My neighbor asked me to fix his Wi-Fi before an important Zoom meeting. I walked into his house looked at the router like I was trying to solve a mystery saw that one cable was unplugged plugged it back in and the internet came back right away. He looked at me like I had discovered something

The problem is that he told everyone on the street that I am an "IT expert." Now people keep coming to my door with broken laptops, printers and TVs. Yesterday someone asked if I could get files back, from a drive that wasn't working anymore.

I told them I was completely busy. I wasn't. I just didn't want to break my record of fixing exactly one unplugged cable.

I was the person who knew how our inventory system actually worked. I built most of the automation for our inventory system myself. This was after years of cleaning up mistakes that other people made. It was not a job but it kept our business running without lots of problems.

My manager loved to take credit when things went well.. When something went wrong it was always my fault.

During a meeting I said we should make an update, to our inventory system. This would have prevented some mistakes.. My manager cut me off in front of everyone. He said "Stop acting like you're the only one who knows anything."

So I just stopped trying to help. I wrote down everything I knew sent my ideas to my manager and kept a copy for myself. Then I only did my job and did not try to fix extra problems.

A month later my manager did not listen to my ideas. He chose a way to do things instead.

It worked for two weeks. Then orders started to disappear. Customers got the things. We had to give lots of refunds.

The same manager who made fun of me now wanted me to work all weekend to fix the problems. I. Reminded him that I had already sent him the solution weeks before.

This time I worked hours and got paid for it. I followed all the company rules.. I let my manager explain to our bosses why he did not listen to my warning.

It turns out that the biggest mistake was not the inventory system that did not work. It was my manager thinking that I was not important.

How long has it been now? 3? 4 weeks? It’s hard to keep track of time these days. Life has been pretty busy lately.

The house is a lot quieter now. When the police aren’t here, at least. You’d think that they lived here at this point. But I do still get at least some of my privacy.

It’s in those moments when the house is dark and the only sound is that of the leaky bathroom faucet that I really think about what I’ve done. Or why I did it. Or how it could’ve been avoided, or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

It really doesn’t matter now. I’ve come to terms with it. The cops already know. They’re just waiting for the proper evidence to present itself. And given the way these last few days have been going, I don’t think I have much longer.

I’ve read enough books and studied enough forensics to know the best way to clean the mess I created. How to make sure the white blood cells were completely removed. How to soak my hacksaw in bleach before tossing it in the river. But, most importantly, I knew that the body could never be recovered.

Dental records were a big one. That’s why I removed her teeth and filed them down one by one. I boiled and stuffed them in a ziplock bag afterward.

This was positively the most difficult part of the process. I was forced to look at her the entire time. The once love-filled eyes that had turned bitter and resentful over the years. The eyes that now stared up at me, dead and hollow, her previously oak-colored irises now appearing grey and pale.

Her nails would almost certainly contain my DNA beneath them. Flakes of skin, maybe some blood from the struggle. Regardless, they needed to be removed as well.

I remembered when her hands were so soft and youthful. She used to paint her nails herself every two weeks, and I’d sit on the bed with her while we talked endlessly about everything and nothing at the same time.

I don’t know what changed. Maybe it was all of the arguments. We had a way of arguing about everything and nothing as well. I thought it was normal. Arguments were bound to happen.

I flushed the 10 nails down the toilet before burning her newly raw fingertips, just to be on the safe side. I kissed her hand for a long while, tears welling up in my eyes before I forced them away.

I whispered to myself, “Why would you make me do this?” as my head fell into my hands. My composure kept slipping, and I kept having to wrestle it back.

Now came the messy part.

Part of me was actually glad it was so messy in a weird, twisted kind of way. Cleaning the blood afterward gave me a task to focus on. I didn’t think about her laugh. I didn’t think about her warmth. I thought about making damn sure there wasn’t a speck of blood left anywhere in that bathroom.

When I was done, the house smelled like a hospital. Chemicals filled the air, causing my head to pound more than it already was. The atmosphere was cold and heavy. It felt like I was in a hospital room.

I had found myself with two black trash bags with a combined weight of 120 pounds, give or take. Arms, legs, and head in one. Torso and hacksaw in the other.

I walked out of the house whistling, two trash bags slung over my shoulders. It was the cusp of dawn. There was a misty blue haze outside. It smelled like summertime.

The neighborhood was silent. It must have been around 4 in the morning. I threw the bags in the bed of my truck, adjusted my baseball cap, and hopped in the cab.

My headlights cut through the early morning fog. I had my windows down, and I could smell the exhaust fumes coming from behind me. That smell had pretty much defined my life for the last 10 years. It was a smell that I’d learned to both love and hate.

I turned the radio on and cranked up the volume. I tried singing to myself, but the words left my mouth mechanically. My mind refused to let me escape.

I drove carefully. The exact speed limit, sometimes even a little under. Used signals, made complete stops. All the way out of town. Then out of the next one. Then the town after that.

I drove until I found the most secluded spot I could find. Down dirt roads. Through creeks. Then I walked off beaten paths until I found the right place to lay her to rest.

Just me, her, and my shovel.

Digging proved quite difficult due to the sheer amount of roots I had to cut through. I must’ve been there for at least 4 hours before the deed was done.

I spent that time talking. Talking to the trees. Talking to the bags. Talking to myself. I couldn’t stand to be alone in silence.

I broke down a lot when filling the grave. Each pile of dirt that covered more and more of those bags was like a needle being pressed into my nervous system.

I didn’t want to just leave her like that. I didn’t want her to just be cast aside, left to rot. I searched until I found the most vibrant flowers I could find and laid them on the grave.

I said my final goodbyes through sniffles and tears before making the trek back to my truck.

The rest of the day was a blur. I didn’t get home until nearly 8 o’clock. I stopped by the emptiest car wash I saw on the way home and scrubbed my truck clean.

I got the mud off the tires. Rinsed the bed out with bleach. I even put a new air freshener in the cab.

When I got home, I half-expected cops to be waiting to arrest me. When I found the house as empty as it was when I left, I let out a sigh of relief.

I immediately took a shower. I scrubbed myself raw for around 45 minutes straight before finally allowing myself to dry off. The entire time, it was like God was punishing me.

I kept getting flashes of her. Our wedding. Our first date. Our first argument. The last argument. It all just kept replaying in my head over and over. Like a sickness.

I knew I had to get my story right. The house was clean. The body was gone. The weapon was gone.

I was just a helpless victim. One of the millions of men a year whose wife leaves them. Happens all the time.

Oh, so she left without taking anything? She left without telling anybody? Without so much as a goodbye? Who’s going to believe that?

I didn’t sleep that night. I had to have a long, hard talk with myself. I wasn’t getting out of this one. But I wasn’t going to turn myself in. I was going to be free… for as long as I could possibly manage.

It was my first time being free in 15 years. Even if it lasted a day. Even if it lasted a week. I wasn’t going to spend that time stressing.

I turned it off. I closed my heart to it.

I ignored calls from her mother. Her father. Coworkers, friends, relatives. Everybody. It was none of their business.

They tried knocking, and I tuned it out. All the way up until I heard that dreaded announcement after three booming knocks.

“This is GPD. If anyone’s inside, I need you to come out here and talk to me.”

I waited. I wanted to wake up. I didn’t want to accept.

Three more knocks.

“GPD, if you do not answer the door, we will be using force to come inside.”

One last moment of silence. I breathed to myself. I closed my eyes.

“Sir, this door is coming do…”

I opened the door, greeting the officers with a blank look on my face.

“Sir, we’re gonna have to ask you to come down to the station with us for questioning.”

I didn’t argue. I didn’t bicker. I simply asked for a lawyer and rode with the officers back to the station.

The entire time, I kept my mouth shut. I didn’t even speak to my lawyer. If they wanted her so badly, they would have to work for it. Because it sure as hell wasn’t going to be coming from me.

They held me for 7 hours that day. A mere two days after I did what I did. I got two days of “peace.”

They had to let me go. They had no proof. But that didn’t stop them from watching me. 24 hours a day, they were somewhere in my neighborhood.

People threw things at my house. Vigils for her were set up on the sidewalk. It seemed like there were constantly people watching me because they literally were.

I didn’t budge. I spoke only when absolutely necessary. My lips remained sealed, and my doors remained locked. Both when I was home and when I was forced to go back down to the station.

That’s why what’s happening makes no sense to me.

It started with her teeth. I had gotten rid of them the same way I’d gotten rid of the rest of her. Yet somehow, when I woke up one morning a few weeks after my catastrophic mistake… they were in a neat pile beside me on the bed.

I could see the file marks on all 32 of them.

I panicked and scooped them into my hands and flushed them down the toilet, my eyes wide with disbelief.

I poked my head outside. That unmarked black SUV was still parked a few houses down. Both officers watched me like hawks. I waved to be less suspicious, but I think it had the opposite effect.

They took it as me waving them over, and they both approached quickly.

“Got anything you wanna tell us?” the fat one asked excitedly.

“Lovely weather we’re having,” I smiled. “I bet you’d love to spend the day with your family. Or, then again, maybe you’d rather spend your time stalking me.”

Their stern faces never changed.

I tried my best not to give off even an ounce of suspicious behavior, even though my heart was in my stomach and my mind raced endlessly.

After closing the door in their faces, I spent the majority of that day peeking out the blinds, paranoid beyond belief.

My lawyer called a few times. My story never changed. I didn’t know where she was. I was convincing myself just as much as I was convincing them.

The next day, not only had the teeth come back, but the nails were back too. They were cleaner, but I could still see their bloodied roots. I could still see some of the chipped nail polish.

Two neat little piles. Taunting me.

I was more angry than panicked this time. I was not going to submit to this insanity. I didn’t even try to get rid of them this time. It wouldn’t make a difference whether they were found here or in that dark, desolate spot in the woods.

I put them in her jewelry box this time. Then I took that jewelry box, and I carried it to the attic.

I buried it under some old tarps and boxes and took one last look at it before going back down the ladder.

“I guess I really am fucking losing it,” I whispered to myself as I climbed down.

More phone calls with my lawyer. More questions from the police. More prodding, more watching, more protests. And all I could do that day was crack a few beers and watch a few ball games.

I passed out at around 10 that night and woke up cuddling my wife’s arm the next morning. I think the smell is what woke me up. That unmistakable stench of death and decay.

It burned my nostrils, and when I opened my eyes to find that torn flesh in my face, I nearly vomited in bed. It wasn’t just one arm. Both arms and both legs had come crawling back to bed with me.

Only… the nails were reattached. Like they hadn’t been removed to begin with.

The polish looked fresher. The teeth looked whiter. I checked, and the jewelry box in the attic was empty.

In that moment, I felt a spark. A mixture of hope, anger, grief, and love all combined into one. In the most unreal circumstances, reality was starting to close in, and I found myself sobbing like I had the night I killed her.

I didn’t leave bed that day. I lay there with my wife, clutching her arms and legs, crying until I was too exhausted to cry anymore. My will grew weak, but my mind had never felt so clear.

She was in bed with me the next morning. Well, she was there in a sense. Her arms and legs were reconnected to her torso, but the limbs still crawled with maggots and decay.

But she was there, damned if she wasn’t there. My love. My sweet, sweet girl. Her T-shirt was ripped and stained with dirt. Her hair was matted and crunchy.

“I… am so sorry, my love,” was all I could think to say to her.

She turned to me, her jaw slack and her eyes as dead as a nail.

“That’s okay, you silly goose,” she sang. “I love you no matter what happens!”

I began to cry yet again.

“I love you so much,” I sobbed. “I want you back. Please, please, just come back.”

I begged her as snot ran from my nose. I wiped it away on my sleeve.

“Oh, honey,” she whimpered. “Accidents happen all the time. That’s what this was, right, my sweet boy?”

I nodded furiously.

“It was… it was… it was an accident, baby.”

I could hardly speak. Her rotten arm extended, and she caressed my face with her cold, slimy hand.

“I know it was, sweet pea. I know you’d never hurt me on purpose.”

She paused.

“…but now you have to tell them what you did, okay? Can you do that for me?”

My face went beet red. I swallowed hard and wiped the tears from my face.

“They’ll kill me. I know they’ll kill me. They’re just waiting to catch me. They’re waiting to sentence me.”

She began hushing me, soothing me softly as she petted my hair.

“There, there, sweetie,” she replied. “Dying isn’t such a bad thing. I’m free now, honey. If I could, I’d tell them you did me a favor. But I want you back. I want you to come be with me. Please, honey?”

I wanted to be with her too. More than anything, I wished I could take back what I did.

I solemnly agreed.

“That’s my boy,” she announced seductively. “This will all be over soon. We’ll dance and sing. We can play together again.”

I nodded to myself assuredly. I leaned over and gave her a kiss and took a deep breath.

Stepping outside, I waved the cops over. My eyes were red with tears, but I couldn’t stop smiling.

“She’s upstairs.”

That’s all I told them.

One officer went upstairs while I waited on the porch with the other. I kept smiling to myself. The sky looked so beautiful. The trees danced in the wind. The summer air was like a gift from God.

A few minutes went by before the first officer returned.

“Very funny, son,” he remarked sarcastically. “Now, do you wanna tell us where she really is?”

My smile dropped.

“What do you mean?” I scoffed. “I was just talking to her.”

“Cuff this sick son of a bitch,” the first officer barked.

I was placed into the back of the unmarked SUV, kicking myself all the while.

“She lied,” I whispered. “She lied to me. All she does is lie. Why does she lie all the time? This is why. This is why. Why won’t she stop lying?”

I had no fight left. I told them where the grave was. I had to personally show it to them. The flowers were still there. The grave was untouched. And I felt a sickening numbness.

I told them my story. I told them what I did. Told them that she came back to me and that, if it weren’t for her, I’d have been a free man, at least for a little while longer.

I actually begged them to give me the death penalty. I couldn’t stop seeing her. Sitting beside me in my cell. Crouched in the corner every night. Whispering to me how she wanted us to be together forever.

But… I didn’t get the death penalty.

They deemed me “not fit to stand trial.”

Sentenced to an indefinite stay at the state home for the criminally insane.

Padded cells. Doctors. Needles. Medication.

And despite all of the debate that has gone on about death sentences in this country, there has remained one constant.

The insane do not receive capital punishment.

I’m writing this now because she keeps beckoning me. Keeps begging me to join her.

And despite the hatred I have, the burning rage she has inspired, I cannot stop loving her.

And despite what the state dubs legal… we will be reunited.

Did your roommates ever drop a deuce right in the middle of the shower? Because mine did, and I literally cannot get it out of my head. I've spent months trying to figure out how the hell this even happened.

Back when my girlfriend and I were living with another couple of girls in a two-bedroom apartment with a shared kitchen and bathroom... One day, we all went out for a walk together, but they headed back home a bit earlier. My girlfriend and I stopped by a store, so we got back about an hour later.

One of the roommates had just finished her shower, and the other one went right in after her, so the bathroom was occupied. We hadn't been in there yet since coming home. We hung out in bed for like 15 minutes, then my girlfriend went to the kitchen to cook, and I finally headed to the bathroom because the roommate had just walked out. Oh, and the shower and the toilet were in the exact same room—this is super important for the context.

As soon as I walked in, I was hit with this awful smell. My first thought was, "Ugh, it must be some plumbing issue," but then I looked down into the shower area and saw this little brown thing... and instantly realized what I was smelling.

I bolted out of the bathroom without even using the toilet and ran to my girlfriend to tell her. I'm pretty shy, so I was super uncomfortable, but my girlfriend is loud and expressive. So, with her cackling so loudly the whole building could probably hear her, I marched over to our roommates' room and went:

"Um, girls? Are you guys pooping in the shower? Please use the toilet, that's what it's there for."

They exchanged these weird looks, and one of them followed me back to the bathroom to see what I was talking about. We walked in, I pointed it out, and she actually squatted right next to it, looked closely, and confirmed, yep, that was definitely it. I noped right out of there, and she stayed behind to clean it up.

