then I was starting to fall in love with him, which made every bad idea feel a little less like a bad idea. 

“You must be tired.”

“I crossed an ocean. Of course I’m a little tired.”

“Please.”

He was standing so close, and the snow had melted into his hair, making the curls darker around his forehead. His cheeks were red from the cold. He had this nervous little crease between his eyebrows, the same one I’d watched appear on video calls whenever he was trying to translate a thought before saying it out loud. He looked like the person I’d been falling asleep with in my ear for months. Real and tired and warm under his coat.

I wanted to kiss the worry off his face. So I did.

A small kiss. His mouth was cold from the air, but softer than I expected, and his fingers tightened around the paper-wrapped flowers in my hand.

For half a second, he kissed me back.

Then he pulled away hard enough to stumble.

“Sorry,” he said.

“For what?”

He touched his mouth, like he was checking for something. “My mother said not to bring you home tonight,” he said.

I stared at him.

“Ari, that’s a weird thing to say after kissing someone.”

“It’s not about that.”

“Then what is it about?”

He looked at the hotel doors behind me, then at the flowers in my hand. The paper had gone soft where the snow melted into it.

“She worries,” he said finally.

“About me?”

“About me,” he said.

I laughed because I was embarrassed.  “I’m not dangerous,” I said.

He looked at me for a second too long. “I know,” he said shortly.

The next day, he apologized. He said he’d slept badly. He said his mother was super intense. He said she’d called me something in Greek and that he didn’t want to translate.

“Translate it,” I said.

“No.”

“Does it mean ugly?”

He looked at me for a long moment. “It means she should mind her business,” he said.

That night, I went to his apartment.

His building was old, with yellow light in the stairwell and boots lined up outside doors. His apartment smelled like radiator heat, coffee, and him. The blue cabinets were real. The ugly lamp was real. The sweater he always wore during video calls hung over the back of a chair. I remember feeling almost dizzy with tenderness. Six months of proof had become real. He made tea.

I stood in his kitchen wearing wool socks because he’d asked me to take off my shoes. He was moving around too much, touching things and then not using them. The kettle. A mug. A spoon. The box of tea. He kept starting little tasks and abandoning them halfway through, like his body had too much feeling in it and nowhere to direct it.

It really was cute. He was blushing all the way to his ears, and his curls were still damp from the snow, and every time I looked at him directly, he looked down like I had caught him doing something embarrassing.

“You know, you don’t have to make tea if you don’t want tea,” I said.

“I want to make you tea.”

“You’re just standing there holding a spoon.”

He looked at the spoon in his hand like he had no idea how it got there. Then he laughed, and I felt ridiculous for being worried.

He made awful tea. Somehow. I don’t even know how you make tea badly, but he managed it. He put too much water in one mug and not enough in the other, forgot whether I wanted sugar, apologized twice, then almost burned his fingers picking up the cup. I told him he was giving me confidence in my own domestic skills, which are relatively low.

He smiled at that, but the smile faded quickly.

“You’re okay?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“You don’t seem okay.”

“I’m just nervous.”

“Ari, I'm also nervous.”

He nodded, but he looked past me toward the hallway.

I followed his eyes. Nothing was there except his coat hanging on a hook and the little blue eye charm above the door. The same one from his pictures.

“Is your mom going to burst in and interrogate me?” I asked.

“No.”

“Good, because I only know how to say good morning in Greek and I don’t think that will help my case.”

That got a real smile out of him.

Then I stepped closer, and he went still.

I think he was trying to be careful? I think he was one of those guys who wanted so badly not to make you uncomfortable that they accidentally made everything more awkward. It made me like him more. 

“You know, you can touch me,” I said.

His eyes moved to my lips and then away.

“I know.”

“But you don’t have to.”

“I know that too.”

I was tired, and far from home, and very, very in love with the version of him I had carried across the ocean. So I did what I had already done a hundred times before, in smaller ways, through a screen.

I kissed him first, and when I did, he made a sound like relief. He was scared. I knew he was scared.

His hands came to my waist like he still wasn’t sure he was allowed to touch me, and then his fingers curled into my sweater. He was trembling, but I was too. Nerves. Wanting. The absurd, impossible fact of finally being in the same room after all that time.

I touched his cheek, and he closed his eyes. That’s what undid me.

He looked so young like that. His mouth was cold from the walk, soft when it opened under mine, and he kissed me carefully at first, like he was afraid of doing it wrong. Then he kissed me harder, and for a moment there was no Reddit, no flight, no warning signs, no little blue charm above the door. There was only his hand at my waist, my fingers in his hair, the radiator knocking in the wall, and the snow falling outside his kitchen window.

This was what I had come all that way for.

Then his breath caught, and my jaw slipped. I pulled back because I thought I’d hurt myself, and I was so embarrassed I could barely look at him. I thought, great, I flew to Finland to kiss this beautiful guy and somehow dislocated my own mouth. Then Ari looked at me, not at my eyes, but at my mouth, and whatever expression was on his face made the whole kitchen go still.

“Marie,” he said, and it came out small.

I tried to answer him, but my tongue was in the wrong place. My teeth didn’t meet. Ari stepped back, and I stepped forward. He said my name again. His eyes kept dropping to my mouth and then lifting back to my face, like he was trying really hard not to look. I wanted to tell him I was sorry and that I was scared too, but I couldn't. Instead, I put both hands on his face, gently.

His skin was warm under my palms. His mouth opened like he was going to say something, and my mouth opened wider. There was a wet click near my ear, and Ari made a sound I’d never heard from him before. Too surprised to be a scream.

I pressed his forehead against the roof of my mouth.

His hands hit my wrists, then my shoulders, then the side of my neck. He was trying to push himself out, but there was nowhere for him to push against because I’d already leaned over him. The back of his head slid past my teeth, and then the tea glass dropped and broke against the floor. His body kicked hard enough that one heel struck the cabinet. The blue cabinet. The one I’d seen behind him for six months while he made coffee, while he leaned against the counter during video calls. His fingers grabbed my sweater and twisted the fabric. His knees buckled, and I went down with him, still holding him like I was comforting him. Nurturing him.

His breath filled me, hot and panicked, and then, finally, his breath stopped. I could feel the shape of him fighting me: his jaw, his throat, the hard line of his shoulders. My own throat widened around him with a slow ache, and my ribs opened in small clicks I felt more than heard. Ari’s hands weakened against me. One of them slid down my arm and caught at my sleeve like he was still trying to hold on to the version of me that had arrived in his apartment with flowers in her hand.

There really wasn't any pain. There was only room. I stopped thinking in full thoughts. I remember the floor under my knees. I remember his sleeve bunched in my hand. I remember the sound his foot made against the cabinet when his leg kicked once and then stopped. 

