There are nights when silence is loud.
Then there are nights, when sound takes the place of silence, when one single sound is all that encompasses the available quiet, and begs to be called silence.
The dim light of the fan circling overhead above my bed sliced through the hours, as the mechanical buzz of its slow dance became a familiar accompaniment. Every rotation was like a second being shaved off of me.
I didn't sleep.
The same notebook was on my chest, pressed in place as if I intentionally put it there, I lay on my back, looking up.
When you meet her, the pain will sharpen.
It had sharpened. The pain in my heart wasn't shapeless anymore, it was edgy, it had a direction. Now that it was trying to go, to where?
Which meant something terrifying: The notebook was right.
And if the notebook was right, then the stranger was too.
I turned my head toward the window. The lights on the street illuminated the curtains with a dull, steady light—neutral gold, the colour of normal nights. Ordinary. Calm.
Lies.
I closed my eyes.
Maybe if I stopped thinking, I could slip back into ignorance.
I lasted twelve seconds
_ _ _
I got up and sat down at the desk.
I picked up the notebook and started to read again.
My handwriting.
But it read like a message from a version of me that had already accepted something I was still resisting.
> "Observation: Emotional pain returns before memory does."
I exhaled slowly.
So that was the order.
Not memory first.
Pain first.
Like the body remembering before the mind could.
I have scrolled through previous pages and have seen another line I did not have noticed:
> "If you feel like you arrived mid-sentence, it's because you did."
Mid-sentence.
Mid-life.
Mid-love.
A knock sounded on my door.
It was sharp and unexpected.
I froze for a moment.
This late there were no visitors at all that I was expecting. Not my mother, she was a deep sleeper. Or any other person.
There was another knock.
"Elvio?" Justin's voice.
I closed the book.
"Yeah?"
He opened the door without waiting, which would probably have riled an earlier version of the occupant of this room. He was in the doorway, as if by a screw-up of the head, his hair thrown out of place, a cell phone in his hand, an expression like a man who discovered something he couldn't detect or pair with.
"You awake?"
"Clearly."
He stepped inside hesitatingly. I almost looked him in the eye.
"Something weird just happened."
A cold thread slipped down my spine.
"What?"
Then he turned the screen of his cell phone to me.
The group chat. Our class group. A blurry, low lighted photo shot but one that only captures enough to be recognizable and not to be comfortable.
The streetlight. The bench. And me.
On my knees.
Alone.
My breath stopped.
"What is this?" I whispered.
"Someone was out for a run," Justin said. "Said you looked like you were having some kind of breakdown."
I caught my breath, and looked at the image. I cannot recall anyone being around at the time. The only other visitor, or what amounted to a visitor, was the stranger I met.
"Who posted it?" I asked.
"Doesn't matter. They deleted it already. But…" He hesitated. "Dude, who were you talking to?"
"I wasn't."
"Then why do you look like you're arguing with someone?"
The answer was somewhere in me and because I couldn't use it, it was less digestible, less tasty. Because I was. With a man no one else was able to see. There's someone that appeared where physics didn't really fit him and faded mysteriously away leaving no warning at all.
I said, "I got dizzy. "I sat down."
Justin searched my knowledgeable expression for a very long time as if he thought he was being lied to but had no other explanation to consider.
"You sure? You seem all piffle up, man!"
No.
"Yes."
He didn't look convinced.
"You've been acting strange, man."
I almost laughed.
You have no idea.
He sighed and scratched his hair and then ran a hand through it. "Just… don't disappear on us, okay?"
Disappear. The word echoed too loud.
"Yeah," I said. "I'll try."
He left. I closed the door and remained there for a while and waited for the handle to budge again.
And the room felt smaller.
_ _ _
I went back to bed, but still didn't find it comfortable to lie down.
The picture had proven something which I had been trying not to look at directly in this world: If no one saw the stranger,
then who exactly had I spoken to?
This left me with the answers I couldn't help figure out from just facing the question.
Back to the notebook my gaze went.
I opened it and flipped to my final page of reading.
Something stopped the breath in my throat.
My heart skipped.
I haven't written since coming home.