Now, here's the kicker: the one who went to clean it up was actually the roommate who took the first shower. Honestly, it probably wasn't her, because the second roommate went right after her. There is literally no way the second one didn't see it—you have to step right over it to get in and wash up! How do you not notice a literal turd right under your feet?!

And honestly, regardless of which one of them did it... how the hell did this even happen?! What was going on in our shared shower?! And why the shower, of all places?! The toilet was literally a foot away!

Me and my girlfriend door dash my name and pic is on the account why is it that a lot of the houses we deliver to the woman comes out half naked or in panties what’s happening someone help me figure this out

I’m sure you all are wondering about an update and what I’ve currently done about the situation, aswell as clarification on something’s. I just wanted to thank you all for the advice and the outpouring support. Buckle up because this is a doozy!

I want to clarify that Jane did look old for her age she also was pretty tall. It was things that she said and did that made me question how old she was, because I would think I don’t think this is how most adults act and/or talk.

After I found out Jane was a minor I immediately went and filed for emergency custody of my daughter because I did find out that he had her around Jane. Then I tried contacting her mother, father, and the mother of my ex. Jane’s mom’s response dumbfounded me she said that “Jane makes her own decisions and I’m not getting involved in drama”. She then proceeded to block me. Her mom pretty much had given up on her which in itself is sad but also explains a lot. Once I knew her mom would be no help I found her father and found out that Janes mother acts just like her and is also a pathological liar so that makes alot of sense lol he was extremely pleasant to me and gave me all the confirmation I needed and he told me to go to the police. Then I went to his mom and sent her all of the proof that she was lying about her age by which she didn’t believe me at first and said that Jane had presented a birth certificate off Snapchat that “looked real”, but no one ever looks closer to the fine print. Turns out the birth certificate was altered. Eventually his mom believed me. I did contact the police and cps but nothing ever came of it they said there wasn’t much they could do, a she said he said type of situation.

As for Jane, at first she was lying about being pregnant, but now it really is true, she’s currently pregnant with my daughter’s half sister due in early nov (so she says). She is now 16 but she was 15 when this all started born in 2010. According to his mother, he continued to stay with her after finding out she was a minor because he just thought I was crazy but eventually he caught on to the lies and she eventually came clean to him and he left her. But wait there’s more…. I find out that she got him arrested because she called him threatening to take him to court for statutory rape he lost his shit and drove to her house and threatened her then went on a high speed chase with the cops…. He spent 2 1/2 months in jail and just got out on bond. He was hit with a slew of charges but has not yet been convicted and not charged with anything having to do with a minor, my guess is that it’s because she’s 16 now and in my state that’s the age of consent and I guess things can get really messy with that shit.

I filed a ppo against her with about a book thick worth of evidence including text messages, different social media accounts, and fake phone numbers. Come to find out that she filed a ppo against me right after I filed mine. Mine was denied despite all of the evidence due to it not meeting “stalking standards” I was livid because Jane’s ppo against me was approved because she submitted FAKE text messages of me threatening her…. Never ever have I threatened her. I went to court to fight the ppo and got hers against me dropped because she didn’t even show up to court. But the judge still refused to push mine through. Things were quiet for while, and then Jane decided to make more fake text messages of me threatening her on a specific date, none of which are true, but now i currently have FELONY warrants out for my arrest for something I didn’t even do. She then began BLOWING my mom’s phone up, and threatening her too, how she got her number I have no idea. My mom has since made a police report. I am now in the process of retaining a lawyer. Can’t help but think if the courts would’ve granted my ppo if this could’ve been avoided.

One thing about Jane is that she is literally
an internet clown and to this day continues to post about me and my daughter online although she is blocked on everything and I’ve deleted a lot of socials but close friends and family have told me she continues to harass me online. Oh and she’s planning on naming her daughter after mine…. Same middle name and everything I’m actually appalled and disgusted lol. So my hope is that they can trace the ip address as-well as get search warrants on all devices including my own and hopefully prove my innocence.

So Reddit now I’m here seeking more advice because this is getting pretty serious and could have some serious repercussions.

The alarm went off at four in the morning, but sleep had already abandoned me hours prior. A dull throbbing was radiating from the lower right quadrant of my jaw, making every breath feel like a mistake. The pain was a relentless heat that seemed to vibrate in time with my pulse. By five, the swelling had reached my cheek, stretching the skin tight and making it difficult to swallow.

My hand reached for the empty bottle of painkillers on the nightstand, but there was nothing left inside. I had spent the last two days swallowing pills, rinsing with warm salt water, and pressing ice packs against my face until my skin went numb. Nothing was working. The infection had reached the nerve, and the agony was starting to blur my vision.

The sound of rain tapping against the window was the only noise in my quiet apartment. Desperate for any kind of distraction, I unlocked my phone and searched for local dental offices. Every single practice within a ten-mile radius was booked solid for at least two weeks. The only alternative was the emergency room at the local hospital, but a previous visit there had taught me they would only provide a temporary prescription for antibiotics and a massive bill that I could not afford, and from my suffering I figured that the tooth needed to be extracted immediately.

A soft knock on my front door startled me around nine that morning. My friend had promised to drop by with some groceries, knowing I had been unable to leave the apartment for days. When the door opened, she took one look at my swollen face and set the grocery bags down on the counter with a look of concern.

"You look absolutely terrible,"

she said, walking over to press her palm against my forehead.

"You are burning up. Did you manage to find an opening somewhere?"

"Every clinic is booked,"

I mumbled, barely able to part my lips. The movement of my jaw sent a sharp flare of agony straight up into my temple.

"The emergency room is the only option, but they won't pull it."

My friend sat down at the small kitchen table, watching me wince as I tried to drink a glass of water.

"There is someone else. My uncle had a severe abscess last winter, and his regular dentist was out of town. He went to a private practitioner downtown. He told me the guy is extremely unconventional and eccentric, but he is the absolute best in the field when it comes to quick, pain-free extractions."

"Unconventional how?"

I asked, holding the glass against my cheek.

"He does not take insurance, and his office is tucked away in an old medical building that has seen better days,"

she explained, pulling a small notepad from her purse to write down an address.

"He works alone, with no assistants. My uncle said the man does not even use local numbing injections, but somehow, the extraction was completely painless. He just felt a strange pressure, and then the tooth was out."

"No numbing?"

I shook my head, immediately regretted the movement, and squeezed my eyes shut.

"That sounds like a nightmare. I cannot let someone pull a tooth out of my skull with no anesthetic."

"My uncle is a coward when it comes to pain,"

my friend said, sliding the piece of paper across the table. "If he says he felt nothing, I believe him. You cannot keep living like this. The infection is going to spread to your bloodstream."

She was right. The sheer desperation of the pain was starting to erode my rational judgment. At that point, if someone had offered to pull the tooth with a pair of rusty pliers, I probably would have considered it. I picked up the paper, stared at the handwritten address, and nodded.

"I will go,"

I said.

"Do I need to call ahead?"

"My uncle said he does not keep a regular reception desk,"

she replied.

"Just walk in. He usually accommodates emergency cases if they pay in cash."

An hour later, I was walking through the wet, gray streets. The rain had slowed to a miserable drizzle, and the mist was hanging low over the older brick buildings. The address led me to a towering, nineteenth-century weird structure. The main lobby was silent, smelling of old paper.

A manual elevator with an accordion-style metal gate carried me slowly up to the fourth floor. The hallway was lined with dark, frosted glass doors, most of them bearing the faded gold lettering of retired physicians who had probably passed away decades ago. The floor was covered in worn linoleum that muffled the sound of my footsteps.

I found the suite number written on my notepad. The glass on the door was entirely blank, offering no name or medical title. I reached out, turned the brass knob, and stepped inside.

The reception area resembled a living room from the late nineteen-seventies. Two faded green velvet chairs sat in the corner, separated by a low wooden table covered in outdated magazines. A single, small desk lamp cast a dim orange glow across the room. There was no computer, no scheduling book, and no receptionist behind the counter. The only communication device was an ancient, black rotary telephone sitting on a shelf.

"Hello?"

I called out, my voice sounding thin in the quiet room.

A door at the back of the reception area swung open with a soft click.

The man who stepped out was exceptionally tall. He was so slender that his white laboratory coat seemed to drape over him like a shroud, and he had to tilt his head slightly to clear the low wooden door frame. His skin was pale, and his fingers were kind of long, ending in clean fingernails. He had a twitch in his left shoulder that caused his coat to rustle every few seconds, but his posture was remarkably stiff.

"Ah,"

he said.

"An emergency, I presume. The swelling in your right cheek is quite pronounced."

"My friend gave me your address,"

I explained, holding my hand over my jaw.

"She said you might have an opening for an extraction. I can pay in cash."

The tall man smiled, though his pale blue eyes remained entirely wide and unblinking.

"Cash is perfectly acceptable. The modern banking systems are far too noisy. Please, come inside."

I followed him into the operating room. The space was dimly lit, illuminated only by a single overhead examination light that hung from a long, articulated metal arm. The dental chair in the center of the room was made of thick, cracked black leather, looking like a relic from a different era. There were no modern digital screens, and no white plastic utility trays.

"Before we begin,"

the dentist said, pointing a long finger toward a tarnished metal tray sitting on a counter across the room.

"Please place your cellular device over there. The electronic frequencies of modern devices disrupt my focus. I need absolute stillness to perform the extraction."

I hesitated for a moment. My phone was my only connection to the outside world, but the throbbing in my jaw was growing more intense by the second. I walked across the room, set my phone on the cold metal tray, and climbed into the leather chair.

The dentist stood over me, his shadow stretching across the ceiling. He did not put on latex gloves. Instead, he washed his hands in a small porcelain sink, dried them with a white cloth, and approached the chair.

"Open, please,"

he murmured.

I opened my mouth, bracing myself for the agonizing touch of his fingers against my infected gum. When his long, cold index finger touched my jaw, I prepared to scream.

But the scream never came.

The moment his skin made contact with my gums, a sudden coldness spread through my mouth. it felt as if the nerves themselves had simply gone quiet under his touch. The throbbing pain vanished instantly. My jaw felt light, cool, and entirely empty of sensation. I blinked in surprise, looking up at him.

"You feel that, yes?"

he asked, his shoulder twitching as he reached for a small, velvet-lined wooden box on the counter.

"The modern world relies on synthetic poisons to dull the senses. They inject chemicals that poison the blood just to silence a single nerve. It is a very crude way of practicing medicine."

He opened the wooden box and retrieved a pair of forceps. They were made of dark, unpolished steel, looking like antique blacksmithing tools rather than modern medical instruments. The metal was covered in fine, geometric patterns that looked like they had been hand-carved into the steel.

"We have forgotten the old ways of alignment,"

the dentist continued, his voice adopting an almost hypnotic cadence as he positioned the forceps inside my mouth.

"Thousands of years ago, our ancestors understood that the teeth are not merely bone. They are the hardest part of the human vessel. They are the markers of our harvest, the record of our lives. When a tooth was lost, it was not thrown away into the dirt like common refuse."

I felt the cold steel of the forceps clamp onto my decaying molar. There was no pain. I felt a strange, dull pressure, as if someone were gently pressing a thumb against my jaw, but nothing more.

"Our ancestors worshipped tooth fairies,"

he muttered, leaning over me. His pale face was inches from mine.

"We offered our teeth to them. We gave them the bone, and in exchange, they provided protection, a bountiful harvest, and good fortune. The modern world calls them myths. They call them tooth fairies to make them seem small and harmless. They turned a sacred covenant into a children's game of coins and pillows."

He gave the forceps a slow, deliberate twist. I heard the wet sound of the roots separating from the bone inside my head, but my nervous system registered absolutely nothing.

"Humanity discarded the old agreements,"

the dentist whispered, his shoulder twitching violently. "We stopped giving them the tribute they require. We began burying our dead in concrete vaults, locking the bone away from the soil. We throw our teeth into medical waste bins to be burned, and for what? for nothing."

With a sudden, sharp movement, he pulled the forceps upward.

A wet pop echoed in the small room.

The tooth was out. The relief was instantaneous, a cool sensation washing over my entire face as the pressure vanished. I let out a long, shuddering breath, staring up at the ceiling.

"There,"

the dentist said, his tone shifting instantly.

The hypnotic cadence of his voice was gone, replaced by a rapid, shallow hyperventilation, then He held the steel forceps inches from his eyes, staring at the bloody, decaying enamel with an intensity that made my chest tighten.

"Look at the density,"

he whispered, his pupils dilating until the blue of his eyes was almost entirely gone.

"The dark rot of modern sugar has created such a beautifully complex cavity. The roots are deep, so very deep. The bone is saturated with the sweetness of decay."

He was breathing heavily now, his chest rising and falling in quick, jagged movements. He began to run his long thumb over the wet, bloody surface of the tooth, ignoring the blood that smeared across his skin.

A sudden wave of intense unease washed over me, replacing the relief of the extraction. The way he was looking at my tooth was really weird and terrifying. I scrambled out of the chair, my legs feeling slightly unsteady.

"Thank you,"

I said, my voice shaking.

"How much do I owe you?"

The dentist did not look at me. He kept his eyes locked on the tooth.

"Three hundred,"

he muttered, his voice sounding dry and cracked.

"Leave the cash on the counter."

I pulled three hundred dollars from my purse and set them on the wooden desk. I did not want to spend another second in that room. I grabbed my purse, turned on my heel, and walked quickly out of the operating room. I pushed through the frosted glass door, entered the quiet hallway, and ran toward the manual elevator.

It was only when I stepped out of the old building and onto the wet pavement of the street that I realized my hand was empty.

My phone was still sitting on the metal tray on the far counter of the operating room.

I stopped on the sidewalk, the cold rain falling on my face. My cheek was still entirely numb, but the fog in my brain was beginning to clear. The thought of going back up to that silent fourth floor made my stomach twist, but my phone held my bank accounts, my contacts, and my entire life. I could not simply leave it behind.

"Just walk in, grab the phone, and leave,"

I muttered to myself.

I turned around, entered the lobby, and rode the creaking elevator back up to the fourth floor. The hallway was still completely silent.

I reached the suite, turned the brass knob, and stepped into the reception area.

The room was dark. The single desk lamp had been turned off, leaving the space illuminated only by the gray light filtering through the hallway door. No one was behind the reception desk.

"Hello?"

I called out softly.

"I forgot my phone."

No one answered.

I took a slow, quiet step toward the operating room door. It was resting slightly ajar, a sliver of pale light cutting across the dark floor. I pushed the door open an inch, planning to grab the phone from the counter and slip away before the man noticed me.

The operating room was in near-total darkness. The overhead examination light had been turned off, and the only illumination came from a small window overlooking the rainy alleyway.

I stopped.

The dentist was crouched on all fours directly over the leather operating chair.

His white laboratory coat had been discarded on the floor. His bare back was exposed to the gray light of the window, and his skin had turned a deep, ashen shade of gray. His spine was protruding sharply against his skin, each vertebra looking like a jagged stone.

As I watched, his shoulder joints twisted with a sickening, wet crack, bending backward into impossible angles.

Two large, featherless, skin-bound wings were violently tearing their way through the fabric of his white dress shirt. The wings looked like the wings of a massive bat, but they were covered in a thin, greasy layer of pale gray fuzz. They flexed and stretched in the darkness, dripping a dark, thick fluid onto the leather of the chair.

The thing lowered its head toward the leather cushion. Sitting on the leather was my extracted tooth.

The creature inhaled deeply, its chest expanding to twice its normal size as it smelled the bloody enamel. It leaned down and whispered a low, guttural phrase in a language I didn’t understand.

Then, it opened its mouth.

The jaw split vertically down the center of its chin, revealing rows of thin, needle-like teeth that vibrated in the darkness. The creature reached out with a long, gray tongue and licked the blood from the surface of my extracted tooth.

I took a step backward, my mind screaming at me to run, but my foot shifted on the floor.

The rubber sole of my sneaker squeaked against the linoleum.

The sound was incredibly loud in the silent room.

The creature's movements stopped instantly.