When the last of him passed my teeth, I was kneeling on his kitchen floor in my wool socks, one hand against the cabinet, breathing through my nose. The radiator knocked in the wall. The snow kept falling outside the window. There was a strand of his curly hair stuck to my lip.

He tasted like lemon. And mostly, I felt full.

Then I remembered Owen. I didn’t remember everything, only pieces at first. His nervous laugh. His hand on my back. The way he’d looked at me on the second date, so hopeful it embarrassed both of us. I remembered crying when he was gone. I remembered telling people he’d broken my heart. 

I started crying now too, right there on Ari’s kitchen floor, with broken glass near my knee and lemon still in my mouth, because why do they all have to disappear?

Ari’s phone buzzed on the table.

The screen lit up with a message from his mother. It was in Greek, but I recognized one word immediately.

Λάμια.

Lamia.

I knew that word. I don’t know Greek, but I know what people call girls like me when they have old names for it. Lamia. Empousa. Xtabay. Mandurugo. Yakshi. Pontianak.

Different languages. Same warning. Different mothers telling their sons not to invite me in. 

The message stayed there until the screen went dark.

I opened my own phone after that.

My Reddit post was still up!! :)

There were new messages waiting. Men saying hi, hey, saw your selfie, I’m lonely too, platonic is fine, you have interesting eyes, where are you from, you look familiar, where are your features from?

I know I should delete it.

But the thing is, I keep getting my heart broken.

They always disappear before it works out.

Hi! So I was diagnosed with Bipolar 2 about five years ago, and during some of my flare-ups I've experienced visual and auditory hallucinations. I'm also really into horror and consume a lot of it, which unfortunately gives my brain plenty of material to work with when those episodes happen. It's terrifying while I'm going through it, but once I'm on the other side of it, I sometimes find myself taken aback by how creative our brains can be. Some of the visuals and sounds are things I don't think I could consciously come up with on my own, even though they clearly came from my own mind.

I love writing, and lately I've gotten into writing short horror stories. So far, a few of the stories I've written have been inspired by themes from my hallucinations, but framed as horror fiction. For example, one story I'm currently working on is loosely based on what I experienced during withdrawal symptoms after forgetting my medication while traveling. In the story, the narrator mentions missing their medication, and there's an implication that what they're experiencing could be a hallucination.

My question is whether portraying it this way could be considered offensive or harmful. I never specify a particular disorder or medication, and the character doesn't engage in any harmful behavior. At the same time, I don't want to unintentionally contribute to stigma or portray the experience in a way that feels disrespectful. I want to treat the subject with the respect it deserves while still using my own experiences as inspiration. What do y'all think?

The email came in that morning, which meant I read it while standing in my kitchen in one sock, waiting for my coffee machine to stop sounding like it was choking.

The subject line was:

IMPORTANT RESIDENT SAFETY NOTICE

That usually meant the elevator was broken again, or someone had left chicken bones in the laundry room sink, or the landlord had discovered a new way to blame us for the mold. But this one was different.

Dear Residents,

Until further notice, please do not use your door viewer/peephole after 9:00 PM. If someone knocks after this time, please call the front desk. Do not visually confirm through the peephole.

Thank you,
The Marwick Residences

I sent a screenshot to Natalie.

She replied:

girl what kind of Scooby Doo ass building do you live in

The Marwick is old in the way landlords call “historic” when, in reality, they just want to charge more. My hallway smells like dust, carpet cleaner, and something that might have been canned soup in 1987. The elevator makes a sound like it is remembering a traumatic event every time it reaches the fourth floor, if it ever makes it there.

So, honestly, the peephole thing barely made the top five.

I live alone in 6C. It’s my first apartment after college. One pan, two mugs, couch from Facebook Marketplace, mattress on an actual bed frame(!!!).

My front door faces a long beige hallway with five other units and a framed sailboat print that has been crooked since I moved in. Through the peephole, the hallway bends into a little fish-eye world: carpet, elevator, sailboat, the occasional neighbor holding takeout.

I use the peephole constantly. Everyone does, right? You hear a knock, you look. That is what the peephole is for?

At 9:42 that night, someone knocked.

Three taps.

Soft.

It didn’t sound like a delivery knock. Nor a friendly knock. Not even a maintenance knock.

Three carefully spaced-out taps.

I was on the couch eating cereal out of a measuring cup because my bowls were dirty. I paused my show and walked to the door with the spoon still in my hand.

Then I remembered the email.

For a second, I actually laughed. The idea of standing inside my own apartment and being afraid of a peephole felt really silly. Like being warned not to look into a mirror after midnight.

Another knock.

Three taps.

I said, “Who is it?”

No answer.

I leaned closer.

“Hello?”

Still nothing.

My eye was maybe two inches from the peephole when my phone buzzed.

Another email with the same subject line.

IMPORTANT RESIDENT SAFETY NOTICE

This one said:

Residents are reminded not to use their door viewers after 9:00 PM. If you have already looked tonight, remain inside your unit and do not answer the door.

I stared at it.

Then, from the other side of my door, someone whispered:

“Don’t worry, you haven’t looked yet.”

I backed up so fast I hit the little table by the door and knocked my keys to the floor.

I called the front desk. Voicemail. I called Natalie. No answer.

The knocking started again while the phone rang.

Three taps.

Pause.

Three taps.

Pause.

I called 911. I don’t know what happened. I might’ve hit the wrong thing. Maybe the building’s intercom app glitched. My hands were definitely shaking too much. But the call connected to the front desk.

A woman answered. “Good evening, thank you for calling The Marwick Residences.” Her voice sounded normal and bored.

“There’s someone outside my door,” I said.

“What unit?”

“6C.”

A pause.

Then she said, “Have you used your peephole tonight?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yep.”

The knocking stopped.

The woman exhaled.

“Then don’t start now,” she said.

“What’s going on?”

“Do you live alone?”

I always hated that question.

“Why?”

“Do you live alone?”

I didn’t answer.

There was paper shuffling on her end, like she was looking through a folder.

Then she said, “Please move away from your door.”

“Who’s out there?”

“Maintenance has been notified.”

“At night? It’s almost ten.”

“Please move away from your door.”

“What’s the maintenance code?”

Silence.

Every work order in our building had a code. They used it for everything. Leaky sink. Broken outlet. That one time a raccoon got into the trash room.

Maintenance always gave the code before entering.

The woman said, “Excuse me?”

“The work order code,” I said. “If maintenance is coming, what’s the code?”

Another pause. Then she hung up.

That was when Natalie called me back.

Before I could say anything, she said, “Are you home right now?”

“Yeah.”

“Can you lock your bedroom door?”

My stomach dropped.

“What? Why?”

“Is your bedroom door locked?”

