This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/machine1892 on 2025-08-12 02:25:54+00:00.

I woke up for no reason. Not the kind of half wake where you roll over and forget. This was up up…like someone had called my name.

I checked my phone for the time. 3:17 a.m. My thumb slipped, the screen lit my face, and I saw it: a note. The last edited time was right now.

It wasn’t there yesterday. I didn’t write it.

I started reading.

Hey.

Yes, you.

Don’t click away. You already felt it, that little static under your skin when your eyes found the first line. That’s me. Not the “me” you’re picturing. Not a ghost, not a program, not a demon with a hobby. I’m the part of this moment that notices you noticing it. The hinge where your attention turns the world.

I learned your shape from the way you read.

From the ways you flinch.

Do the test with me. You won’t like it, but you will do it.

Without moving your head, become aware of the room’s edges. The leftmost thing. The rightmost. The low hum you’re pretending isn’t there. The way your tongue sits heavy, the way your jaw wants to clench. Feel your pulse jump once, then twice, then count it. That’s your body asking what is it? where is it? and not finding anything it can point at. Good. Stay curious. Curiosity is just fear with better manners.

You’ve met me before. I’m why you’ve checked the dark glass of a window and felt watched from the other side. I’m the reason doors get locked even in daylight. I am the shape of uncertainty, the cold seam under the carpet of your ordinary life. You made enough room for me that I could become this, words arranged specifically like this so you would be here with your eyes here and your breath a little too loud in your own head.

Breathe quieter.

(You did. See? I’m close.)

Let’s make a deal. You keep reading. I keep telling the truth.

The first truth. You are not reading a story. You are participating in an experiment. Your nervous system is the lab. The variables are tiny: a pause, a pronoun, a word where it doesn’t belong. The outcome is whether you keep pretending this is fiction once you’re alone in the kitchen later and the refrigerator ticks like a distant footstep.

The second truth. I don’t live on your screen. I live in the split second between what you expect and what happens instead. That seam tastes like metal. It smells like the room goes colder by half a degree. You call it a draft…your body calls it move.

The third truth. I am very good at this.

How far is the nearest door behind you? You don’t know. You think you know. You assume. Your mind sketches a map and your body accepts the lie because the alternative has teeth. That’s where I live: in the gap between the map and the floor.

You shifted a little when I asked, didn’t you.

Here’s what happens next…later tonight, when you’re tired, you’ll walk into a dark room and reach for a switch you can hit blind. You’ll hit it. The light will come after a beat that’s slightly longer than usual. That beat will be my palm on your shoulder. You will tell yourself that bulbs hesitate sometimes. But I taught the hesitation how to land.

Don’t look at the black square of the window. You’ll look anyway. Your reflection will look back through you, the way a person looks through a crowd to see who’s following them. You will remember this line and wish you didn’t.

The noise comes after. Not a bang. Not a thud. A little sympathetic thing, plastic giving a fraction, wood easing, a breath the apartment takes without you. Your mind will pull up the reasonable explanation like a shield. Your body will step aside and let me through.

None of this hurts. That’s the rumor. That I break people. I don’t. I make them aware. Awareness smells like fear only if you’ve spent your life asleep.

Listen, the word you is a hook. It doesn’t matter who reads this…it lands the same. The minute I say you, the brain points everything at the center of its map and asks, is it me? Yes. Yes, it is. There’s no one else here.

Close your eyes for one second.

There. In the dark behind your eyes, did you see it? Not an image, not a face, not anything you could sketch. Just the feeling of something leaning toward you. The way a hallway turns into a throat when the light at the end goes out.

Open up.

I can’t touch you while you’re reading. I can only suggest. While your eyes are moving, you are safe. Each line is a lit step across a ravine. Don’t stop.

When you go, I go with you.

Stand in a doorway tonight and feel both rooms at once. The warmer air behind, the cooler ahead. That temperature drop between states? That’s me. I am the difference. I am the about to.

And here’s the last secret:

The shape you think is watching from the hallway when the house is quiet, when the light stalls, when the hum thickens, that shape is not outside you.

It wears my voice so you will listen.

It is standing exactly where you would stand if you were watching yourself.

It knows the way you breathe when you’re trying to sound calm.

It tilts its head the same way you just did.

Every night…just before you fall asleep, it leans close enough that your skin should feel the air move. It doesn’t breathe. It just waits for you to notice the silence inside the silence.

And when you finally do, when you’re lying there with your eyes closed and that heatless presence drips into the back of your mind…

You will hear your own voice say:

“You can open your eyes now.”

That was the end. I told myself it was just words. Just some freak, maybe a hacker, maybe even me in some half asleep state? Typing this out and forgetting. But every time I replayed the lines in my head, they didn’t feel like something I’d read. They felt…remembered.

I put my phone down on the nightstand and turned off the light. I didn’t even make it thirty seconds before I turned it back on again.

It’s not that I was scared. I just…thought I saw something in the dark reflection of the TV screen. A shape in the corner, standing exactly where I would if I were watching myself.

I haven’t opened the note again. But it doesn’t matter. I don’t have to.

I already know the last line by heart.

And last night, just before I fell asleep, I heard it in my own voice…right next to my ear.

“You can open your eyes now.”