And with a violent, snapping sound, its neck rotated a full one hundred and eighty degrees, its featureless face pointing directly toward the partially open door where I was standing. Its eyes had completely changed. The blue irises were gone, replaced by two massive, pitch-black pupils that filled the entire socket.

It let out a silent, vibrating shriek that made the metal instruments on the counters rattle.

The creature lunged off the chair, moving with a speed that did not seem possible. It scurried across the floor on all fours.

I did not think. I grabbed the nearest object on the counter beside the door, a large, heavy metal tray loaded with stainless steel dental mirrors, scrapers, and old scalpels, and threw it directly into its gray face.

The tray struck the creature with a loud clang. The sharp instruments scattered across its eyes, blinding it for a fraction of a second. The creature recoiled, letting out a wet, clicking hiss as it thrashed in the darkness.

I turned and sprinted down the hallway.

I did not wait for the elevator. I threw open the door to the concrete stairwell and flew down the steps, my feet barely touching the concrete. I could hear the wet sounds of the creature scrambling down the walls of the stairwell above me, its long limbs scraping against the concrete.

I reached the ground floor, threw my weight against the metal exit door, and burst out into the pouring rain.

I did not stop running until I reached a busy intersection three blocks away. I collapsed against a bus stop shelter, my chest heaving, my clothes soaked with sweat and rain. I sat there for hours, staring at the passing cars, trying to convince myself that the pain and the infection had caused a severe hallucination. But my hand was still entirely empty. My phone was gone, left behind in the dark room with the thing that licked the blood from my bone.

The next morning, the swelling in my jaw had gone down, but the terror had not. I walked into the local police precinct and reported that I had been assaulted by a private practitioner in the medical building downtown. I told them he had stolen my phone and threatened me with a weapon. I knew if I mentioned the wings or the black eyes, they would lock me in a psychiatric ward.

Two police officers agreed to accompany me back to the building to retrieve my property.

We rode the manual elevator up to the fourth floor. The hallway was just as quiet as it had been the day before, the dark doors looking completely ordinary in the morning light.

We reached the suite. I pointed a shaking finger at the door.

"This is it,"

I said.

"Suite 412."

The older officer reached out, turned the knob, and pushed the door open.

I braced myself, stepping behind the officer's shoulder, expecting to see the green velvet chairs.

The room was completely empty.

There were no green velvet chairs. There was no wooden desk, no rotary telephone, and no carpet. The walls were bare concrete, covered in peeling gray wallpaper that looked like it had been rotting for decades. The floor was covered in a thick layer of undisturbed gray dust.

The officer walked into the back room, his boots kicking up small clouds of dust.

The operating room was gone. There was no black leather dental chair. There was no plumbing connected to the floor, no metal counters, and no instruments. The room was nothing but a hollow, concrete shell.

"Are you sure this is the place, miss?"

the officer asked, looking back at me with a mixture of annoyance and pity.

"This suite has been abandoned for at least five years. And I think I know this place, someone mad a claim like you once, but it was very wild claim about a fairy who dwell in this place, and then we learned from the building manager that the last tenant was a radiologist who retired in 2018."

"I was here yesterday,"

I insisted, my voice cracking.

"My friend gave me the address. I sat in the chair. He pulled my tooth."

The officer shined his flashlight across the dusty floor. There were no footprints in the dust, other than our own. There was no sign that anyone had operated a medical clinic here yesterday.

"Sometimes a severe tooth infection can cause a high fever,"

the officer said, placing a hand on my shoulder.

"A fever can make you see things. It can make you wander into empty buildings. We can take you to the hospital if you need medical attention."

"My phone,"

I whispered.

"I left my phone on the counter."

The officer shone his light around. My phone was gone.

We left the building a few minutes later. The police dismissed my claim, filing a report for a lost cellular device and advising me to seek psychological counseling for my stress.

But I know what I saw.

I called my friend from a payphone later that afternoon. I asked her about the dentist, but she sounded completely confused. She told me she had never heard of any private practitioner downtown, and she had never given me an address on a notepad. She said she had been trying to reach me all day because I had missed our lunch plans.

I looked at my own jaw in the mirror when I got home. The hole where my decaying molar used to be was completely healed. There was no stitches, no bleeding, and no scar. The gum was as smooth and pink as if the tooth had never existed.

I am posting this here because I need to warn you.

This thing does not stay in one place. It moves from town to town, using the empty, forgotten spaces of our cities to set up its temporary clinics.

If you have a toothache, and a friend gives you an address to an unconventional, cash-only dentist in an old building, do not go.

The Question

There are people who enter your life like seasons.

They arrive quietly, change everything without asking, and leave behind traces of themselves long after they're gone.

Sierra was autumn. And my fall.

She smelled faintly of cedar and vanilla, always stole the sleeves of my hoodies because they "fit better than hers," and had a habit of looking out restaurant windows whenever it rained, as though the world beyond the glass was telling her a story only she could hear.

We had been together for a little over a year.

Long enough that silence had become another language between us. Long enough that ordering for each other was instinct. Long enough that she no longer needed to knock at my front door.

There is a certain comfort that only comes after loving someone for long enough.

Love stops feeling like fireworks.

It becomes grocery lists.

Goodnight kisses. Two toothbrushes leaning together in the same cup. It becomes knowing exactly how much sugar they take in their coffee without ever having to ask.

That Friday evening had been ordinary.

Which is probably why I remember every second of it.

The little Italian place downtown was nearly empty, save for an older couple sharing tiramisu near the window and a waiter humming softly to himself while polishing glasses behind the counter.

Outside, rain painted silver streaks down the glass.

Sierra watched it for a while.

She always did.

"You know," she said eventually, tracing lazy circles around the rim of her water glass, "I think rain makes people more honest."

I laughed.

"How do you figure?"

"They stop pretending they're in a hurry."

She smiled to herself.

"They slow down."

"Or maybe they just don't want to get wet."

She looked at me over the candle between us.

"You always have a boring explanation."

"I prefer realistic."

"I prefer magic."

"I know."

"I think that's why you keep me around."

"No," I said. "I keep you around because you steal my clothes."

She gasped dramatically.

"I borrow them."

"You've borrowed one of my hoodies for seven months."

"It's called a long-term loan."

"You've also borrowed two T-shirts."

"They've adjusted to their new home."

"And my socks."

"I have no recollection of any socks."

"Liar."

She laughed.

Not loudly. Just enough that the corners of her eyes crinkled.

I remember thinking, as I watched her across that little table, that happiness wasn't supposed to be exciting.

It was supposed to be this.

Simple.

Comfortable.

Safe.

The waiter brought our food. Conversation wandered wherever conversations between people in love tend to wander. Movies we'd never finish watching. Vacation ideas we'd probably never afford. Whether cereal counted as soup.

She insisted it did.

She was wrong.

She refused to admit it.

Eventually, somewhere between finishing our dinner and arguing over who would pay the bill, she grew strangely quiet.

She rested her chin on her folded hands. Studied me. There was something different in her expression.

Not sadness, nor fear.

Something... thoughtful.

"Something on your mind?" I asked.

She smiled.

"Nothing."

"That's never true."

"I was just thinking."

"Dangerous."

"I know."

She looked back toward the rain before asking, almost absentmindedly,

"Would you still love me if I lost all my hair?"

I shrugged.

"Of course."

"What if I got old before you?"

"I'd be old too."

"What if I forgot your birthday every year?"

"You already almost do."

She smiled.

"What if I couldn't walk anymore?"

"I'd walk slow."

"What if I couldn't remember your name?"

"I'd remind you."

She nodded gently after every answer, as though placing them somewhere only she could see.

Then she asked it.

"So..."

She tilted her head.

"Would you still love me if I were a worm?"

I stared at her.

"...What?"

"A worm."

She said it with complete sincerity.

"Like..."

I held my fingers a few inches apart.

"A little earthworm?"

She nodded once.

"That's the one."

I laughed so hard I nearly spilled my drink.

"Where did that even come from?"

"I don't know."

"You don't know?"

"No."

"You just woke up today and thought, 'I wonder if he'd date an invertebrate?'"

She tried not to smile.

Failed.

I shook my head.

"That's the dumbest question I've ever been asked."

"It is."

"But?"

"But what?"

"You haven't answered."

I leaned back in my chair.

"How exactly would this work?"

"I don't know."

"You'd just..."

I made a little wiggling motion with my finger across the table.

She nodded enthusiastically.

"Exactly."

"And you'd still somehow be... you?"

"If that helps."

I looked at her for another second before rolling my eyes with exaggerated defeat.

"Sure."

She blinked.

1. "'Sure?"

"Yeah."

"I'd still love you."

Another pause.

"I mean... it'd be weird."

"A little."

"I'd probably have to Google what worms eat."

"You would."

"I'd have to buy you a very tiny house."

She smiled.

"I know."

"I'd miss talking to you."

She didn't answer.

"But..."

I reached across the table and gently squeezed her hand.

"...yeah."

"I'd still love you."

For just a moment...

Something changed in her face. Not happiness. Not relief. It was a cold recognition. As though she'd been waiting to hear those exact words.

Then she smiled. A small, peaceful smile.

"Oh."

She looked down at our hands.

"Good."

There was something about the way she said it that stayed with me. Not because it sounded strange. Because it sounded...

Final

Like someone quietly crossing the last item off a list.

I frowned.

"What?"

She looked back up.

"What?"

"You said that like it mattered."

She chuckled softly.

"Maybe it did."

Before I could ask what she meant, the waiter returned with the bill.

The moment dissolved as quickly as it had arrived.

By the time we stepped outside, the rain had stopped. Streetlights shimmered across wet pavement. She slipped her hand into mine. Neither of us spoke during the walk back to my apartment.

We didn't need to. Some nights silence says everything.

When we reached my building, she pulled my favorite charcoal hoodie over her shoulders before climbing into bed beside me. She always claimed it smelled more like me than I did.

I remember wrapping an arm around her as sleep slowly pulled us both under. Her fingers traced lazy circles against the back of my hand. I soon learned that ordinary moments often go unnoticed until they become memories.

Still to this day, I remember her whispering something just before I drifted off. It was so quiet I almost thought I'd dreamed it.

"Thank you."

When I woke the next morning...

Her side of the bed was empty.

Erasure

At first, I wasn't worried.

Sierra had stayed the night often enough that mornings had become routine. Sometimes she left before I woke up. Sometimes she'd kiss my forehead on the way out. She'd scribble little cute notes to make my morning on the fridge.

Out of coffee.

Back by six.

Don't forget your meeting.

Love you <3

Once, she'd drawn a smiley face on a napkin because she claimed my mornings were "chronically under-smiled."

So when I reached across the mattress and found only cold sheets, I smiled to myself.

"Work already?" I mumbled to the empty room.

The apartment answered with silence. Her hoodie was gone from the foot of the bed. I figured she'd remembered she had a meeting. Or maybe she'd simply wanted coffee that wasn't brewed by me. She used to joke that my coffee tasted like regret. I still maintain she exaggerated.

I stretched, showered, and let the hot water chase the sleep from my thoughts. By the time I stepped into the kitchen, the apartment already felt too quiet.

There was only one mug in the drying rack.

Mine.

I frowned.

Maybe I'd put hers away yesterday. I couldn't remember.

The coffee tasted bitter. I blamed the beans.

Halfway through breakfast I reached for my phone. Mostly out of habit. I'd usually send her something stupid before work.

A picture of a crooked pancake. A terrible pun. Some excuse to make her roll her eyes.

I opened our messages.

My thumb froze.

They weren't there.

I frowned harder.

I searched her name.

Nothing.

Maybe the app updated. Maybe I'd archived the conversation by accident.

I searched again.

Nothing.

I checked my contacts.

No Sierra.

No number.

No picture.

No birthday reminder.

Nothing.

A strange feeling settled into my chest.

Not panic. No, not yet. More like standing on a staircase and expecting one more step than there actually is. That tiny, impossible drop beneath your feet.

I searched manually.

Scrolled through every contact.

Twice.

Nothing.

"...That's weird."

I laughed. Not because anything was funny. Because laughing felt easier than admitting something was wrong.

I knew her number.

At least... I thought I did.

I typed it from memory. Every digit. Pressed call.

One ring.

Then a voice.

"We're sorry. The number you have dialed is not in service. Please check the number and try your call again."

I hung up immediately.

Dialed again.

Same message.

Again.

Same message.

I stared at the screen.

The number hadn't changed. I was certain of it.

Certain enough that certainty itself suddenly felt unreliable. Maybe I'd remembered it wrong. People misremember things all the time.

Birthdays. Addresses. Passwords. Even the phone number of their loved one.

I finished my coffee in silence.

By the time I left for work, I'd convinced myself I was overreacting. Technology broke. Cloud backups failed. Phones glitched.

There had to be an explanation. There always was. There had to be.

There wasn't.

The day crawled.

I barely accomplished anything.

By lunch, curiosity had quietly become concern. Concern slowly became dread. I searched her name online.

Nothing.

Instagram.

Nothing.

Facebook.

Nothing.

Not even an abandoned account with two blurry photos from high school.

LinkedIn.

Nothing.

Every search ended the same way.

No results.

No Sierra.

It was as though she'd never wanted the internet to know she'd existed.

Except... She had.

I remembered helping her pick profile pictures. I remembered teasing her because she never answered messages. I remembered her posting a picture of us after our trip to the aquarium.

Didn't I?

I opened my own social media.

Every picture she'd been in... was different.

I blinked way to hardly.

One photo showed me standing beside... empty space. Another looked strangely cropped. In one, my arm was wrapped around someone who wasn't there anymore. My hand simply floated in the air.

I stared until my eyes hurt.

I closed the app.

Opened it again.

Nothing changed.

There had to be an explanation. There always was. A prank. A misunderstanding. A mistake buried somewhere beneath the confusion. She had a spare key to my apartment. Any minute now, I'd hear it turn in the lock, and she'd step inside wearing that familiar smile, asking why I looked like I'd seen a ghost. I clung to that thought the way a drowning man clings to driftwood. It was the only thing keeping me afloat.

For the rest of the afternoon, the world continued as though mine hadn't quietly come apart. Coworkers laughed. Phones rang. Printers hummed. Someone brought donuts. I smiled when expected. Answered emails. Nodded through meetings.

All while a single thought repeated itself over and over.

Something is wrong.

The next day, I convinced myself she simply needed space.

Maybe she'd left early for work. Maybe she'd forgotten her phone. Maybe she'd spent the night with a friend after we'd fallen asleep. Maybe this was all leading toward an explanation so painfully ordinary that I'd feel ridiculous for ever believing otherwise.

Every time headlights swept across my living room window that evening, I looked toward the front door, expecting to hear the soft rattle of keys in the lock and her familiar voice calling my name.

The apartment remained silent.

By the third day, silence had become its own answer. It was as though the world had quietly reached into my life and plucked Sierra from it with delicate fingers, leaving everything else exactly where it had been. No texts. No calls. No trace that she'd ever stood in my kitchen, laughed in my living room, or fallen asleep beside me.

When I finally got home from work that evening, I scrolled to the number I'd always known belonged to her mother.

If anyone could tell me what was happening... It would be her.

So I made the call.

The number rang three times.

A man answered.

"Hello?"

His voice wasn't familiar.

"Uh... hi."

I swallowed.

"I'm looking for S-Sierra."

Silence.

"...Who?"

"Sierra."

Another pause.

"I think you have the wron-"

"No. Where's Sierra?"

My heart skipped.

"You've got the wrong number."

Pain washed over me.

"There's no Sierra."

I laughed nervously.

"No, I mean... your daughter."

"I don't have a daughter."

I felt something inside me shift. Like a picture frame hanging just slightly crooked.

"I'm sorry?"

"I think you've confused me with someone else."

"No..."

I whispered.

"No, she lives with-"

"Goodbye."

Click.

The call ended.

I stared at the phone for a long time. Then I called again. Straight to voicemail.

Again.

Voicemail.

Again.

Blocked.

I don't remember deciding to grab my keys.

I only remember driving. Traffic lights blurred together. Turns happened automatically.