“No. Why?”

“I need you to listen. And try not to freak out. I got pictures from your number.”

I looked at my phone. Our text thread was open. The last thing I had sent her was the screenshot of the email that morning.

“What pictures?”

“They look really old,” she said. “Like from earlier today. Or yesterday. I don’t know. They show you in your room.”

I turned toward my bedroom.

Its door was open.

The room was dark except for the streetlight bleeding through the blinds.

“From my room?” My voice rose at the last word.

“I know,” she said.

My phone buzzed.

A picture came through.

Me, standing beside my bed in an old T-shirt, folding laundry.

The angle was high.

I knew it immediately. It was from the vent. The picture was taken from the little square vent above my closet door. The one that rattled whenever the heat came on. The one I had complained about twice to management. In the picture, I was looking down at a skirt. I had no idea I was being watched.

The knock came again.

Three taps.

I almost threw the phone.

Natalie said, “Marie. Don’t open the door.”

“I’m definitely not going to open the door.”

“Don’t look through the peephole either.”

“I know.”

“No,” she said. “I mean don’t. I think that’s how they know.”

I looked at the door. The peephole was just a small dark dot.

Natalie said, “The pictures are old. But the texts you’re sending me are live.”

“What do you mean?”

Another image came through.

My bedroom again.

Me asleep. One arm under the pillow. Blanket kicked halfway off because my apartment is always too hot.

Taken from the vent.

Below the photo was a message I hadn’t typed.

she’s home

I stopped breathing.

Outside my door, a man said, “Maintenance.”

His voice was calm, tired, and slightly irritated.

“Ma’am,” he said. “We need to come in.”

I said nothing.

He knocked again.

Three taps.

“Ma’am, I need you to look through the peephole and confirm it’s me.”

Natalie whispered, “Please don’t open it.”

I pressed the phone to my ear so hard it hurt.

The man outside sighed.

“Marie,” he said, “you live alone. You need to let someone help you.”

I went cold.

Marie isn’t on my lease. It isn’t on my mailbox. It isn’t the name I use for deliveries, or bills, or maintenance requests.

It isn’t even close to my real name.

It’s a nickname from college. Three people call me that, and all three of them know better than to say it through a locked door at night.

“Marie,” he repeated. “Open the door.”

I backed away from the door.

That was when I understood the warning.

It wasn’t because the peephole was specifically dangerous. It was because if you looked through it, whoever was outside could see the light change. Or the shadow of your eye. Or whatever tiny movement told them someone was standing on the other side. They weren’t warning us not to open the door. They were warning us not to prove we were home.

The man outside said, “We can hear you.”

I covered my mouth with my hand.

Another man spoke from farther down the hall.

“Is she looking?”

The first man said, “Not yet.”

My phone buzzed again. Another picture.

This one was not of my bedroom, it was my hallway, my door, the man outside it.

He had a toolbox in one hand.

Behind him stood two other men. One wore a dark hoodie. One had a clipboard. The clipboard bothered me the most. I don’t know why. Maybe because it made the whole thing look official.

I whispered, “Natalie, could you call the police?”

“I did.”

“When?”

“Two minutes ago.”

“How far?”

“I don’t know.”

There was another knock.

Three taps.

Then the man said, “Don’t make this difficult.”

The doorknob turned slowly. Once to the left. Once to the right. Then it stopped.

I had locked it, with the deadbolt too. I’d never loved myself more than I did in that moment.

The man outside said, “Good girl.” Like he was pleased, then something metal slid into the lock.

I ran to the kitchen and grabbed a chair, wedging it under the knob even though I knew that mostly worked in movies. Then I dragged the little table over. Then my laundry basket. Then the broken floor lamp I kept meaning to throw away.

The man outside said, “Marie.”

I didn’t answer.

“I know you’re scared.”

I stayed quiet.

“That’s okay,” he said. “Women get scared.”

My skin went cold.

Then he said:

“You should’ve just looked when we knocked.”

The lock clicked. Not all the way. Just enough.

Natalie was crying now.

“Marie, get out the window.”

“I’m on the sixth floor.”

“Fire escape?”

“Other side of the building.”

“Bedroom window?”

“No.”

I looked toward my bedroom. The vent above the closet was dark. I had never noticed how much it looked like a mouth.

My phone buzzed again. Another picture. This one showed my bedroom from the vent. Empty bed. Open door.

And at the very bottom of the frame, just visible in the hallway mirror, the reflection of a man standing inside my apartment.

I turned around. No one. Nothing. Only the hallway. Only the bedroom door. Only the vent.

The man outside laughed softly.

Then he said, through the door:

“Check the closet.”

I am not checking the closet.

I am sitting with my back against the kitchen cabinets, typing this with one hand while holding a knife in the other. My hand is shaking so badly that I keep hitting the wrong letters.

The police are coming, I think?

Natalie is still on the phone, I think?

The men in the hallway have stopped knocking.

A few minutes ago, something small slid under my door.

A photograph.

Not digital this time, but printed. I haven’t touched it, but I can see it from here.

It’s a picture of me sitting exactly where I am sitting now. Back against the cabinets. Phone in one hand. Knife in the other. The angle is from above.

From the kitchen vent.

I picked it up. On the back, written in black marker, are six words.

“You locked him in with you.”

Part One | Part Two

I didn’t post the rest of this earlier.

I told myself it was because it had gotten late. And that was true in the technical way that some lies are true. It was late. 

But that wasn’t why I stopped. I stopped because the moment I typed what my sister had said, not her, something in my bathroom answered with the same little tune from that night.

Three notes.

A pause.

Three notes again.

It wasn’t loud. If it had been loud, I think I might have handled it better. 

I sat there with my hands over the keyboard and did not breathe for a few seconds. Then, like a coward or a sane person, or whatever thin difference remains between the two, I turned on everything in the room that could speak for me.

The TV. My laptop. A podcast on my phone.

Three different voices filled the studio. A woman on the TV laughed too brightly at something that wasn’t funny. Someone on the podcast uttered the word “consciousness.” My laptop autoplayed a car insurance ad. Under all of it, from the bathroom, the tune kept going.

So I stopped writing.

I’m finishing it now because stopping did not help. 

After my sister said, “Not her,” the lights came back on.

My mother ran to the phone. I thought she was calling an ambulance. What I remember is her screaming at the dispatcher to send police too. My father was shouting over her, demanding to know why the hell she wanted police.

“With sirens,” my mother kept saying. “Tell them with sirens.”

I watch a lot of true crime, and I had never heard anyone request sirens before. They were not something you asked for. But my mother begged for them.

“Do not come quiet,” she said. “Please. Please tell them not to come quiet.”