Yet below the previous entry, a fresh line stared back at me.
Dark brown ink and still recent.
> "He will come again."
The room didn't seem to be off balance - yet there was a weird suddenness in the air.
I read the words again and again. It was my handwriting, same letterforms, same leftward leaning. However, it seemed like the ink had just been freshened up in comparison to the submissions above. I curled my lips over the edge of the page, like it would have been wet.
It wasn't.
To no one, to the emptiness... okay..."I said... "Think."
Rational explanations trotted out dutifully. I started to pen down all the possibilities I could think of.
Possibilities.
1. I wrote it and forgot.
2. I sleepwalked.
3. Stress hallucinations.
Or,
4. I wasn't alone inside this process.
I could no longer rely on myself as a witness to my experience, and that's because I hadn't slept in a while.
Yet, more was said behind those rationalizations:
The notebook was not used only for observation..
It was communicating.
Across versions.
Across states.
Across...
I stopped the thought before it finished.
_ _ _
The fan continued to spin. Round and round, unimpressed by what I wasn't getting done.
I stared at it. Suddenly aware of something else.
It had been here since the first morning that I awoke in this world.
Every night.
I didn't remember turning it on the first day.
But it had been on.
Always.
A small detail, meaningless, to say the least...
Except,
My eyes dropped to the notebook.
One of the early pages.
I flipped.
By leafing through the pages of the notebook, I ended up on the page where I found this extra line I had somehow overlooked:
> "The fan helps stabilize transition. Don't turn it off suddenly."
I read it twice.
Stabilize what transition?
Why did a piece of machinery in my room have instructions attached to my existence?
I raised my gaze upwards to watch the blades.
Still spinning.
Steady.
A mechanical heartbeat above me.
And for the first time,
I felt afraid of silence.
_ _ _
I lay back down, staring at it.
"What happens if I turn you off?" I asked the ceiling.
The room, of course, didn't answer. But the thought stayed.
What if the fan wasn't just background noise?
What if it was-
I sat up abruptly.
No. That was paranoia.
Stress.
Sleep deprivation.
I needed grounding.
Proof of something normal.
I took my phone out. Open the photos. The photographs of Elvio. A life, reversed, the latest on top to the very bottom of the screen, through parties and common afternoons, and non-important moments that a person had decided to save on these.
Trips. Friends. Her.
His girlfriend, who in each shot was smiling at someone who loved her, shot after shot. I scanned her face, made an attempt this time with purpose, to make it look as if there were something we had in common. I retained the images and awaited.
Nothing came. Only data.
I scrolled further.
And stopped.
Photograph taken several months ago. Night. Rain can be seen on the road in the glow of the streetlamp at the periphery of the frame. The picture blurred a little, captured by someone's hands that were not perfectly still and/or while on the move.
In the background, not in picture, face to right, a figure.
A girl.
My chest seized.
I was approaching very slowly, as if I had to take my time with it, as in approaching a person who is to be treated carefully. As I zoomed in and up the resolution was getting worse, however, the shape was still obvious. The way she stood. The way her shoulders are angled. Her quietness, something in it.
I felt myself trembling, while my heart started beating rigorously.
The date of the picture was accurate. This was a picture by Elvio. It was months before I came into this body, months before this began, before the park, before the stranger, before the gravity in my chest started.
That is, which meant that Elvio had known of her.
Before me. Before the shift. Before, I dropped the phone onto the bed.
There was one truth that no man could turn a blind eye to.
This wasn't random. Nor was it projection, nor was it coincidental: it was not a lingering sense of a life I had left behind.
This was a story already in motion, before I arrived.
And I had stepped into the middle of it.
_ _ _
The fan continued to turn and turn.
Relentless. Unhurried. Like time. I felt as though I was being left to work out the rest of the puzzle myself, like it was as if I had been snow blinded and had to figure it out.
I closed my eyes.
And for the first time since waking in this life, I didn't fear the dreams.
Because if memory was coming back through pain, then sleep may have been the way through which it came. And it was important to me to see what lay beyond.
As I drifted off, one final thought echoed through my mind:
If the fan stops,
what else stops with it?
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