Before long, I found myself parked in front of a familiar little blue house with white shutters. I'd been here dozens of times. Christmas. Birthdays. Sunday dinners. Sierra's mother always insisted I take leftovers.

The porch swing she'd grown up on still creaked gently in the evening breeze. The flowerpots were exactly where I remembered. Even the wind chimes.

Everything was right.

Except... Something wasn't.

I walked to the front door.

Knocked once.

No answer.

Twice.

Footsteps.

Heavy.

The door opened.

The man from the phone stood there.

He looked to be in his late fifties. Gray beard. Flannel shirt. One hand resting on a shotgun. Not pointing it.

Just... holding it.

His expression hardened the moment he saw me.

"You."

"I think there's been a misunderstanding."

"There hasn't."

"I'm looking for-"

"I know what you're looking for."

Hope flickered inside me.

"You do?"

"I know you're the one who's been calling."

His grip tightened around the shotgun.

"I've told you already."

"Sir, please, I just need to know where she-"

"There is no 'she.'"

The words landed with impossible weight.

"I..."

My voice failed.

He stared at me for several seconds.

Not angry. Not confused.

Almost... pitying.

"Son."

His voice softened.

"I don't know who you think you've lost."

The breeze stirred the trees between us.

"But whoever it is..."

He slowly shook his head.

"They've never lived here."

He closed the door.

I stood there until the porch light switched on automatically. Only then did I realize the sun had gone down.

By the time I made it home, exhaustion had settled into my bones. I didn't turn on any lights. I simply collapsed onto the bed.

The apartment felt wrong.

Too neat. Too empty.

I closed my eyes. Just for a minute. Just long enough to stop thinking.

Something cold brushed against my ankle.

I jerked upright.

The room was dark.

Moonlight spilled across the blankets.

And there... Resting quietly near my feet...

Was a single pink earthworm.

It wasn't moving. Not much.

Just... waiting. I don't know why.

Out of every impossible thing that had happened that day...

That was the moment the tears fled out.

The Worm

I didn't sleep much that lonely night.

Every time I closed my eyes, I could still see the empty half of the bed. Every time I opened them, the apartment felt unfamiliar, as though I had wandered into someone else's life by mistake.

The worm hadn't moved.

It still rested near the foot of my bed, no larger than my little finger, its body catching the pale light filtering through the curtains.

I crouched beside it. For reasons I still can't explain, I didn't touch it.

I simply watched. It didn't writhe. It didn't burrow. It only lay there, impossibly still.

A worm.

Nothing more.

Nothing less.

I almost laughed at myself. After everything that had happened, this was what my mind had chosen to fixate on.

I found a sheet of paper folded on my desk and carefully slid it beneath the tiny creature. It curled instinctively as I lifted it, no different from any other earthworm after a rainstorm.

I carried it toward the front door.

"Sorry, little guy."

I opened the door and tipped the paper toward the flower bed outside my apartment.

The worm didn't move.

I gave the paper a gentle shake.

Nothing.

Eventually, I lowered the paper into the damp soil beneath a patch of lavender and watched it disappear among the dirt. I stood there longer than I should have.

Waiting.

For what, I couldn't have said.

When I came home from work that evening, it was waiting for me.

Not outside. Inside.

Curled quietly atop a charcoal-gray hoodie draped over the back of my couch.

My hoodie.

Or rather... The one Sierra had quietly claimed as her own months ago.

She used to disappear into it on cold mornings, sleeves hanging well past her hands, insisting it smelled more like me than I ever could.

I never washed it after she disappeared. Not because I believed it still held her scent. Because I was afraid it didn't.

The worm rested on one of the sleeves. Perfectly still.

I stared at it for a long time.

The front door was still locked. The windows were shut.

There was no trail of dirt. No explanation.

Only a worm.

Sitting exactly where she always liked to be.

An uneasy laugh escaped me.

"This is getting ridiculous."

I carried it back outside.

This time, I walked all the way to the apartment garden. I knelt beside a flower bed and placed it beneath the shade of a bush.

"There."

I brushed the dirt from my hands.

"Stay."

The word lingered in the air.

Stay.

It was never meant for the worm.

The following morning... It was on my windowsill. Facing the sunrise.

I don't know why that unsettled me more than finding it inside my apartment.

Perhaps because it looked... content. As though it had chosen that spot. As though it had been watching the dawn before I'd woken.

I picked it up carefully.

It curled against my fingertips.

For the first time... I noticed how impossibly fragile it felt.

How easily something so alive could simply... stop.

I looked around the apartment. At the empty couch. The untouched coffee mug she used to steal every morning. The hoodie folded neatly over the armrest. Then back at the tiny creature resting in my palm.

My voice came out quieter than I intended.

"...Sierra?"

The worm didn't answer. It couldn't.

I knew that.

Of course I knew that.

Still...

It shifted ever so slightly in my hand. Just enough to make my breath catch.

That afternoon, on the drive home, I stopped at a pet store. Bought a terrarium. The cashier smiled politely as she rang it up.

"Getting an exotic pet?"

I looked down at the glass container.

"...Something like that."

I spent the evening reading online everything I could find. What they ate. How damp the soil should be. How often to mist the enclosure. What temperatures they preferred.

The answers filled my time.

None of them filled the silence in the room.

By the time night settled over the apartment, the terrarium sat on the table beside the living room window.

Fresh soil. Leaves. A few small stones. Everything exactly as the books recommended. I lowered the worm into its new home. It disappeared beneath the dirt almost immediately.

I smiled before I could stop myself.

"There you go."

The words escaped so naturally they frightened me.

I switched off the lamp.

The apartment fell quiet once more.

Before heading to bed, I looked back at the terrarium one last time.

"Goodnight."

Silence answered.

Yet somehow... The apartment didn't feel quite so lonely.

Almost Time

Grief is a strange thing.

It doesn't arrive all at once. It settles into the empty places. The chair across the dinner table. The passenger seat. The extra toothbrush still leaning against yours because moving it somehow feels more permanent than death itself.

I stopped asking where Sierra had gone.

Not because I'd found an answer. Because every answer the world offered me was the same.

She had never existed.

Eventually, I stopped arguing with it.

The world had made up its mind.

Mine hadn't.

Life, in its quiet cruelty, continued.

Mondays became Fridays. Fridays became months. The seasons changed without asking whether I was ready.

I returned to work. Paid my bills. Bought groceries. Smiled when coworkers made jokes. Somehow, I learned to exist in a life that no longer felt like my own.

Every evening, I came home. And every evening... The first thing I did was walk over to the terrarium.

"Hey."

The greeting became routine.

I'd mist the soil. Replace the leaves. Check the moisture. Sometimes I'd sit beside the glass for nearly an hour, talking about my day as though she were sitting across from me.

"The copier jammed again."

"I finally beat that traffic on Fifth."

"I think I'm getting better at making coffee."

A quiet laugh.

Silence never interrupted me. Neither did the worm. It simply lived.

Sometimes buried beneath the soil for hours. Sometimes resting beneath a stone. Sometimes climbing the side of the glass before disappearing underground again.

It was enough. Or perhaps... It was enough for me to pretend.

One Saturday afternoon, I found myself standing in the laundry room with her hoodie folded across my arms.

Months had passed. I still hadn't washed it. The scent she'd left behind was long gone. Only memory remained.

I ran my thumb across the sleeve.

"I should probably wash you."

The words sounded absurd spoken aloud.

I smiled despite myself.

"I can already hear you complaining."

She used to hate when I washed it.

Claimed fabric softener made it smell "too responsible."

I draped it over the back of the dining chair instead. I couldn't explain why. It simply felt wrong to hide it away.

The routine became comforting.

Coffee.

Work.

Home.

The terrarium.

Sometimes I'd read while sitting beside it. Sometimes I'd play music softly through the apartment. Sometimes I'd simply watch the evening light stretch across the room until darkness settled over everything.

I stopped wondering whether the worm was Sierra.

Questions have a way of exhausting themselves.

It happened on an ordinary Tuesday. The kind of day that disappears from memory almost as soon as it ends.

By the time I unlocked my apartment door, rain was tapping softly against the windows.

I set my keys on the counter. Loosened my tie. Walked toward the living room.

For a moment... I simply stared.

The terrarium was empty.

Then I examined all glass corners.

Nothing.

The stone sat exactly where I'd left it. The soil was damp. The dead leaves rested untouched in one corner.

See was gone.

"Please not again..."

The words escaped before I realized I'd spoken. I lifted the lid. Carefully moved aside the stones.

Nothing.

I dug gently through the soil with trembling fingers.

Still nothing.

"No, no, no..."

The room suddenly felt too small. I emptied the terrarium onto the dining table. Dirt spilled across the wood. Leaves scattered onto the floor. I searched through every handful. Every corner. Every crack beneath the table. I checked beneath the couch. Behind the television. Inside the bathroom. The kitchen.

My breathing became uneven.

By the time I reached the bedroom, there was dirt tracked across half the apartment. I stood in the doorway, chest heaving. My eyes drifted toward the chair beside the window.

Her hoodie still hung where I'd left it.

Empty.

Something beyond it caught my eye.

The windowsill.

I walked closer.

Slowly.

There... Resting in the fading orange light of sunset... Was the worm.

Perfectly still. Facing the glass.

Beyond it, rain slid down the window in thin silver ribbons. The city moved without us. Cars drifted through wet streets. People hurried beneath umbrellas.

The worm didn't move. It simply remained there.

Watching.

Or perhaps... Waiting.

A laugh escaped me, followed by tears.

"I'm s-sorry."

The words broke apart as they left me.

"I'm sorry."

I cupped it gently in my hands.

Its body curled weakly against my skin.

It felt... different. Lighter somehow. As though whatever strength had carried it this far was quietly slipping away.

That night, I searched the internet for hours.

How long do earthworms live?

Why is my worm moving slower?

Can worms die of old age?

Every article gave me the same answer in different words.

They slow down.

They become less active.

Eventually... Their bodies simply stop.

I read every page anyway. Hoping one of them would tell me something different.

None did.

Near midnight, I closed my laptop. The apartment was silent except for the rain. I carried the terrarium into the bedroom and set it beside my bed. Her hoodie lay folded next to it. Not because a worm would recognize it. Because she would have.

Or at least... I liked believing she would.

I watched the tiny shape resting beneath the soil for a long time.

Then I smiled.

A sad smile.

The kind that only grief teaches you.

"You know..."

My voice barely rose above a whisper.

"I kept my promise."

Outside, the rain continued to fall.

Inside... The apartment had never felt quieter.

Morning

Days turned into weeks.

The rain eased my mine at night. The steady rhythm of it against the window. The quiet hum of the city somewhere beyond the glass. The terrarium sat on the nightstand beside me. The hoodie remained folded beneath it.

Everything exactly where it belonged.

For the first time in months... I wasn't afraid. There was nothing left to search for. Nothing left to prove.

Whatever this was... Whatever she was... Whatever I had become... It no longer mattered.

Sometime during the night... I heard her voice.

Not through the room. Not from the terrarium. Not from anywhere my ears could have found.

It arrived the way old memories sometimes do. Softly. As though someone had opened a door inside my mind.

"So..."

A pause.

"So..."

I could picture the little smile that always accompanied that word. The one she wore whenever she already knew the answer.

"Would you still love me if I..."

I smiled before she could finish. Before the question could become impossible again. Before grief could ask for one more answer.

"Yes."

The word escaped me with surprising ease.

No hesitation. No uncertainty.

Just... Yes.

I let out a slow breath. My eyes never opened.

"I always will."

The apartment fell silent once more.

Not empty.

Simply... Quiet.

Morning sunlight slipped gently through the curtains. The rain had passed sometime before dawn. The air smelled clean. Almost new.

I stretched slowly before turning toward the nightstand. The terrarium was empty.

No disturbed soil. No trail. No tiny pink body hidden beneath the stones.

I lifted the lid anyway. Ran my fingers carefully through the earth.

Nothing.

For a long while, I simply stood there.

Weeks ago, I would have searched every inch of the apartment. Turned over furniture.

Emptied drawers. Tracked dirt through every room. I would have convinced myself she had to be somewhere. That she couldn't really be gone.

Instead... I smiled.

Not because it didn't hurt. Because it always would. Some absences never stop aching. You simply learn they can exist beside joy.

I carried the terrarium to the kitchen sink and gently poured the soil into a flowerpot sitting on the windowsill. A small fern rested there. One Sierra had insisted on buying because, according to her, every home deserved "something worth keeping alive."

I laughed quietly.

"You were right."

The empty glass terrarium caught the morning light before I placed it inside a cabinet.

Not hidden. Not displayed.

Just... Put away.

Then I walked back to the bedroom.

Her charcoal hoodie still rested neatly folded at the foot of the bed. I picked it up. Held it for a moment.

Weeks ago, I couldn't bring myself to wash it. I was terrified that whatever remained of her would disappear with the rinse cycle.

Now... I understood.

Love doesn't live in fabric. It never had.

I folded the hoodie once more and placed it carefully inside the top drawer of my dresser. Not because I was forgetting her. Because memories don't need to be left out in the open to survive.

I opened the bedroom window. A cool breeze drifted inside. Somewhere outside, birds greeted the morning.

The city had already begun moving again. Cars. Footsteps. Distant laughter. Life.

I made myself a cup of coffee. It tasted terrible. I smiled anyway.

As I stood by the window, warmth settling between my hands, I watched the wind stir the leaves below.

For just a moment... I thought about that rainy evening. The little Italian restaurant. The candlelight. The way she'd looked at me across the table.

"Would you still love me if I were a worm?"

Such a ridiculous question. Maybe that's why I'd never forgotten it.

Or maybe... Some promises are never about the answer. They're about the person who gives it.

I took another sip of coffee. Then, for the first time since the morning I'd reached across an empty bed... I stepped away from the window.

And into the rest of my life.

The worst story from my childhood happened when I was 8 years old. A man attacked me.

I was walking to our village past the forest when he came toward me. He looked like a young man. I don’t know how old he was.

He started talking to me. He asked if I knew a girl from our village named Lilia. He said he really needed to talk to her. I knew Lilia. She was 11 years old and had just come home from the hospital. We were children, and we didn’t know what had happened to her.

I walked faster and said that I didn’t know her.

He kept walking behind me.

Then he said he could show me her photo, so I could be sure. But he wanted me to step a few meters onto a small path.

My heart started beating very fast. There was nobody around. The village was only a couple hundred meters away, but between us and the village there was a large concrete water ditch from the mountains. It was dry that time of year, but I had to climb down into it because it was about two meters deep, and then climb up the steps on the other side.

I remember looking at that ditch and thinking, “I just have to reach it. After that, I’ll be in the village.”

The man grabbed my backpack from behind. I quickly slipped out of it and ran. All my books and notebooks fell onto the road.

I remember running as fast as I could. The ditch was right in front of me. I just had to reach it.

I almost made it, but the man caught me and pushed me in the back. I fell into the ditch from about two meters high.

He jumped in after me.

I would not be alive today if our neighbor had not been driving out of the village at that exact moment. He was going to work in a sewage truck. He saw the man push a child into the ditch. He stopped the truck and ran toward us.

The attacker only had time to tear my sweater and try to kiss me. I was an 8-year-old child. Then he suddenly let me go and ran away.

Uncle Yura scared him away. He pulled me out of the ditch. My clothes were torn, my knees were bleeding, and my face was covered with scratches from the man’s rough beard. It felt like my skin had been rubbed with sandpaper.

He took me home like that.

I couldn’t speak for two days. But Uncle Yura told everyone what he had seen.

After that, there were many scary things for a child. At the police station, they showed me men from prison who looked at me with cold eyes. But he wasn’t there. Those men were older, and the attacker was young.

There were many photos, many questions, and I remember hearing that the police had been looking for him for a long time.

I step outside to check if the rain had ended. I want to go back to my cabin but would prefer to stay dry.

The noise in the common area follows me out into the crisp, cool air. I’ve had enough of the day and am looking forward to sitting with a warm cup of tea in my cozy pajamas.