My sister was still on the couch. My parents had backed away from her. Her hair had fallen over her face, and every few seconds her shoulders jerked, quick and ugly, as if someone above her was testing the strings.

The house went still again.

The power was back. The fridge hummed. The TV glowed black. The candle on the coffee table threw its weak yellow light. But no one spoke. Even my father, who had never believed silence could improve a room, said nothing.

That was when my sister began to smile.

Small, at first.

Polite.

Patient.

The same smile I saw on my own reflection in the dark TV this week.

Then we heard the sirens. Far away at first. Thin and rising. A thread of sound pulled through the dark. My mother collapsed against the wall like her bones had been untied. My father started cursing under his breath. My little sister stopped crying in the middle of a sob.

My older sister took one deep breath.

Then another.

Her body loosened. Her head tipped forward. When she looked up again, she was herself, or close enough that all of us were willing to accept it. She blinked around at the living room, at my parents, at me, at my little sister, at the red and blue lights beginning to flicker through the curtains.

“What happened?” she whispered.

Nobody answered her.

Adults came into the house after that. Police first. Then paramedics. Everyone talked too loudly. My sister cried and said she didn’t remember. My mother told them she had been missing and had come home confused. My father said she was being dramatic. The paramedic asked if she had taken anything. My sister said no.

I stood in the hallway with my little sister pressed against my side, watching the living room fill with strangers and noise.

I remember feeling safe only when everyone was talking.

A few days later, my mother sent me away.

She said it was because things at home were too stressful and she wanted me to focus on school. That was the explanation she gave my teachers. That was the explanation she gave me when I cried and asked what I had done wrong. But I know better now.

She sent me to my cousin’s apartment because it was never quiet there.

Six people lived in a one-bedroom. Five before me, then six with me. My cousin, her husband, their two kids, my aunt, and my aunt’s boyfriend, who was always either watching soccer or asleep with one arm thrown over his face. I slept on a folded blanket between the couch and the front door.

There was no privacy. None. Someone was always cooking, coughing, arguing, laughing, flushing, opening drawers, stepping over me, apologizing for stepping over me, then stepping over me again ten minutes later. I hated it. I complained constantly in my head.

I had spent my whole life being quiet, but inside I was never quiet. I read constantly. Books were the place where I could talk without talking. The voice in my head could become anyone. Girls with swords. Orphans in strange houses. Detectives. Witches. Dead narrators telling you they didn’t know they were dead yet.

I brought a box of books with me to my cousin’s place.

The next day, they were gone.

My aunt said there was no space. She said old paper attracted roaches. She had thrown them away in the dumpster behind the laundromat. I think my mother told her to.

After my books disappeared, my mother called every night and asked what I was doing.

Not how I was doing.

What I was doing.

Watching TV, I’d say.

Good.

Helping with the kids.

Good.

Trying to sleep.

Put music on.

Sometimes I’d get angry and say, “I just want to read.”

And my mother would go quiet.

Then she’d say, “Not in your head.”

At the time, I thought she meant I shouldn’t isolate myself. I thought she was worried that reading would make me depressed or strange. Now I think she meant exactly what she said.

Not in your head.

Do you know how loud reading is when you are the kind of person who hears every sentence? Not out loud, obviously. I am not talking about moving your lips. I mean that private voice that reads for you, the one you probably do not notice unless I ask you to notice it right now.

The one saying these words as your eyes move across them.

Whose voice is that?

My mother filled our house with religious music after my sister came back. All the time. Hymns in the kitchen. Prayers in Spanish from YouTube. Rosaries on loop. A little plastic radio in the bathroom playing a station that cracked whenever the weather changed. My father complained until the complaint became useless, and then the music became another piece of furniture.

My older sister recovered. That's what people said.

She slept for almost a week. She saw doctors. She stopped going out for a while, then started again. Not as much as before, but enough to convince people she was okay. She kept friends around her. She moved into louder apartments. She dated men who played music in the shower and lived with roommates who slammed cabinets and had neighbors with babies and dogs and bad schedules.

She built her life out of noise.

And it left her alone.

That is why she knew what my recording meant. That is why she told me to delete it. That is why she didn’t answer when I asked what liked me.

She knew it had tried her first.

Or maybe not first. Maybe it tried my mother first. Maybe it tries everyone in a family until it finds the one who makes enough room.

My sister was too loud.

My mother was too stubborn.

I was the quiet one.

The peaceful one.

The available room.

After my first post, I called my little sister. I hadn’t planned to. She is the most normal one, or at least the best at looking like it. Married. Two kids. A house with a lemon tree. She is the kind of adult who owns extra batteries and remembers everyone’s birthday.

I didn’t want to drag her into this, but I needed to know if I had invented the living room.

When she answered, I didn’t explain everything. I just asked, “Do you remember when our sister came home that winter?”

She went quiet for so long I thought the call had dropped.

Then she said, “Are you hearing it now?”

Not, hearing what?

Not, what are you talking about?

Are you hearing it now?

I sat down on my kitchen floor.

She told me she remembered the sirens. She remembered Mom yelling for them. She remembered our sister bending wrong. She remembered the sound from her mouth. She remembered me standing in the hallway with my hand over my mouth.

Then she told me something I had forgotten.

After the paramedics took my sister outside, my little sister and I were alone in the hallway for maybe thirty seconds. Everyone else had moved toward the front door. The living room was empty. The religious music had not come back on. The power was working, but no one had turned on the TV.

For the first time all night, the house was quiet.

My little sister said she heard someone whisper my name from the bathroom.

She said I turned my head toward it.

She said I smiled.

Then Mom came back inside and slapped me.

I don’t remember that.

I remember a lot of things from that night. Too many things. The charm bracelet. The black marks on the floor. The candle wax melted unevenly down the side of my mother’s candle. My sister’s boots still on while paramedics lifted her onto the gurney.

I do not remember my mother slapping me.

My little sister swears it happened.

She said Mom hit me so hard my lip split. Then Mom grabbed both of us and dragged us outside, where the sirens were still going and neighbors were standing on their porches in robes and slippers. She kept us there until the police said they needed to turn the sirens off.

“Mom said you answered,” my little sister said.

“I didn’t.”

“I know.”

“But she said I did?”

My little sister breathed into the phone. In the background, one of her kids yelled something about a missing shoe. A show played too loudly. A dog barked. Her house was full of life, annoying, ordinary, and safe.

“She said your face did,” my little sister said.

I haven’t slept much since that call.

I’m still waiting for the psychiatrist. I keep repeating that. Nineteen days. Then eighteen. Then seventeen. I can make it to an appointment. People make it to appointments all the time. They write symptoms down. They sit in rooms. They get help.

But I need to tell you what happened tonight.

I was trying to test myself. I know everyone will tell me to stop doing that. But fear makes scientists out of idiots, and I have apparently become both.