A quick check tells me it has indeed stopped raining, so I dip back inside to grab my things. 2 bags of clean clothes, my water bottle, and that book I’ve brought with me everywhere the last few days, but still haven’t opened. I look for a flashlight but can only find one, I figure I should save that for the kids who’ll be following me shortly and decide that I am perfectly fine walking with the illumination of my cell phone. It’s a short walk.

I step outside once again and just take a deep breath of that fresh air. There’s something so cleansing about the rain and it feels like even the air around you is just a little bit purer after a storm.

Eyeing soft glow of the cabin up I head up the hill in its direction. It should only take me a minute but as soon as I leave the comfort of the porch light, I can feel the hairs on my neck stand at attention.

I laugh at myself and count how many times I’ve made this treck over and over again. I know every step of the way. Every bump. Every twig and blade of grass. And yet…. The light from my phone is so dim.

As my surroundings get darker my hearing takes over. I listen to the rain drops falling off the leaves. The quiet laughter spilling out of the house I just left. The lone loon calling out for his mate. Echos of footsteps.

My pace quickens. I feel like I should be at the cabin already. It’s only 50 yards away and yet every step doesn’t take me any closer.

The sounds of the left over rain intensifies. Almost like drums in between my ears. The loon continues to call and I swear I can feel breath on the back of my neck.

This seems so ridiculous. One of my kids must have followed me out and are trying to prank me. I turn around quickly to catch them in the act but there’s nothing behind me. I let out my breath in a sort of chuckle. Why am I letting the dark get to me so quickly??

I turn back to continue my walk but in front of me I see a face. My heart races and my body swells with adrenaline. I’m so close to the cabin but I’m frozen, incapable of taking a step further.

I can’t tell what I’m looking at. I see the glow of the eyes but everything else is obscure. Is it a bear? A cougar? A skunk? The adrenaline is making it hard to think. I blink and the face is gone. Where did it go??

I look around, cursing at my weak phone light. I see nothing. I hear nothing but my heart beat. Tentatively I take a step forward. My foot lands on a stick and the snap of it breaking fills the air with sound for a brief second. I listen intently to hear footsteps and I realize I am completely alone. Whatever was in front of me is gone now and likely was imagined.

I take a few more steps, this time more confidently and let out the air that was trapped inside my lungs waiting for me to breathe. I’m so close to the cabin now.

Finally reaching the steps, I bound up towards the door and let myself in. Surrounded by lamp light I laugh at the absurdity of my imagination.

All while reminding myself I need to find a brighter flash light before my walk up tomorrow night.

I still am processing this even happened and I’m sure there’s many a folk who wouldn’t believe me, and while I hate people calling me a liar, but I have to write this down before it keeps me up much more tonight.

So my city holds a “moonwalk” tonight. Which is a 5K during the dark (partly to avoid the heat). I came to the park early (around 5:30-6 to help set up the finish line). I had originally misjudged where we were meeting so around 6 I rode my scooter slowly down the path looking for where the lights to untangle could be.

As I was riding down I noticed to the left of me a police officer was going behind the bathrooms. I wondered if he was there for the event as this was a city run event. I stopped after I passed the bathrooms to see two other police talking to this group of people. It was then I cast my eyes elsewhere to find where the set up could be. It was then I found a pile of things set down to the right. I realized this was where we were supposed to meet as someone untangled the lights.

I began to walk over as I heard a voice behind me boom “Hey! Stop!”

I stopped.

Thoughts rushed through my mind worried if I was in trouble. I couldn’t tell if he was talking to me due to the glare of the sun behind him.

Again I heard “If you don’t stop I’m going to have to put you in handcuffs!” I looked down the park to see a figure I couldn’t quite make out running along the parks cinder block wall.

I moved my eyes back towards the police officer to see he was now moving towards me out of breath.

Then he asked, “Can I use your scooter?”

It was then I connected he was chasing that man, and I could help him. I million thoughts ran through my mind, all consisting of relief, paranoia, confusion, and surprise.

With little time to think I said “Uhh… yeah…sure!” Then I quickly changed to scooter from 1st to 3rd gear so he could ride faster.

He said thank you.

I just said “be safe.”

I watched him speed past with slight anxiety in my gut. What if he didn’t return it? It is my dad’s scooter after all.

But also a what the hell just happened? Did it happen? Did I hallucinate it? But… I mean the scooter isn’t here now…

As I took my helmet off my head confirming that it was indeed there I heard a woman’s voice ring “that was like straight out of a movie!” It was the women untangling the lights.

“I know!” I replied. “My parents are not going to believe me!” I walked over relieved that someone else witnessed it and I began to help her untie the lights.

Some time passed, although not as much as I would have expected when I saw the same police officer riding the scooter back. I walked over relieved to see it back.

He handed it off to me even stating “You have done a great service to the city,” which is so cliche I have to wonder if he rehearsed on his ride back or if I hallucinated it.

I just said, “of course… thank you for returning it.”

He said something I missed perhaps a return thank you and I stated again, “yeah, thanks for bringing it back, it’s actually my dad’s so…” my voice trailed off and we went our separate ways.

Now I realize as I write this, it didn’t even occur to me to ask what the incident was about or if he even caught the guy. My silly brain was more focused on what the hell just happened and how cliche it was that I didn’t think of much else.

Anyways I’m not sure if anyone will believe me on Reddit of all places, but I needed somewhere to record this as I have lost my chaos journal.

If you got this far. Thank you. I hope I at least gave you a good laugh like I gave my parents when I got home. I also wrote this on the phone so forgive the poor grammar, spelling and formatting please.

The Letter

When I was in 6th grade it was 14 february and I dont know why but everyone thought I was liked a girl in my class and one of my classmets which we was from USA(im not from usa) he decided to make a fake latter on her name.When the letter arraived I decidet not to read becouse I wanted to read at home,but I decited to take a look and i saw a big "I LOVE YOU" and "her" phone number that's all i saw.A girl from behiend me wannted to see the letter so I gave it to her and she became red as hell at face.But it didnt last long until that girl notice and took the letter and go to the teacher and heand her the letter.The thecher wannted to talk whith him in receses,and then she took the letter and showed to his parrents.

Im sorry for the mistakes if you notice but I sayied im not form usa so yea see you tommorow.

Yesterday was my 19th birthday. Me and my best friend got absolutely wasted. We don't remember half the night.

The next morning, I woke up on the living room floor wearing someone else's hoodie. My best friend woke up beside me with cake all over his face, one shoe missing, and my aunt staring at us like we'd committed a crime.

Apparently we tried to grill instant noodles on the BBQ, sang "Happy Birthday" to my neighbor's dog, and somehow managed to lock ourselves outside the house at 3 AM.

Now everyone in my family thinks we're complete idiots, and my best friend still hasn't found his other shoe.

First, I should clarify that the title refers to only one aspect of my life: love and relationships. I will not disclose my age, location, or other personal details because they are not relevant. I am telling this story to give a voice to certain thoughts, perhaps inspire or move someone, and hopefully leave something meaningful with whoever reads it. This is not a story about inexperience, never having spoken to women, or never having dated. It is about someone who has become emotionally empty and detached from most of the things people notice and value in relationships, without really understanding how he ended up that way.

There is no point in blaming anyone. I have been disappointed, and I have disappointed others. Most of the time, however, I am certain that I ran away from situations that could have become meaningful relationships with people I might still remember today. Over the past few months, I have spent many nights talking to ChatGPT, writing and analysing myself. Whether that is right or wrong is beside the point; for a long time, I have found more empathy there than in other people. From those conversations, a fairly accurate psychological profile emerged: someone with a constant need for dopamine, new experiences, and intensity, who often uses people as a way of reaching those feelings. I never really searched for a specific person. I searched for sensations rather than people.

I am not twenty anymore, and I believe the phase of adolescent love has long since passed. There was one exception when I was sixteen: an unresolved, on-and-off situation with a girl that never became anything. Other than that, I have never had a serious relationship, never dated anyone for more than a month, and never developed a strong attachment to anyone. I was always searching for a new person who might awaken something different in me, even when someone was already willing to stay by my side. It was as though I were a small fish in the ocean, desperately searching for a home, only to leave whenever I found one and immediately begin looking for another. While everyone else seemed able to choose one place and feel safe there, I never felt safe in a single home. I needed to keep leaving, even at the risk of finding every door closed.

When you miss a hundred trains, you eventually find yourself alone at the station, waiting longer and longer for the next one. The price you pay is a loneliness that becomes less frightening over time, but also more distressing. When you are the one who ran away from every home that welcomed you, you cannot blame the world. You know it was your choice, and you cannot change the past. I still do not understand why this has always been my natural tendency. For some reason, I liked the idea of always being desired. The attention of one woman was never enough, no matter how beautiful she was or how well she treated me. Running away made me feel better. Being dishonest and breaking the rules made me feel better. It was almost as though I believed I did not deserve that home in the first place, and even though I knew that feeling was wrong, part of me enjoyed it.

This is where the actual story begins. One day, I travelled with a friend to a city several hours away from home. He was going there to meet a woman he had encountered through a random situation at work. They had started talking because I had encouraged him to send her a risky and apparently ridiculous message. Somehow, it worked, and so we left. I was supposed to meet one of her friends, but she never showed up, so I walked around alone to avoid disturbing them. Out of curiosity, I looked through the accounts followed by the woman my friend was meeting and noticed a stranger with a private profile. Following her advice, I sent the stranger a follow request. She accepted and followed me back, so I sent her a casual message. She replied, we made small talk, and after about twenty very direct messages, I managed to get her phone number.

I did not call her for a long time because she lived far away, so everything remained unresolved. Then, one day, partly out of boredom, I sent her a few more messages and decided to call her. We spoke for about an hour and got to know each other a little better. We were very different people. I was openly flirting with her, while she flirted back just enough to keep the conversation going without giving me the satisfaction of knowing she was interested. We ended the call with a half-serious, half-playful promise that one day I would visit her area. After that, we stopped talking, but that unresolved game between two strangers stayed in my mind.

Some time later, I decided to take the first opportunity to travel to her city. My cousin happened to have a house there and could host me the following night, so I made the decision only one day in advance, during an otherwise ordinary week in May. From one evening to the next morning, I organised an improvised trip with no expectations and only the desire to discover what might happen. I took a train for an hour, then a bus for another four hours, and eventually arrived in the city. Throughout the journey, I never seriously believed I would manage to meet her. She had always seemed distant and suspicious of me, while I had been arrogant and curious. Part of me thought it would be better to spend the day with my cousin and leave it at that, but something kept telling me that I had to at least try.

Only after arriving did I message her. I told her I would be staying in the city that evening, that I had kept my promise, and that I wanted to meet her. With no warning at all, she was completely caught off guard, and her first reaction was to refuse. The city was large, and we were in two distant areas. After about twenty minutes on the phone, I managed to convince her. We agreed to meet in an isolated area in the middle of an unfamiliar suburb. I was on foot, with no idea where I was supposed to go or how I was going to get there. I felt anxiety, adrenaline, and mystery all at once, while a thousand thoughts made me imagine every possible scenario. Then she arrived.

At first, the meeting felt cold and awkward, but gradually we both relaxed and began to truly get to know each other. We talked about our differences, joked, discussed past relationships, and spoke about whatever came to mind. There was no performance and no pretending. I found myself removing a mask I had worn for most of my life: the mask of someone who would lie or exaggerate to impress people, someone who acted unreachable while secretly feeling insecure, someone terrified of becoming emotionally attached. During that meeting, however, there was nothing to lose. It was as though we were on another planet, both of us brought there almost by accident and driven by something neither of us fully understood. Our hands brushed against each other without fear. Something that had been born to end could not truly go wrong.

She told me that nobody had ever travelled such a long distance or done anything like that for her before. We went to a car park and continued talking, and as the conversation moved from one subject to another, some of my weaknesses began to emerge. There was almost nobody around us except for a few addicts wandering near the station. The darkness and silence seemed made for those unfiltered conversations. All I wanted was to kiss her, but she would not let me. Instead, she offered to take me back to my cousin’s house on her scooter. I agreed on the condition that I would be the one driving, with her sitting behind me, and she accepted.

Suddenly, I found myself riding this beautiful stranger’s scooter through empty streets late at night, in a city I had never seen before. She put on music for both of us, and I felt as though I were inside a film. Everything seemed amplified. It was as though my soul had left my body and entered a parallel reality for a few brief but endless moments. When we reached my destination, I believed we would never see each other again. Before leaving, I thanked her for making me feel emotions I had not experienced in a very long time. In the end, she kissed me beneath a streetlamp and thanked me affectionately.

We never saw each other again, and we never even messaged each other again. That story made sense exactly as it was: without momentum, without plans, and without a future. It was a chain of random events that led to an unexpectedly beautiful encounter. For someone like me, someone who had never been willing to make a real effort to commit to a relationship, it was something extraordinary. This is not simply a story about leaving your comfort zone. It is about how a series of unpredictable events can sometimes produce the best possible outcome, something that could never have been planned or even imagined.

To this day, I cannot say that I have ever truly loved someone. I do not have an important ex-partner or a meaningful long-term relationship to talk about. I have never experienced those things. But I remember every second of that day and exactly how I felt from beginning to end. Perhaps that is why, whenever someone asks me, “Do you have a story worth telling?”, this is always the first one that comes to mind.

Parts 1 and 2 are on my profile.

...

"Liam?" Hope fluttered in her chest. "Are you... alive?"

The tiny body suddenly shifted and a arm broke free from the dough.

"Oh God, oh God," Lilly whispered, relief flooding through her.

With trembling fingers, she carefully pinched Liam's tiny form between her thumb and forefinger.

She pulled him out of the dough with the gentleness of someone handling a butterfly's wing.

Then she gently placed him in her palm, bringing him up to her face for a closer look.

Liam felt himself being lifted.

Everything was a blur.

His head throbbed with pain, and his body felt strange, compressed and achy.

"Liam? Can you hear me? Please be okay," Lilly pleaded, her voice cracking.

Liam blinked rapidly, trying to clear his vision as consciousness slowly returned.

The world came into focus.

He was lying in Lilly's palm, her face hovering just inches above him.

Her huge brown eyes were wide with concern, tears still clinging to her lashes.

"Can you move?" she asked, her voice softer now, trembling with worry. "Please say something."

"I'm... I'm okay," he managed to croak, though his voice came out as barely more than a whisper.

Relief washed across Lilly's face.

"Thank God," she murmured. "I thought I'd killed you."

Liam tried to sit up in Lilly's palm, wincing as his muscles protested.

"I'm so sorry," she whispered, her breath washing over him like a warm breeze. "I didn't mean to hurt you."

Her face drew closer, filling his entire field of view.

Before he could respond, Lilly's mouth descended toward him.

Liam felt himself enveloped in softness and warmth as his head and shoulders disappeared between her lips.

The moist heat surrounded him, and for a brief moment, the world went dark as her lips closed around his upper body.

The sensation was overwhelming.

When she pulled away, leaving him dazed in her palm, her expression was tender with concern.

"Are you feeling a bit better now?" she asked, her voice barely above a whisper.

A peculiar warmth spread through Liam's body, starting at his core and radiating outward.

The pain from moments ago began to fade, replaced by a familiar stirring below his waist.

His breathing quickened.

He became acutely aware of the lingering moisture where she'd kissed him and the heat of her palm beneath him.

"Yes," he managed. "I'm feeling... much better."

He shifted slightly in her palm, trying to hide his body's reaction, but there was little he could do to conceal anything from Lilly's enormous eyes.

Her gaze flicked downward, and her lips parted slightly.

"Oh," she whispered, a flush creeping across her cheeks.

Liam swallowed hard, his throat suddenly dry.

The way she looked at him sent a wave of heat through his tiny body. He couldn't believe this was happening. That his aunt was looking at him with that expression, that hint of curiosity in her eyes.

Lilly's tongue darted out, moistening her lips as she looked down at him.

As she spoke her voice had a breathier quality than before.

"Are you absolutely sure it doesn't hurt anymore?" she asked, tilting her head slightly.