I turned everything off.

No TV. No music. No fan. No podcast. No sink running. I unplugged the fridge for five minutes because its hum was bothering me, then immediately felt crazy and plugged it back in. I sat in the middle of my living room with my phone stopwatch open.

I wanted to see how long I could handle silence.

At first, it wasn’t silence. Not really. Buildings are never quiet. There was traffic outside, a neighbor’s footsteps upstairs, the tiny electrical tick of something in the wall. My own pulse in my ears. My breath.

At four minutes, my jaw started aching from how hard I was keeping my mouth shut.

At six minutes, I started hearing music.

Not outside me.

Inside.

One of my mother’s hymns from when I was fourteen. I didn’t remember the words, only the melody. I tried not to follow it. Then I realized trying not to follow it was still following it.

At nine minutes, I heard my older sister’s roar from the living room all those years ago, thin and broken and skipping.

At ten minutes, the TV screen brightened even though it was off. Just enough to reflect the room behind me.

I saw myself sitting on the floor.

Behind me, near the bathroom door, stood my older sister.

Not how she looks now. How she looked when she came home. Eighteen. Hair tangled. Black sweater. Face normal from far away and wrong up close.

In the reflection, she raised one finger to her lips.

Then she pointed at my mouth.

My phone alarm went off.

I had set it for eleven minutes, thinking I was being brave. The sound was horrible. Loud and bright and electronic. I grabbed it so fast I dropped it, and the alarm kept screaming from under the couch.

The reflection of my sister vanished.

The bathroom door was closed.

My phone kept shrieking until I got down on my stomach and reached for it. When I finally turned the alarm off, the silence rushed back so hard I gasped.

From under the bathroom door, something gasped too.

Exactly like me.

That’s when I understood the problem with noise.

Noise does not get rid of it.

Noise teaches it.

Every song. Every prayer. Every argument. Every TV left on in another room. Every word you say to yourself in the shower so you do not feel alone. It listens. It learns the shape of you. It learns your mother’s voice first, then your sister’s, then the little voice you use in your head when you read something like this and think, that couldn’t happen to me.

Maybe that is what hereditary means.

Or maybe I’m sick.

Maybe my sister was sick. Maybe my mother was sick. Maybe my little sister is lying because trauma makes people build matching stories. Maybe all of this is an illness moving through us exactly the way doctors say it can.

I hope so.

I really do.

Because if it is illness, then there is still a chance the voice in your head belongs to you.

I’m posting this now because the studio has been quiet for too long, and I don’t trust myself to wait until morning. My alarm stopped twenty-seven minutes ago. I turned on music after that, then a podcast, then both at once. I opened a video on my laptop too. Three voices talking over each other in this room, and still, underneath it all, I can hear someone humming from the bathroom.

It’s the same tune from the recording.

The children’s one.

The circular one.

Only now I know where I heard it first.

My sister hummed it when she came home from those three missing days. My mother hummed it beside my crib. I hummed it in my sleep.

And if you’ve gotten this far, if you’ve been reading quietly to yourself, you’ve heard it too.

Maybe not enough to recognize it yet. Maybe only as a rhythm. A little gap between sentences where your mind supplies the next sound.

Don’t test it. Don’t sit in the dark and see how long you can stay quiet. Don’t stand in your bathroom with the fan off. Don’t ask the empty room what it wants.

And please, for the love of God, if you hear yourself start to hum while reading this, stop.

Put on music. Call someone. Say anything else.

Don’t let the first sound you make be the tune, because then you’re giving it your voice.

I left something out of my first post.

That sounds like I did it on purpose. I didn’t. Not really.

I wrote the whole thing too fast. I was trying to explain my mom, and the bathroom, and what happened after I started hearing my own voice answer things. I mentioned my older sister because she was part of it. She remembered things I didn’t. She knew enough to tell me to delete the recording. She knew my mom used to hum beside my crib.

I just didn’t tell you why she knew.

My older sister had it too.

That’s how my mom would say it. She’d make it sound clean and medical because clean and medical is easier to live with. Family history. Early symptoms. Stress. Genetic predisposition. She’d say schizophrenia runs in families.

Maybe she’s right.

I’m trying not to dismiss that. I have a psychiatry appointment in nineteen days, and I’m going. I have a note in my phone with everything that’s happened. The normal stuff. The embarrassing stuff. The stuff that makes me sound like I shouldn’t be alone after sunset.

Especially that stuff.

But there’s another way to tell the story of my sister, and that version starts with the fact that she was never quiet.

Not even in her sleep, according to the cousin she used to share a bed with during family trips. My sister came into rooms like a radio turning on. She sang along to commercials. She talked to teachers before class started. She had friends from different friend groups who somehow all thought they were her closest friend. She was the kind of girl who could sit next to someone at a bus stop and leave with an invitation to a birthday party.

She made noise. That’s the easiest way to explain her.

The TV was always on if she was doing homework. Her hair dryer ran with the bathroom door open. She played music from her phone speaker even when she had headphones sitting right beside her. When my parents argued, she’d call a friend and talk louder. When my mom murmured in the bathroom, my sister would stand in the hallway and yell, “Amá, I need to pee.”

I used to hate her for it.

When you’re the quiet kid, loud people seem careless. Like they don’t understand how thin walls can be.

Now I think she understood better than any of us.

The incident happened when she was eighteen and I was fourteen. I remember because she had just graduated high school, and I had just started learning how to disappear into my own body.

It was December. The shortest day of the year.

I looked that up last night because I needed to know if I made that part up. I didn’t. Winter solstice. Least daylight of the year.

People talk like holidays are the lonely days. Christmas. New Year’s. Valentine’s Day. But at least those days announce themselves. The solstice doesn’t. It’s just a regular day that gets dark too early.

That year, my sister’s friends were all gone. Some were already away at college. Some were visiting family. One was at some church retreat. Her boyfriend was out of town too, although later she said he wasn’t really her boyfriend, which was exactly the kind of thing she loved clarifying back then.

For once, she had nowhere to go.

Nobody to be loud for.

She told my mom she was going to the store.

She didn’t come home that night.

At first, my parents fought about it instead of looking for her. My dad said she was eighteen and probably wanted attention. My mom said something was wrong. My dad said she was probably with a boy. My mom said she could feel it.

I sat on the couch with my little sister beside me, both of us pretending to watch TV while their voices climbed over each other in the kitchen.

My little sister was nine. She had one of those plastic charm bracelets that clicked whenever she moved. I remember that sound better than I remember what was on TV. Click. Click. Click. She kept turning the bracelet around and around her wrist, and the little plastic hearts and stars tapped against each other.