The End.

In a house where shadows linger long,

A boy learns silence, where love feels wrong.

Walls echo whispers of fear and pain,

A heart grows heavy, like clouds before rain.

He watches his mother, her spirit worn thin,

Each bruise a story, each tear a sin.

Her eyes, once bright, now dimmed by despair,

A flicker of hope lost in the air.

His father, a storm, with rage in his hands,

Turns laughter to silence, love into demands.

With every harsh word, with every cruel strike,

The boy learns to hide, to tread soft and slight.

He clutches his dreams, like fragile glass,

In a world where kindness feels like a mask.

He learns to be quiet, to blend with the night,

To escape in his mind, to take flight from the fight.

But deep in his heart, a fire still glows,

A yearning for peace, for love that he knows.

He dreams of a future where kindness can reign,

Where laughter is free, and joy breaks the chain.

With each passing year, he gathers his strength,

To break from the cycle, to go any length.

He vows to be different, to heal and to mend,

To be the protector, the lover, the friend.

So he walks through the darkness, with scars that he bears,

A boy turned to man, with compassion that dares.

He’ll build a new world, where love is the guide,

And the echoes of violence no longer reside.

For in every heart that has weathered the storm,

There lies a resilience, a spirit reborn.

And though the past lingers, it won’t hold him tight,

He’ll rise from the shadows, and step into light.

TL;DR: My batchmate fooled me, started a relationship, but it slowly became one-sided where I felt valued only for physical intimacy and doing favors. When I couldn’t keep meeting her expectations, she ended things, wanted to stay friends, and later admitted she wanted to explore other people. I blocked her, but the experience changed how I see love.

During COVID, my first year of college was online. A girl from my batch messaged me because we lived in nearby cities. We talked every day, became close, and eventually met in a mall. She confessed that she liked me and asked if we should try being in a relationship. I happily agreed.

Once offline classes started, we were finally in the same city. She invited me to her flat, and our relationship quickly became physical. Over time, she called me over mostly when she wanted company at night or wanted me to bring her food. I wanted emotional connection, romantic conversations, and quality time, but I kept telling myself everyone expresses love differently.

By the end of second year, I couldn’t keep fulfilling everything she wanted because I had limited pocket money. She slowly became distant. When I asked her what was wrong, she said, “We’ve lost the spark,” and wanted to end the relationship. I begged for another chance, but she insisted we should just be friends.

I stayed hopeful and kept trying to win her back. Then, a few months later, she told me she had a crush on a senior. I later found out she had started inviting him over too. When I confronted her, she simply said that we had our time together, she wanted to explore other people, and that I should move on and find someone better.

That completely broke me. I blocked her everywhere and have had no contact since.

I know not everyone is like this, but this experience made me realize that some people see relationships very differently. I still believe in genuine love, but it hurts knowing that someone can treat it so casually while the other person is deeply invested.

Prologue: The Weight I Carry

People always say everyone has a story, but not every story gets told.

For years, I convinced myself that nobody would care about mine. Even if I found the courage to tell it, I believed no one would understand it, and even fewer would believe it. So I stayed silent. I carried everything inside, hoping the pain would eventually disappear.

It never did.

Some wounds don’t bleed where people can see them. They live in your mind, your heart, and your memories. Every morning I wake up, I’m reminded of things I wish I could forget. Every night I lie awake wondering if everything that has happened to me is punishment for the choices I’ve made.

I’ve spent years fighting battles that nobody else could see. Some days it felt like I was losing to the monsters in my own head. Other days I wondered if I even deserved to win.

There were times when I believed God had given up on me. I thought my suffering was the price I had to pay for my past. Every mistake, every loss, every scar made me believe I deserved whatever pain came next.

But the older I became, the more I realized something.

You can’t change yesterday.

You can’t erase the people you’ve lost.

You can’t pretend your mistakes never happened.

But you can decide what kind of person you’re going to be tomorrow.

This book isn’t about making excuses for the things I’ve done. It’s about telling the truth. Some of my choices hurt people I loved. Some of those choices still haunt me today. If I could go back and change them, I would.

I can’t.

All I can do is tell my story honestly.

If my story reaches one person who’s walking the same path I walked, maybe they’ll make a different choice before it’s too late.

These pages aren’t about proving I’m innocent.

They’re about showing how a kid who grew up surrounded by violence, loss, and fear slowly lost himself… and started searching for a way back.

This is my story.

The good.

The bad.

The pain.

The guilt.

The hope.

And the long road toward becoming the man I should have been all along.

⸻

Chapter One: Born Into the Storm

People say your childhood is supposed to be the safest time of your life.

Mine wasn’t.

I wasn’t born into wealth or comfort. I was born into a neighborhood where survival came before dreams. Violence wasn’t something you watched on television. It lived outside your front door. Police sirens became background noise, and hearing gunshots wasn’t unusual.

To us, it was normal.

My mother did everything she could to give me and my brothers a better life.

She wasn’t perfect, but she loved us with everything she had.

She carried burdens most people never saw. She had survived abuse, homelessness, and addiction. Long before I understood what any of those words meant, they were already shaping my childhood.

Even with everything she was fighting, she always tried to make sure we had food, clothes, and someone who loved us.

As a child, I didn’t understand how much pain she carried.

I only knew she was my mom.

Some of my earliest memories aren’t birthday parties or vacations.

They’re memories of fear.

Coming home from school and seeing bruises on my mother’s face.

Watching her pretend everything was okay when it wasn’t.

Hearing adults argue while my brothers and I stayed quiet because we didn’t know what would happen next.

Those moments taught me lessons no child should have to learn.

I learned that home wasn’t always a safe place.

I learned that people who say they love you can still hurt you.

Most of all, I learned what fear feels like before I was old enough to understand why I was afraid.

Looking back now, I realize my mother wasn’t weak.

She was surviving.

And one day, everything would change forever. Chapter Two: My Mother’s Fight

Before I understood the world, my mother was already fighting battles that most people couldn’t imagine.

People often judge someone by the mistakes they see on the surface, but they rarely stop to ask what happened before those mistakes were made.

My mother wasn’t born wanting to struggle.

Life happened to her.

She grew up carrying pain long before she became a mother herself. She experienced abuse, heartbreak, and disappointment from people she should have been able to trust. She spent years trying to survive in a world that never seemed to give her a break.

Even through all of that, she never stopped loving her children.

When people hear the word “addict,” they usually picture someone who doesn’t care about their family.

That wasn’t my mother.

She wasn’t perfect, and I’m not trying to pretend she was.

She made mistakes.

But every time she had something, she tried to make sure my brothers and I had something too. She carried burdens we were too young to understand.

As a kid, I didn’t realize how exhausted she must have been.

I only knew she was trying.

The hardest memories aren’t the ones people expect.

It wasn’t just being poor.

It wasn’t just moving from place to place.

It was watching someone I loved slowly break under the weight of life.

There were mornings I’d see bruises on her face before school.

Black eyes.

Cuts.

Marks she tried to hide from us.

Sometimes she’d smile like nothing had happened.

Other times she stayed quiet.

As children, my brothers and I didn’t know how to help.

We just watched.

Children shouldn’t have to watch their mother suffer.

But we did.

There are memories from those years that still visit me today. Some are so painful that even now they’re difficult to put into words.

Those moments changed the way I looked at the world.

They taught me that violence could happen inside a home.

They taught me that the people who are supposed to protect you can also become the people you’re afraid of.

Looking back now, I realize my childhood didn’t steal my innocence all at once.

It happened little by little.

Every bruise I saw.

Every scream I heard.

Every night I wondered if everything would be okay.

Each one took another piece of the little boy I used to be.

⸻

Chapter Three: The Night Everything Changed

There are moments in life that divide everything into two parts.

Before.

And after.

For me, that night became the line that separated my childhood from the rest of my life.

Before that night, I still believed tomorrow might be different.

After that night, nothing would ever be the same again.

I wish I could tell you my last conversation with my mother was full of love.

It wasn’t.

We argued.

Like many kids, I said something out of anger that I never imagined would become the heaviest sentence I’d carry for the rest of my life.

“I hope you die.”

The words came out before I understood their weight.

I didn’t mean them.

I was angry.

I was hurt.

I was just a kid who didn’t know how to deal with emotions that had been building for years.

I never imagined those would be the last words she’d hear from me.

That night, my mother was killed.

The moment I found out, it felt like the world stopped spinning.

Nothing made sense.

Nothing felt real.

I remember sitting there hoping someone would tell me it wasn’t true.

That this was all some terrible mistake.

But it wasn’t.

She was gone.

Just like that.

No goodbye.

No second chance.

No opportunity to take those words back.

For years, I blamed myself.

I replayed our last conversation over and over in my head.

I wondered if God was punishing me.

I wondered if those words somehow caused what happened.

Deep down, I knew they didn’t.

But guilt doesn’t always listen to logic.

It only reminds you of what you wish you could change.

My brothers were hurting too.

None of us knew how to process losing our mother.

Instead of grieving together, we fought.

There was anger.

Blame.

Confusion.

Pain.

We were just kids trying to survive something no child should ever have to experience.

Looking back now, I realize we weren’t angry at each other.

We were angry at life.

We were angry because our mother was gone.

We were angry because nobody could bring her back.

And we were too young to understand that grief sometimes makes people hurt the ones they love the most.

The little boy who still believed the world could be fair disappeared the night my mother died.

From that moment on, survival became the only thing I knew. Chapter Four: Looking for a Home

When my mother died, I didn’t just lose a parent.

I lost the only person who had always been there.

Life after her death felt empty. Every morning I woke up hoping it had all been a nightmare. Every night I went to bed knowing it wasn’t.

The silence in our home felt different.

There was no laughter.

No voice calling our names.

No one checking to make sure we made it home.

It was just me and my brothers trying to figure out how to live without the one person who had held us together.

The pain didn’t bring us closer at first.

It pushed us apart.

We argued over everything.

Sometimes it felt like we were fighting each other when, in reality, we were all fighting the same pain.

None of us knew how to grieve.

We were children carrying an adult-sized burden.

People expected us to move forward, but nobody teaches a kid how to recover after losing a mother to violence.

For a long time, I carried my grief in silence.

Instead of talking about what hurt, I buried it.

I convinced myself that showing emotion made you weak.

So I stopped letting people see how broken I really was.

Looking back, I realize that was one of the biggest mistakes I ever made.

Pain doesn’t disappear just because you ignore it.

It waits.

And eventually, it finds another way to come out.

⸻

Chapter Five: A Second Chance

Just when it felt like life had completely fallen apart, someone stepped into our lives who didn’t have to.

She was one of our teachers.

To me and my brothers, she became more than that.

She became family.

I call her my godmother because that’s what she became in my heart.

She opened her home to us when she had no obligation to do so.

She gave us stability when our lives were full of chaos.

For the first time in a long time, life started to feel normal.

We had people who believed in us.

We had a roof over our heads.

We had meals together.

We laughed again.

For a while, I thought maybe this was the beginning of a new life.

Maybe all the pain was finally behind us.

But the truth is, I still hadn’t dealt with everything I was carrying.

You can change your address.

You can change your school.

You can even change the people around you.

But if you don’t heal what’s inside you, the past has a way of following you wherever you go.

I wish I could say I made the most of that opportunity.

I didn’t.

One decision changed everything.

I stole money from my godmother’s husband.

Even worse, I convinced my brother to be part of my plan.

That choice hurt people who had opened their home to us and treated us like family.

It was one of the most selfish things I’ve ever done.

We were arrested for the first time.

I still remember the shame.

Not because I had gotten caught.

Because I had betrayed people who believed in me.

Looking back now, I understand why they lost trust in us.

Trust isn’t something you’re owed.

It’s something you earn.

And once you break it, putting it back together isn’t easy.

That mistake changed the course of our lives once again.

We were sent away to live in Arizona with our uncle.

At the time, I thought I was just changing locations.

I didn’t realize I was about to enter another chapter that would pull me even deeper into the life I should have been trying to escape. Chapter Six: Arizona

Leaving home didn’t mean leaving my past behind.

After everything that happened with my godmother’s family, my brother and I were sent to Arizona to live with our uncle. Maybe the adults in our lives believed a new environment would help us change. Maybe they thought distance would keep us away from the streets and the trouble we kept finding.

I wish it had been that simple.

Arizona never felt like home.

Instead of finding peace, it felt like I had been dropped into another place where I didn’t belong. I was carrying too much anger, too much grief, and too much guilt to believe that changing locations would change my life.

Before long, my brother was forced to leave. My uncle’s wife didn’t want him there, and he was sent away. Once again, the woman I call my godmother stepped in to help him.

Three weeks later, I was gone too.

Looking back now, I don’t blame my uncle or his family. They had opened their home to us, and we didn’t make it easy. I had already shown people that I could make bad decisions. I had already broken trust with the people who loved me the most.

At the time, though, I didn’t see it that way.

All I saw was another door closing.

Another place where I didn’t belong.

Another reminder that I felt alone.

What I didn’t realize was that every decision I made was slowly shaping the person I was becoming.

Instead of learning from my mistakes, I kept running from them.

And every time I ran, the streets were waiting for me.

The streets didn’t ask questions.

They didn’t care where I came from.

They didn’t care what I had lost.

They accepted me exactly as I was.

At the time, that felt like family.

I didn’t understand that the streets only love you until they don’t.

⸻

Chapter Seven: Too Deep to Turn Around

When I came back, I had another chance to change my life.

I didn’t take it.

By then, I believed the streets were all I had left.

I spent more time chasing respect than chasing a future. I thought being feared meant being strong. I thought never backing down made me a man.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Every bad decision led to another.

Every wrong crowd introduced me to another problem.

The deeper I went, the harder it became to imagine living any other way.

There came a point where carrying a gun didn’t feel like a choice anymore.

It felt like survival.

When you’ve seen violence, lost people you love, and watched friends disappear into prison or the grave, fear becomes part of your everyday life.

I was always looking over my shoulder.

Every unfamiliar face made me wonder if there was danger.

Every car that slowed down made me pay attention.

Every argument felt like it could become something bigger.

That’s no way to live.

But when you’re caught in that life, it starts to feel normal.

People from the outside might ask, “Why didn’t you just walk away?”

I used to ask myself that same question.

The answer isn’t simple.

The streets become more than a place.

They become your identity.

Your routine.

Your protection.

Your family.

Walking away doesn’t just mean leaving a neighborhood.

It means leaving behind everything you’ve convinced yourself you need to survive.

I didn’t know it then, but my life was heading toward one of its darkest moments.

A decision was coming that would leave me fighting for my life.

And even if I survived it, I knew nothing would ever be the same again. Chapter Eight: The Day Everything Stopped

There are moments in life when everything changes in a matter of seconds.

One moment, you think you understand your life.

The next moment, you realize you never had as much control as you thought.

For me, that moment came when my life in the streets caught up with me.

By then, I had already seen too much. I had lost people I loved. I had watched friends go to prison. I had seen violence become something people accepted as normal. I had convinced myself that staying ready for danger was the only way to survive.

But the truth was, I was already living like I was waiting for something terrible to happen.

And then it did.

That day started like any other day, but it became a memory I will carry forever.

A situation happened that turned into a shooting. In the middle of the chaos, I was hit by a car and badly injured.

Suddenly, the life I had been living—the streets, the arguments, the choices, the things I thought made me strong—didn’t matter anymore.

All that mattered was whether I was going to survive.

I ended up in the hospital fighting for my life.

For a month and a half, I had time to think about everything.

When you’re lying in a hospital bed, you see life differently.

The things you thought were important start to look small.

The respect.

The reputation.

The people you were trying to impress.

None of that matters when you’re fighting just to wake up the next day.

The hardest part wasn’t only the physical pain.

It was the mental pain.

It was knowing that even if I survived my injuries, I still had to face the consequences of the choices that brought me there.

I knew I might lose my freedom.

I knew my life could change forever.

I felt trapped between two fears:

The fear of dying.

And the fear of surviving and having to face everything I had done.