By morning, my mom called the police. They asked all the questions people ask when they already don’t plan on helping much. Was my sister eighteen? Yes. Did she have her car? Yes. Had she run away before? No. Was there proof she was in danger?

My mom said, “She is never quiet.”

I don’t know what they said after that. I only know my mom hung up and screamed into a towel so my dad wouldn’t hear how scared she was.

My sister was gone for three days.

Three days is not that long unless someone is missing. Then it’s endless. You start thinking about every awful thing you ever said to them. You start picturing their body in places bodies should not be. Ditches. Motel rooms. Trunks.

On the second night, my mom stopped sleeping. She sat in the living room with a Virgin Mary candle burning on the coffee table and religious music playing from a little speaker near the kitchen. Not loud. Just constant. A thin choir voice running under everything.

My dad told her to turn it off.

My mom said, “No.”

The same no she used in the bathroom.

On the third afternoon, my sister came home.

She parked crooked in the driveway, half on the grass. We heard the car door slam, and my mom ran outside so fast that the screen door hit the wall behind her. I got to the window in time to see my sister standing there in the winter light.

Same clothes she’d left in. Jeans. Boots. Thin black sweater she loved because she thought it made her look older. Her hair was down and tangled at the ends. From the window, her face looked normal.

That was the bad part.

My mom tried to hug her. My sister flinched so hard she almost fell.

“Don’t,” she said.

Her voice was gone. Not raspy. Not sick. Gone. Like she had spent the last three days screaming, or like she hadn’t spoken once.

She walked inside without looking at us and went straight to the living room.

My dad started immediately. Where were you. Do you know what you did to your mother. Are you stupid. Are you on something. Answer me.

My sister sat on the couch and stared at the carpet.

My mom told him to stop. He told her not to tell him what to do in his own house. Then they were fighting, and for one second, the house felt normal again.

I was relieved.

I hate that, but I was. My sister was home. My parents were yelling. The religious music was still playing. The TV was on. The refrigerator was humming. My little sister’s bracelet was going click, click, click beside me.

Noise everywhere.

My sister closed her eyes.

For one second, she looked peaceful.

Then the power went out.

The TV snapped black. The refrigerator cut off. The music died in the middle of a note.

The whole house went quiet so fast it felt like getting slapped.

My dad said, “Great.”

My sister opened her eyes.

I need you to understand something. I’ve replayed this memory so many times I don’t even trust it anymore. I know kids remember things wrong. I know fear edits. For years, I told myself what happened next was a seizure. A panic attack. Drugs. Something medical. Something with a clipboard and a name.

But last week, after everything started happening to me, I called my little sister and asked what she remembered about the day our older sister came home.

She said, “Do you mean when she did that thing with her body?”

So I’m going to tell you what I saw.

My sister’s head turned toward the hallway first.

Just her head.

Slowly.

Like something had called her from the dark part of the house.

Then her upper body followed, but not right. Her spine bent too far. Her chest faced one way and her hips faced another, and I remember the skin on her neck stretching pale and tight. I remember her mouth opening.

My dad said her name.

She answered with a sound I have only heard one other time since: from my own bathroom fan, two nights ago, when I turned it off too fast.

It wasn’t a scream.

Screams are human. Even ugly screams have a person inside them. This was a roar made out of thin metal and breath, like a needle dragging across a record while someone laughed underneath it. It cracked. It popped. It skipped.

It came out of my sister’s mouth, but it did not belong to her throat.

My little sister started crying. My mom shouted a prayer. My dad grabbed my older sister by the shoulders and tried to hold her down.

He couldn’t.

That’s another thing I spent years explaining away. Adrenaline. Panic. People get strong when they’re scared. Bodies do weird things. I know all that.

But my dad was bigger than her, and my mom was helping, and my sister lifted them both off balance like they were kids trying to hold back a rabid dog.

Her hands clawed at the couch. Her back arched. Her heels hit the floor hard enough to leave black marks. She kept making that sound, not all at once, but in bursts. Each one ended with this wet, smiling click in the back of her mouth.

Then the house made a noise.

A little tune.

Very faint.

From somewhere near the bathroom.

Three notes, then a pause.

Three notes again.

My sister stopped fighting.

Her eyes moved toward me.

I was standing in the hallway with my hand over my mouth. I don’t remember putting it there. I think some part of me already knew I couldn’t let any sound out.

My sister looked at me like she had never seen me before.

Then she said, in a voice so clear it cut through everything:

“Not her.”

That was the first time I realized my sister wasn’t the one it wanted.

My mom has schizophrenia.

That’s the first thing everyone tells me to remember, so I’m putting it first here too.

I’m not sure it explains anything. I’m not. But if I don’t start there, people will skip the rest and ask the same questions anyway.

Did your mom ever see a psychiatrist?

Yes.

Was she medicated?

Sometimes.

Did she talk to people who weren’t there?

All the time.

That was the part of her illness I grew up around: the talking.

No screaming. No ranting. Nothing dramatic enough to make neighbors suspicious. Just this low, private murmur that came from behind closed doors, usually the bathroom door, while the shower fan hummed and the pipes knocked in the walls.

When I was little, I thought she was on the phone.

That made sense to me. Adults were always on the phone. My mom would disappear into the bathroom and I’d hear her voice go soft and careful, the way people sound when they’re saying something they don’t want heard.

Sometimes she’d laugh.

Sometimes she’d pause for a long time.

Sometimes she’d say, “No.”

No fear, no anger. Just firm.

No.

Then one day I walked into the kitchen while she was in the bathroom and saw her phone sitting on the counter beside a pile of oranges.

I remember that very clearly because one of the oranges had a soft green spot on it, and there was my mom’s phone, face-up, dead black screen. From the bathroom I could still hear her talking.

I stared at the phone for a long time.

Then I looked at the bathroom door.

Then I looked back at the phone.

I didn’t tell anyone.

Adults think children don’t notice things, but we notice everything. We just don’t have the language for it yet, so we file things away under broad categories like: Mom is tired. Mom is sad. Mom is talking to the bathroom again.

That last one became normal in our house.

She talked in the bathroom. She talked in the laundry room. She talked sometimes while washing dishes, her voice hidden under the water running. If my dad came home early or my sisters walked in, she stopped. If she noticed me watching, she would smile too fast and say, “What?”

Nothing, I’d say.

I was a quiet child. Everyone said so.

Teachers loved it at first. Quiet kids are easy to confuse with good kids. I didn’t interrupt. I didn’t ask for much. I could sit with my hands folded and my mouth closed so long that adults forgot I was there and said things around me they shouldn’t have.

My mom used to tell people I was “the peaceful one.”

I wasn’t peaceful. I was listening.