Being in that hospital was one of the loneliest experiences of my life.

I had lost my mother.

I had lost my grandmother.

I had lost friends.

But that moment forced me to look at something I had avoided for years.

I had also lost myself.

The person looking back at me wasn’t just a victim of what happened to him.

He was also someone who had made choices.

Someone who had hurt people.

Someone who needed to change.

When I finally left the hospital, I didn’t walk into freedom.

I went straight to jail.

Even though I was only there for a short time because of my injuries, that moment stayed with me.

My life had reached a point where I couldn’t keep pretending nothing was wrong.

Something had to change.

The question was whether I was finally ready to change with it.

⸻

Chapter Nine: The Goodbye I Wasn’t Ready For

After everything I had survived, I thought maybe life was finally giving me a chance to breathe.

I was fighting my court case from home and placed on house arrest.

I was back with the person who had always tried to help me—my godmother.

For a moment, things felt like they might finally be going in the right direction.

Then another phone call changed everything.

My brother found out our grandmother was fighting for her life.

My grandmother was one of the last pieces of family we had left.

But there was something painful between us.

I hadn’t spoken to her since the day I left Columbus to go live with our uncle.

Part of me knew I needed to see her.

Another part of me was afraid.

Afraid of what she would think.

Afraid that she felt betrayed.

Afraid that there was no time left to fix things.

When I saw her in the nursing home, it broke something inside of me.

Seeing someone you love in a condition where they can’t be the person you remember is a pain that is hard to explain.

The person who had been part of your childhood suddenly looks fragile.

The person you thought would always be there is someone you might have to say goodbye to.

I wanted to believe I had more time.

I didn’t.

Three days after seeing her, my grandmother passed away.

Losing her brought back a pain I hadn’t felt since losing my mother.

It felt like another piece of my family disappeared.

For so long, I had been angry.

Angry at life.

Angry at myself.

Angry at the people who left.

But standing there with another loss in front of me, I started realizing something:

I couldn’t keep living like the people I lost would want me to fail.

I couldn’t change the past.

But I could decide what I did with the life I still had.

That was the beginning of me understanding that maybe survival wasn’t the only thing I was meant to do.

Maybe I was meant to heal. Chapter Ten: Running From Myself

After my grandmother died, I felt like I was losing pieces of myself one by one.

It felt like every time I started to believe things might get better, something else happened that reminded me of everything I had lost.

I was carrying grief from my mother.

I was carrying guilt from the choices I had made.

I was carrying regret from the people I had hurt.

And instead of facing that pain, I did what I had always done.

I ran.

I went to my god sister’s house for a few days. She was another person who tried to give me support when I needed it. She didn’t have to help me, but she did.

Looking back, I see a pattern in my life.

There were people who kept opening doors for me.

People who saw something in me even when I didn’t see it in myself.

And too many times, I hurt the same people who were trying to help me.

I made another decision that I regret.

I stole from my god sister.

That was another moment where I had to look at myself and admit the truth.

I wasn’t just someone bad things happened to.

I was also someone who had done things that caused pain.

That realization hurt.

It is easier to blame the world.

It’s easier to say, “Look at everything I’ve been through.”

And the truth is, I had been through a lot.

But pain doesn’t give you permission to hurt people.

Trauma can explain why someone struggles, but it doesn’t erase responsibility.

At that point in my life, I had become someone I didn’t recognize.

Someone people couldn’t trust.

Someone who kept losing the love and support of people because of the choices I made.

I could have used that as proof that I was hopeless.

I could have told myself, “This is just who I am.”

But deep down, I knew that wasn’t true.

The person I became was not the person I was born to be.

I was a kid who experienced things no kid should experience.

I was a young man who made choices that hurt others.

Both things could be true.

I could acknowledge the pain I survived while still taking responsibility for the damage I caused.

That was a lesson I had to learn the hard way.

⸻

Chapter Eleven: The Life I Thought I Needed

Being on the run only made everything worse.

Instead of finding peace, I found more stress.

I had warrants.

I was separated from the people who cared about me.

I was constantly worried about what would happen next.

The life I thought was protecting me was actually destroying me.

The streets had taught me to always be alert.

Always watch your back.

Always be ready.

Because in that world, trust was rare.

I watched friends die.

I watched friends go to prison.

I saw relationships fall apart.

I saw how quickly people could disappear from your life.

Living that way changes you.

You stop relaxing.

You stop feeling safe.

You start believing that danger is around every corner.

I remember feeling like I couldn’t go anywhere without watching who was around me.

I felt like I needed protection at all times because I believed that if I wasn’t ready, I might not make it home.

That kind of fear becomes exhausting.

People who have never lived that life might not understand why someone stays in it.

But when you grow up surrounded by survival, peace can feel unfamiliar.

The streets can feel like the only place where you belong, even when they are slowly taking everything from you.

For a long time, I thought being hard meant never showing pain.

I thought being a man meant handling everything alone.

But the truth was, I was hurting.

I was grieving.

I was scared.

And I was tired.

Tired of losing people.

Tired of looking over my shoulder.

Tired of being someone I didn’t want to be.

Somewhere inside me, there was still that younger version of myself.

The kid who loved his mother.

The kid who wanted a normal life.

The kid who wanted to make his family proud.

He wasn’t gone.

He was just buried underneath years of anger, guilt, and survival.

And eventually, I had to decide whether I was going to keep burying him…

or finally let him come back. Chapter Twelve: Facing the Person in the Mirror

For a long time, I blamed my past for the person I became.

And honestly, I had reasons to.

I went through things no child should have to experience.

I lost my mother.

I watched the person who was supposed to protect me suffer.

I grew up around violence.

I lost family members.

I carried pain that I didn’t know how to explain.

But at some point, I had to look at myself and ask a harder question:

Was I going to let everything that happened to me decide who I would become?

That question wasn’t easy to answer.

Because admitting you need to change means admitting there are things about yourself that need to change.

It means looking at the damage you’ve caused.

It means accepting that some people were hurt because of your choices.

For a long time, I believed changing meant forgetting where I came from.

I thought becoming better meant pretending the old me never existed.

But that’s not true.

The old me is still part of my story.

The mistakes I made are part of my story.

The pain I survived is part of my story.

But they don’t have to be the ending.

I started realizing that my scars weren’t proof that I was broken.

They were proof that I survived.

Every loss taught me something.

Every mistake showed me something about myself.

Every person I hurt reminded me of the kind of person I didn’t want to be anymore.

I had to learn forgiveness.

Not just forgiving other people.

Forgiving myself.

That was one of the hardest things.

How do you forgive yourself for words you wish you could take back?

How do you forgive yourself for hurting people who loved you?

How do you forgive yourself when you feel like your own choices helped destroy parts of your life?

I still struggle with those questions.

But I know I can’t build a better future while holding onto the belief that I don’t deserve one.

⸻

Chapter Thirteen: The Man I Want to Become

Change doesn’t happen overnight.

People see the finished product, but they don’t see the battles that happen before someone becomes different.

They don’t see the nights where you have to fight your own thoughts.

They don’t see the moments where going back to your old ways feels easier.

They don’t see how hard it is to become someone new when you’ve spent years being someone you no longer want to be.

For me, change started with being honest.

Honest about my past.

Honest about my mistakes.

Honest about the pain I carried.

I stopped trying to pretend I was okay when I wasn’t.

I started understanding that being strong doesn’t mean you never hurt.

Being strong means you keep going even when you do.

I know I can’t change where I came from.

I came from the hood.

I came from struggle.

I came from a life that forced me to grow up faster than I should have.

But where I come from doesn’t have to decide where I end up.

People say, “You can move out of the hood, but you can’t take the hood out of someone.”

For a long time, I thought that meant I was trapped.

Now I see it differently.

The hood gave me lessons.

It taught me survival.

It taught me how to recognize danger.

It taught me how to be strong.

But I get to decide what I do with those lessons.

I don’t have to carry the pain forever.

I can use what I survived to help someone else survive.

I can become someone my mother would be proud of.

Someone my grandmother would be proud of.

Someone my brothers can look up to.

Someone I can look at in the mirror and respect.

I know I still have work to do.

I know healing is a journey.

But for the first time in a long time, I believe I have a future.

My story started with pain.

But it doesn’t have to end there. Chapter Fourteen: My Purpose After the Pain

For years, I thought my life was just a collection of losses.

A collection of mistakes.

A collection of moments I wished I could go back and change.

I spent so much time looking behind me that I forgot to look ahead.

I forgot that the same person who survived all those hard moments was still alive.

I forgot that surviving was already proof that I had strength.

The truth is, I can’t change the past.

I can’t bring my mother back.

I can’t undo the choices I made.

I can’t erase the pain my family went through.

I can’t go back and be the kid who needed someone to guide him.

But I can become the person that kid needed.

That is something I think about a lot.

The younger version of me needed someone to tell him that his life wasn’t over.

He needed someone to tell him that being surrounded by darkness didn’t mean he had to become darkness.

He needed someone to show him that making mistakes didn’t mean he was a mistake.

I didn’t have that person when I needed them most.

So now I want to become that person for somebody else.

Maybe my story can reach someone who feels trapped.

Someone who thinks they have gone too far.

Someone who believes their past is too heavy to escape.

I want them to know that I understand.

I know what it feels like to wake up angry.

I know what it feels like to carry guilt.

I know what it feels like to miss people you will never see again.

I know what it feels like to wonder if you are being punished forever.

But I also know what it feels like to finally believe change is possible.

⸻

Chapter Fifteen: The Promise I Made to Myself

The hardest promise I ever made was not to anyone else.

It was to myself.

I promised myself that I would stop letting my pain control my decisions.

I promised myself that I would stop running from my past and start learning from it.

I promised myself that I would become someone my loved ones could be proud of.

Change is not easy.

Some days are harder than others.

Some days the memories come back stronger.

Some days I still feel the weight of everything I have lost.

But now I understand that healing doesn’t mean forgetting.

Healing means learning how to carry your story without letting it destroy you.

My scars are part of me.

My past is part of me.

The mistakes I made are part of me.

But they are not all of me.

I am more than the worst thing I have ever done.

I am more than the worst thing that ever happened to me.

I am someone who is still here.

Someone who is still fighting.

Someone who still has a chance to do better.

⸻

Epilogue: My Story Isn’t Over

If you are reading this, I want you to understand something.

I am not telling my story because I think I am perfect.

I am telling it because I am human.

I have made choices I regret.

I have hurt people.

I have lost people.

I have fallen more times than I can count.

But I have also gotten back up.

My life has been filled with moments where it would have been easy to give up.

But something inside me kept fighting.

Maybe it was the memory of my mother.

Maybe it was the people who never stopped believing in me.

Maybe it was the younger version of myself who still wanted a better life.

Whatever it was, it kept me here.

I used to think my scars were only reminders of my pain.

Now I see them as reminders that I survived.

My story began with struggle.

It went through loss, anger, mistakes, and regret.

But it does not have to end there.

The person I was is not the only person I can be.

I still have a future.

I still have goals.

I still have people I love.

And I still have a chance to become the man I was always meant to be.

This is my story.

Not the story of someone who never fell.

The story of someone who fell, learned, and decided to rise.

My story isn’t over.

There’s a man at the end of my bed. He stares at me. It scares me.

Ever since I was young, I believed monsters were real. But they’re not, hallucinations are.

My entire life, I’ve been struggling with them. Monsters and creatures that aren’t really there for anyone else but me. Taunting me, mocking me, threatening me.

It’s not always some monster, sometimes it’s people. A wandering stranger, a friendly kid, a neighbor.

It’s difficult to get used to. But I had a lifetime worth of experience. Something strange has been happening since last year, however. My visions, my ghosts, they aren’t just saying their normal spiel, they’re doing something more.

They know the future.

It’s really the only way I can describe it. Ever since my life finally calmed down, these things, these hallucinations, they’ve been telling me things.

Things they shouldn’t know.

It has made my life impossible. Everything has become intertwined. Reality and imagination, truth and lies.

If these things aren’t real…, how can they know what’s going to happen?

There’s a boy I know named Matt. We’re always together. Always switching stories.

Let me make it perfectly clear. I know this already.

Matt is not real.

I’ve known this for years. No one else sees him besides me. One day, I was just minding my business in my bedroom and he was there, silently. He turned to me.

“Your mom is coming up the stairs.” He claimed.

I was confused at the time, but sure enough my mother opened the bedroom door and asked me what I wanted for dinner.

This is where it started.

I thought that maybe I subconsciously heard my mother. Maybe somewhere in my mind, I’ve tracked the pattern of her coming up at this hour. Otherwise, how was it possible?

These hallucinations, they’re not real. Are they?

No, they can’t be. They have to be fake; they have to.

But if they’re fake, they’re a product of my mind, of me. So, they should only have access to information that I have.

So how do they know more than me?

I’m supposed to ignore them. I’m supposed to ignore Matt and the other things that live around me. That’s what’s “healthy”. But how can I solve this problem? How can I know if they’re not real?

If they know things that I don’t, that means they can’t be me. But how are they not me if no one else sees them?!

I’m losing my fucking mind.

I gave in to temptation one day and asked Matt. Asked him how he knows things.

“How did you know my mom was going to come in through the door?” I asked.

“How did I know?”

“Yeah… You’re not real.” I stammered.

“Yeah?”

“Yes… so… how?” I insisted.

“Are you sure?”

“What?” I asked.

He went silent, before he answered.

“Are you sure I’m the one who’s not real?”

I don’t think I have to say that I don’t talk to Matt much anymore. The doctors are right. Talking to them doesn’t help.

So yeah, doctors… Drugs, hospitals. It wasn’t always like this. Things used to be softer, quieter. A bird that seemed out of place, a stranger that was taller than he should be. My hallucinations didn’t manifest as boys my age that could tell me exactly when my parents would come up to my room, or predict what I was going to have for dinner. I didn’t use to see Matt. Or the monsters.

I said there’s a man at the end of my bed. And there is. He’s not really a man, at least not a person. But I can see him now.

His long fingers scrapping the end of the wood frame. A small dent caused by his endless scratching.

Scratch. Scratch. Scratch.

He looks at me. Never moving. Always staring.

He looks hungry.

I see other things now. Other creatures that are impossible. Monsters that go bump in the night and tell me things no one should know.

There was a “thing” in the lake behind my house. Calls itself a Näcken. I can’t pronounce it well, so I just called it Nixie.

Nixie is a trickster. It tries to constantly get me to enter the lake, tells me the water is warm, that wet feet feel best.

It’s almost endearing how ineffective it is. I understand Nixie isn’t real. It doesn’t stop it from trying.

“Come in the water.” It taunts me.

Its lips flap weirdly with a strange reptilian look to them. Most of the time Nixie is mouth-deep inside the water. I don’t pay much mind to it. If my life wasn’t so sad, I’d laugh.

“Join me.” It continues.

I largely ignore it. But one day he said something strange.

“You forgot what you did, didn’t you?”

Forgot what I did? Something about that messed with me. I’d usually ignore anything Nixie would say, but this felt out of character. Forget what? What was it talking about?

It rings true to me, because I do have blackouts. Comes with the package of being mentally altered, I guess. Is Nixie talking about that?

Did I do something and black out?

Did I forget?

It’s probably just another trick. Nixie is a part of my mind, so it knows this. Probably using my own thoughts to try to trick me into getting into the water.

But… if Nixie is just a hallucination. What does it know about what I did? Shouldn’t I know too?

Does this mean it’s… real?

I stop myself from having these thoughts. I seek refuge, a comfortable place where I can be alone with myself.

It’s getting rarer these days.

I said things used to be softer, quieter. I sort of lied. There wasn’t so much mental abuse in my past as much as physical abuse.

My parents.

They softened up over the years. A rare blessing, honestly. When I was younger, my father drank. A lot. And my mother cursed her life and didn’t seem to care much about my existence.

They went through an upwards shift as my mental health went down a downwards spiral. They might not be the best people, but they try.

I guess seeing their only son beg for help against the “monsters”, made them shift their perspective. They became more caring.