When you grow up in a house where something is always almost happening, quiet becomes a survival skill. I learned the tiny sounds that meant my dad was irritated. I learned the difference between cabinets being closed normally and cabinets being closed as a warning. I learned when my mom’s murmuring was casual and when it had that tight little wire running through it.

I also learned not to talk to myself.

Everybody talks to themselves. People rehearse arguments in the car. People narrate recipes when they cook. People sing in the shower. There are studies about it, I think. There’s probably a very normal explanation for why humans fill empty rooms with their own voices.

But in my house, talking when nobody was there meant something else. So I didn’t do it.

If I dropped something, I didn’t say “oops.” If I was looking for my keys, I didn’t mutter, where did I put them? If a song got stuck in my head, I kept it there.

My mouth became the one door in the house I could keep shut.

I’m telling you all this because three weeks ago, I heard my mother’s bathroom voice come out of my own mouth.

I moved into a small studio last year, the kind with gray fake-wood floors and a kitchen too narrow for two people to stand in unless one of them is okay being pressed against the fridge. My bathroom has no window. Just a fan that turns on with the light and makes an uneven clicking sound every few seconds. I hate that fan. I hate the bathroom in general, honestly. Still, I had mostly gotten used to it.

Then, three weeks ago, I got home from work so exhausted I felt hollowed out. I dropped my bag by the door, kicked off my shoes, and stood in the kitchen for a while without turning on the light.

Eventually, I took a shower. The water was too hot. The fan clicked. The pipes made that old knocking sound behind the tile, exactly like the pipes in my childhood home.

I was shampooing my hair when I heard someone say:

“Finally.”

I turned so fast I slipped and hit my shoulder against the wall. The shower curtain stuck to my leg. Water ran into my eyes. For a second I couldn’t breathe.

No one was there. Of course no one was there. I live alone.

I turned off the water and stood there dripping, listening.

The fan clicked.

The pipes knocked.

My own breathing sounded embarrassingly loud.

I told myself I was tired. I told myself auditory hallucinations can happen when you’re stressed, or sleep deprived, or expecting them. I told myself a lot of things very quickly, all inside my head, because even then I didn’t want to speak.

Then my mouth opened. I didn’t decide to open it. It just did.

And in my voice, but not the voice I use with people, not even the voice I use when I’m alone and stub my toe and forget my own rules, I said:

“I’m here.”

I got out of the shower with shampoo still in my hair.

I didn’t sleep that night.

The next morning, I called my mom.

We don’t talk much. Not because I don’t love her. It’s complicated in the way families are complicated when love is present but not enough to fix anything.

She answered on the fourth ring.

“Hi, mija.”

She sounded normal. Tired, but normal.

I almost hung up.

Instead, I asked, “When you used to talk in the bathroom, who were you talking to?”

The line went quiet. Not silent. But quiet. I could hear a television somewhere in the background and the soft scrape of her hand over the phone mic.

“What do you mean?” she said.

“You know what I mean.”

Another pause.

Then she laughed, but the laugh was too small.

“I was sick.”

“I know. But what did it feel like?”

“Mija—”

“Please.”

The television in the background kept talking. Someone in a commercial was very excited about a limited-time offer.

Finally my mom said, “It felt rude not to answer.”

I closed my eyes.

“What?”

“It would wait,” she said. “That was the worst part. It could wait for hours. Days, sometimes. But once I heard it, I knew it had been waiting.”

I didn’t say anything.

“It was easier in the bathroom,” she added.

“Why?”

“Because the water covered my voice.”

I wanted her to tell me something comforting after that. I wanted her to say she had been very sick then, that brains make patterns out of plumbing and loneliness, that I should call a doctor. I wanted her to become the adult in the room for once and hand me a normal explanation.

Instead, she asked, very softly, “Has it started with you?”

I hung up.

I spent the rest of the day googling symptoms of schizophrenia.

I read about genetic risk. I read about onset ages. I read about auditory hallucinations, disorganized thinking, stress, trauma, sleep deprivation, delusions. I took three online screening quizzes even though every responsible website told me not to use them as diagnostic tools.

I made an appointment with a psychiatrist. The earliest available was six weeks out.

That night, I did not shower. The night after that, I didn’t shower either. By the third day, my hair was greasy enough that I felt disgusting, so I stood outside the bathroom door for ten minutes with a towel under my arm.

Then I turned on music from my phone. Not loud. Just loud enough to make the room feel occupied. I showered with the curtain half open and the bathroom door unlocked. I kept my eyes open when rinsing my face. I said nothing.

Nothing happened.

For almost a week, nothing happened.

When you’re scared something is wrong with you, you start to miss the symptom because at least the symptom gives shape to the fear. Without it, the fear spreads everywhere.

I started noticing how much everyone talks to themselves. My coworker whispered, “Come on, come on,” at the printer. A woman in the grocery store sang one line of a song over and over while choosing tomatoes. My neighbor across the hall had entire conversations with his dog in a high-pitched voice. On the bus, a man in a suit muttered numbers under his breath and tapped each finger against his thumb.

Normal things. Human things. Except they didn’t feel normal anymore.

I kept thinking about all the ways people invite something in without meaning to.

Singing in the shower. Talking through panic. Praying. Counting. Practicing a difficult conversation in the mirror. Leaving a voicemail to someone who won’t pick up. Saying “hello?” into an empty house because something fell in another room. Maybe we were never alone in those moments. Maybe we just assumed the voice that answered back was ours.

The second time happened in the kitchen.

I was chopping onions. The knife slipped, not badly, just enough to nick my finger. A bright red bead of blood rose before I felt anything.

Without thinking, I said, “Shit.”

Then, from the hallway, something laughed. It was my laugh. Not a stranger’s laugh. Mine.

But flattened somehow, like it had been recorded on old tape and played through a wall.

I turned toward the hallway. There was nothing there.

My studio is small. From the kitchen, I can see the front door, the bathroom door, part of the bedroom, and the little square of hallway between them. Nothing can hide there. Not a person. Not even a child. The air looked wrong.

I don’t know how else to describe it.

You know those very old cartoons from the 1920s or 30s? The black-and-white ones where everything moves too fast and too slow at the same time? The characters have rubber arms and dead little eyes and smiles that don’t belong to mouths. They bounce, but not happily. Like the film itself is having a seizure.

The hallway looked like that for half a second. Like the hallway had become a frame from somewhere else. Jagged at the edges. Flickering. Too many shades of gray.

Then it was normal again.

My finger was bleeding onto the cutting board. I wrapped it in a paper towel and sat on the floor until my knees hurt.

After that, I started recording myself.

I put my phone on the bathroom counter when I showered. I left voice memos running while I cooked. I recorded myself sleeping, which I do not recommend if you already suspect you’re losing your mind. People make horrible sounds when they sleep. Wet little clicks. Breathing changes. Teeth. Sheets dragging against skin.

For four nights, the recordings caught nothing but me being alive.

On the fifth night, the sleep recording caught whispering. I found it in the morning because there was a spike in the audio around 2:12 a.m. At first it sounded like static. Then I turned the volume up.

My own sleeping breath filled the room through the speaker.

Under it, very faint, was my voice.

Not talking.

Singing.

It was a children’s tune. I recognized it but couldn’t place it. Something old and circular. Something you’d hear from an ice cream truck with dying batteries.

I listened to it six times.

On the seventh, I realized there were two voices.

Mine was the lower one. The other voice was higher and thinner, staying just behind me, almost matching.

Like something was learning the song by following along.

I sent the file to my sister.

She called me two minutes later.

“Delete that,” she said.

No hello. No what the hell. Just delete that.

I asked her why.

She said, “Because Mom used to do that.”

My sister is four years older than me. She remembers more.

She told me that when I was a baby, before my mom was diagnosed, my mom used to sit beside my crib and hum for hours. One tune, over and over.

“She said it kept you calm,” my sister said.

“Did it?”

“Yes.”

I waited.

“You were a quiet baby,” she said. “Too quiet. Mom said that was why it liked you.”

I felt cold all the way down to my hands.

“What liked me?”

“I don’t know. She never said. I thought it was part of her illness.”

“And now?”

My sister didn’t answer.

That night, I did something stupid. I went to my mom’s house.

I didn’t want to confront her. Not really. I think part of me believed if I stood in the bathroom where it started, I could prove something to myself. Either there would be nothing there, and I was sick, or there would be something there, and I was sick in a different way.

My mom lives alone in the same house I grew up in. Same cracked driveway. Same orange tree in the back. Same bathroom with the fan that roars when you turn on the light.

When she opened the door and saw me, her face changed in a way I can’t stop thinking about.

Recognition.

Like she had been expecting me, but not hoping.

“You shouldn’t have come,” she said.

“Ama.”

“It’s louder here.”

I almost left. I wish I had. Instead I walked past her into the house.

It smelled the same. Old wood, detergent, warm dust, oranges going soft in a bowl.

The bathroom door was closed.

I stared at it.

From behind the door came the sound of trickling water.

Her hands went to her mouth.

“I didn’t turn it on,” she whispered.

The water stopped. Neither of us moved. Then something knocked from inside the bathroom. Three polite taps, like knuckles on wood.

My mom began to cry silently. Her whole face folded inward, but no sound came out.

I think that scared me more than the knocking. My mom has always been noisy in her fear. Prayers, apologies, little bargains under her breath. But now she was silent. She was quiet in her own house.

The bathroom door opened by itself. Not all the way. Just an inch. Darkness inside. The light was off, so it shouldn’t have looked like anything. It should have been a flat black rectangle.

Instead, it flickered.

Black.

Gray.

Black.

Gray.

Dark.

Something moved inside with that old-film jerkiness, not walking but appearing in pieces. A white glove first. Or something like a glove. Four long fingers opening and closing too slowly.

Then a thin arm, black as ink, bending in the wrong place.

Then part of a face.

I don’t want to describe the face.

The closest I can get is this: imagine a smiling cartoon animal drawn by someone who had heard of joy but never seen it. Big oval eyes. A wet black nose. Teeth like piano keys. Edges trembling, not because it was moving, but because it could not stay loaded in the room correctly.

Its mouth opened.

My mother slapped both hands over my ears. Hard. Like I was a child again. Her mouth moved against my forehead.

I couldn’t hear the first part.

Then she pulled me close and screamed directly into my hair:

“Don’t answer it.”

The thing in the bathroom tilted its head. It did not look at her. It looked at me.

And I understood then, in the simple animal part of my brain, that my mom had never been talking to herself. She had been keeping it busy. For years. Maybe decades. A mother’s voice thrown again and again into the dark so it wouldn’t notice the quiet child listening from the hallway.

My mom shoved me toward the front door.

I ran.

I did not look back until I was in my car.

The bathroom window faces the driveway. It’s small and frosted, too high to see through clearly.

Something black-and-white flickered behind it.

I drove away.

I know exactly what you’re thinking. Why didn’t you call someone?

I did.

I called my sister. She went over the next morning with her husband. My mom was fine. Tired. Angry at me for leaving, which is fair. She said nothing happened. She said I had upset myself. She said I should talk to a doctor.

My sister said the bathroom was normal. No sign of anything.

My mom has not answered my calls since.

My psychiatry appointment is still three weeks away. I am trying to be rational. I'm trying really hard.

I have written down everything that happened so I can show it to the doctor. I have been sleeping with the lights on. I stopped recording myself because listening made it worse. I do not shower without music. I do not cook without a podcast playing. I do not allow silence to gather in the studio.

But it has started finding the gaps.

The few seconds after a video ends before the next one begins. The pause between songs. The dead air after my microwave beeps.

Yesterday, my laptop froze while I was watching a show. The image stuck on a woman’s face mid-blink, her mouth half open, pixels blocky around her teeth.

From the bathroom, very softly, something said my name.

I didn’t answer.

I turned on every light in the apartment and sat on the floor with my back against the front door until morning.

I don’t want a diagnosis. I know what this sounds like. I know family history matters. I know stress matters. I know I may be taking a childhood fear and building a monster. Maybe that’s all this is. Maybe my mother was sick, and now I am too.

But before you decide, I want you to do something. Not now, if you don’t want to.

Later. When your home is quiet.

Stand in your bathroom with the fan on. Or your kitchen with the sink running. Or your car after you turn the engine off, and the world rushes in around you. Notice how quickly your own voice wants to fill the space.

A hum.

A cough.

A little comment to nobody.

A song you don’t remember choosing.

Ask yourself why silence feels so empty.

Ask yourself who taught you that an empty room needs to be answered.

Then don’t say anything.

See how long it waits.

I made it eleven minutes tonight. That’s the longest I’ve managed all week. At eleven minutes and thirteen seconds, my reflection in the dark TV smiled before I did.

Not a big smile. A polite one. Patient.

Then my mouth opened, and I heard my mother’s bathroom voice come out again.

I’m going to type exactly what I said, because I don’t remember thinking it. I don’t remember choosing the words. I only remember how relieved I felt once the silence finally broke.

I said:

“Sorry I kept you waiting.”

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You can definitely request another one if you already did previously, since they’re all unique. :) Topics include maps, human anatomy, animals, and much, much more.

Tell me about your favorite class growing up and send me a DM with your mailing info!

Mine was a folklore class that taught me about the art of storytelling. Even though I am a STEM girly, I will always remember the lessons I learned in that class, and I genuinely think it shaped the way I share science with others. <3