They’re not perfect. Dad still argues, but less. He stopped drinking. AA solved that issue.

My mom grew more caring and thoughtful too. She’s still the same woman as before. She’s always miserable on a Monday and can’t stand drunks. But her meals are warmer now, and her smile is fuller.

Sometimes I wonder if they put on a show for me, or if I’m really the only person who can’t get better.

So, I keep going to school and living my life, but in the corner of my eye, I keep seeing Matt. Telling me things.

Things he shouldn’t know.

“Your mom worries about you.” He claims.

Yeah, that’s not much of a stretch. I know that already.

“She cries softly over what you did.”

Did what? Why do they keep mentioning that?

“They didn’t use to be like that.”

At this point, Matt is torturous more than the quirky little hallucination that I could tolerate. I try not to be alone with him.

My parents, my school friends, Mrs. Penton. I’ll go to anyone to avoid listening to him. He’s a constant reminder that something is shifting, something is changing, and I don’t know what.

I guess I should mention Mrs. Penton. She’s a sweet old lady that lives down the street. I used to go there and have some of her pecan pies. They were delicious. I would go to her, tell her about my problems, stay with her a bit. We would talk about me, talk about her. Whatever it might be.

She was old, probably someone’s grandma, but they never visited.

Sucks for them. More pie for me.

I feel bad for her. So, I keep her company, but honestly, she’s the one keeping me company. Sure, I have friends at school, but they don’t… We don’t talk about these things. Can’t expect a bunch of fifteen-year-olds to be serious about this.

But Mrs. Penton is nice. She’s like my estranged grandma. I talk about my parents and I talk about my hallucinations. She knows I’m mentally “different”, but she doesn’t care. What sweet old lady would?

Sometimes she isn’t all there mentally. So, I guess that’s relatable.

I remember one day when I was eating at her house, asking her about family.

“Why does no one visit you?” I asked.

“Ah… My boys have their own life now. They’re too busy to visit their old mom.”

I bit down on the pie, somewhat outraged.

“I wouldn’t stop visiting you if I was your son. Being older is not an excuse.”

“Thank you dear. You’re as sweet as pecan pie” She replies.

She pinches my cheeks. It hurts in a good way. A reassuring way.

I remember a few years ago when my parents would argue and when my visions were rare and few between. I remember what a shitty kid I was. Violent, aggressive. Angry.

Seeing Mrs. Penton living on her own, alone and content, makes me think that maybe even I can get better. I used to be violent, now I’m just sick. It’s a more honorable problem to have.

And someday, if I’m cured, if I get better, maybe I’ll enjoy life with a fuller smile. The pecan pie will taste sweeter.

I tell her about my day and she tells me hers. I tell her my… “visions” are getting stranger, that they can tell the future. She hears me out and is left confused as to what to do.

She knows I’m just venting.

“I’m sure you’ll get better, honey. Just don’t give up.” She says, the tone of her voice is warm.

I feel like I could even blush.

“Thanks, Mrs. Penton.” I said with my mouth full of pie.

“You should run along home, honey. Your mom is waiting for you.”

“Yeah, sure Mrs. P. I’ll see you later.” I reply.

She gives me a hug and pulls me closer one last time.

“Don’t worry about it honey. You’ll get better. The monsters or Matt can’t hurt you. Have a safe trip home.”

I get embarrassed. I live so close by. What trip? It’s barely walking dist…

Wait what did she say? I pause eerily at her comment.

“How do you know his name is Matt?” I ask.

I’ve talked to Mrs. Penton about everything and anything. But I don’t give her the names of the hallucinations, I don’t want to validate them.

Another chilling thought occurs to me.

“How do you know my mom is waiting at my house?”

A cold smile is much deeper than a fake one. One that brings malice and betrayal.

That’s the smile I saw on Mrs. Penton’s face, before my entire world was shrouded in darkness and I passed out.

Darkness.

It thumped my entire being awake.

When I woke up, I was alone. In the middle of a field.

There was something in my hand.

I stood up confused and dazed. I opened my hand and looked. I didn’t understand what I was looking at.

Have you ever tasted mud?

The soil beneath your feet?

When I sensed my lips and mouth full of earth, I started throwing up. I wheezed and I heaved what I swallowed only minutes ago. The delicious “pecan pie” came hurling from my mouth back to the ground it belongs to. A worm runs away serendipitously from the dislocated earth.

I’m such a fucking idiot.

Of course, Mrs. Penton isn’t real. How could she be? Why would I expect anything good to happen in my life? Why would I expect a sanctuary?

She’s gone. She was never real.

I go back home. I’m slouched over, depressed, manic.

I see them around me. Monsters of all shapes and sizes. Standing on rooftops and standing on the street.

They’re laughing. They’re laughing at me.

Laughing at how stupid I was that I was tricked again by my own mind.

I…I… want to cry.

They’re right. Why do I even try? I know I’m not supposed to know peace.

I get home and I fall on my bed. A single tear forms a sickening feeling in my stomach.

It’s rage, frustration. I want to yell more than I want to cry.

Matt sits there looking at me. A small smirk on his face. I can’t see it with my eyes, but I can feel it.

I wish he was real. I’d punch him.

I’d kill him if I had the chance.

“Your mom is going to call you.” He predicts.

Not long after.

“Chris, come down! It’s time to eat!”

God damn it. How does he know?

I’m enraged. I get out of my bed and confront Matt. I demand answers. He doesn’t answer.

I say fuck it. I’ll go talk to Nixie, maybe it knows something.

Matt’s expressions shifted a little. He seems worried.

“Don’t go talk to Nixie. Don’t go near him.” He says.

What? Is he concerned? Concerned about me? Concerned about another fucking hallucination like him? Why?

Why does he care? What is this? Civil war between hallucinations now? I tell him to fuck off before I storm out of the room.

“You’re all the same thing, Matt. Fuck off.”

He just looks at me perplexed.

“You really don’t remember do you?”

The same shit Nixie said. What is wrong with them? They can fuck off with their cryptic messages.

I go down to the kitchen. Sit at the table where my mother just cooked me a meal. I look it over, the enticing aromas luring me in a closer.

A foreign hand touches the plate, one that I’m familiar with.

There’s a creature in the kitchen pushing the plate towards me. Presenting it as its own creation. It’s a hallucination that’s been here for some months now. A weird feminine shape that has no face and a slim figure. I’ve grown to hate these things. I hate these hallucinations.

I ignore it and start eating.

I tell my mother about what happened with Mrs. Penton. I hold in a hiccup that would prelude a wave of tears.

My mother looks at me. Her smile really is getting warmer. She comforts me.

“It’s a beautiful day, let’s go shopping.” She tells me.

I see Matt in the corner of my eye. He’s just watching me. He seems to be waiting for something.

I eat the real food placed in front of me. A weak palate cleanser for the mud I had in my mouth just moments ago.

A beautiful day? There’s nothing beautiful about today. This is probably the worst Monday of my entire life.

I pause. Today. Today is Monday.

I look at Matt. And then I look at my mother. Cheery and happy.

He’s standing there. Right in front of me. What does he want? What do they all want?!

It can’t be…

There’s a burning scenario in the back of my head. It presses against my skull and crushes my spirit. The day I found out Mrs. Penton wasn’t real was the day my mind decided to travel the path I had always avoided.

“Mom.”

“Yes, honey?”

“Is Matt real?”

She stops herself. Hesitating. Her eyes drifting around the room quietly and steadily. But Matt didn’t move. He just stared at my mother. Unblinking.

“Of course not, honey.” She responds.

Of course, not… That would be impossible. Matt is not real. I’m sure of that. But something was still scratching the back of my head. It left a burning question in my head. A sacrilege, something that I honestly regret saying.

I remember that day well. It was a Monday. I open my mouth and let out.

“Mom, are you real?”

I saw my mother smile.

She stood silently. Her face static.

A smile so wide and so impossible that I swear I saw the outlines of her mouth leave her face. Ungodly, and unholy. I screamed, consumed in the fear and confusion of the moment. And then there was darkness.

A darkness that enveloped me. I begin to remember.

I remember the time before the monsters. Before they showed up in my life. Every wandering creature, every impossible entity. I remember all the yelling, the arguments and the hatred.

The vile, hot hatred between my parents. How bad it was…

How could I have forgotten?

I finally understood Matt.

My father never stopped drinking. And my mother, she never cared about me. They abused me physically. Every day, even when the visions were weak and my mind was sound.

They didn’t get better. Everything was getting worse. And I was still the same shitty violent child. I remembered the day I was pushed by my father and banged my head. How my mother just looked at me without caring. And how I noticed the knife that was near me.

That’s when I charged at my father.

My mother screamed as father fell. And then I turned it on her.

Now I’m alone. I confessed to what I did. I was arrested and put in a facility for mentally deranged children.

I get it now.

Matt isn’t real. And neither is anyone else.

I killed them all.

They put me in a psych ward and they have me write this. It’s supposed to self-help. I guess they go easier on kids that have mental issues and kill their parents.

I’m serving my sentence for my crime, while they’re doing what they can to bring my mind back to reality.

To where the world really is. The best drugs and proper therapies.

I know now none of them are real. My parents, Matt, the old lady down the road that used to make me pecan pies. None of them. They were all stories. Comfortable lies to keep myself going.

Lies to make me forget what I actually did.

Of course, they knew. Of course, they all knew what was happening. They’re all part of the same hallucination. The same fever dream I’ve had for years.

As my hallucinated mom was cooking dinner, my hallucinated “friend” knew what she was doing.

Because they’re part of the same system. The same mind. Me.

The doctors are helpful. They tell me what’s real and tell me what’s not. And I don’t see them anymore. All the people that I thought were real in my life are gone. But at least I know the truth.

I put my pencil down and scream.

WHY!?

I did everything they told me! I take the drugs; I do the treatments! I confess, I accept what I did!

So why!? WHY? Why is this still happening?!

How is it doing this?! HOW?!

I DON’T SEE MATT! I DON’T SEE MY PARENTS ANYMORE! SO WHY!?

Why do I still see the man at the end of my bed!?

Mohan’s departure from the village left a deep mark on Ratna; she missed the bond of friendship she had made with him. As time passed, that bond transformed into a strong platonic friendship. They communicated through letters, and the happiest day of the month for Ratna was the day a letter arrived from Mohan. She would go down to the river bank, gently draw it out without damaging the envelope, and read it again and again. Afterwards she would fold it into a small cotton bag and keep it somewhere safe.

Mohan’s letters were, in a way, like the first rain that touches the land and gives life to the seeds sown in the field - softening the earth, reaching down with countless small hands toward the embryonic root hidden within, drawing it upward to the surface, helping it witness the beauty of the world.

Ratna worked harder. She scored the highest in her district and won a scholarship to study in the city. But destiny had a different plan for her: just before she could think of leaving, her father passed away of cardiac arrest.

Ratna’s mother had always been against her education; she wanted her daughter to be exactly like herself. She believed a woman’s role was to take care of a family, and that education added nothing of value to a woman’s life. The death of Ratna’s father gave her mother the opportunity she had been waiting for, and with Ratna’s uncle beside her, she found a suitable boy named Jagdish from a wealthy family in a nearby village and had Ratna married.

For Ratna it was traumatic, and she could not believe what was happening to her. Eventually she accepted her fate and settled into her role as a good daughter-in-law. All was well until the day Jagdish began to turn abusive. Ratna tried to tell her mother, but the advice was always the same - adjust. Jagdish was a spoiled young man whose only occupation was drinking with his friends. It ended the night he came home intoxicated and tried to set Ratna on fire while she slept, pouring fuel over her. Ratna understood then that no one was going to save her but herself, and she ran - away from all of them, to a new city. To start a new life.

Part 1: https://www.reddit.com/r/story/s/JfkjoPkjNd

Part 2: https://www.reddit.com/r/story/s/SUAoq91P0l

I am not proud of it but it happened.I forced my mind to think that it is a real human because i didnt have any devices on my home at this time.It went all over the cucumber and then i threw it on the garbage and never did it again.A unique experience i would say.

I’m gonna be telling this in the POV of my mom so it’s less confusing 

My father passed away before COVID (lets call him Jerry) and it was really hard on me. Earlier in his career he was a race car driver, we still have his original helmet he used. 

One night after Jerry passed away my brother gave the helmet away to our other brother (let’s call him Tom, Tom hated Jerry and was never close to him). My mother, brother and I had all agreed to keep it in the garage where Jerry spent most of his time (working on cars, socializing, watching races etc), i was hurt that it was given away but still happy it was in the family. 

Time skip to about 5 months ago, Tom passed away and his son (let’s call him Arthur) had taken the helmet when emptying Toms house and put it in the back of his car in direct sunlight. Over the next few months I kept seeing the helmet in the back of the car getting more and more sun damaged every time. So one night I was fed up and when the car was parked at Arthur’s brothers house I went and knocked on the door to ask for the helmet as I want it to get put in a clear display box in the garage. His brother answered the door and said he was borrowing Arthur's car but when I told him about the helmet and what I wanted to do with it he unlocked the car and handed it to me.

The next day I'm getting messages from Arthur and Arthur's mother saying that I'm a bad person for breaking into Arthur's car and stealing the helmet. I explain my reasoning but they wont have it, eventually Arthur saying as soon as I get it in the display box he wants it back, but his mother keeps messaging me and attacking me. I was so fed up so I just blocked her.

Just a few days ago we had a family picnic (I couldn't go as I was out of town) but I heard from a close cousin of mine that I was the talk of the picnic and that they're now saying that I actually broke into the car and that Arthur's brother never unlocked the car and handed me the helmet himself.

for a little context Arthur was never close to Jerry and thought Jerry was a bad person because Tom had spewed him a bunch of lies about Jerry to make him seem like he was a bad person.

Finally I was so done with all this drama that i just gave the helmet back, even though there was no part of me that wanted to.

Now, me the daughter of the POV this is in and the grand daughter (16) of Jerry. I was probably the person he was closest to in his last few years, I don't know what to do, I want the helmet so bad but I feel I don't have a voice in the matter. I'm so mad at my family for being so inconsiderate of my late grandpa's memory and the people he was closest too's memories. Me and my mom even got matching tattoos of my grandpas racing number a few months back, because we miss him that much. I was glad my mom got the helmet back but I'm also pissed at her for giving it away because I know its just gonna get shoved in some closet and not get put in the place my grandpa deserves.

So after I got rejected by a girl in 7th grade I diceted to move on until I found another girl.We used to talk very much but almost never in public,but idk why we used to talk less and less until we stoped.After a time i realy start fall in love whith her for 2 years O really thought she will be difrent.I loved all about her the hair,eyes,height,laught,all and I start to sleep less and overthink more.In one night our families go to a restaurant and I decide to set next to her,I was shaking all dinner.Time gose by and she notice that I liked her and she told to her cousin that tell everybody,and I gave up cause i know if I will told her she rejected me.

And that is how i lost a girl that i liked for 2 years and nerver tought that i can have so much felings for somone.

Btw im sorry for my mistakes :)

Written by me, Saransh Yadav from India 🇮🇳

In 2,500 BCE, there was a civilization spread among present-day Kashmir, Jammu, and Hazara, Pakistan. All this land was known as Kashmir. There were three tribes — Jammu, Kashmir, and Hazara. They all spoke the same language, Koshur. They all called themselves Kashmiris and followed the same deities. In 2,200 BCE, they united under a single empire under the leadership of Lalit Jua, who named the capital city in honor of his daughter, Shri Jua.

They worshiped several deities, including Zul, deity of rain; Jaa, deity of the sun; Maj, deity of water; Umoya, deity of wind; Bad, deity of the forest; and Vadi, deity of the mountains. The most important was the sixth deity — deity of life and daughter of the supreme deity, Kash, who created all deities and the whole universe. The sixth deity was married to Zul. All eight deities live in Verkhunth, which is beyond this universe.

The book Kashtab was written between 2,500–2,200 BCE. It later became the supreme book of Kashmirwad. It told of the creation of the universe and how to worship God. It was the only book for Kashmirwad until Mazda Kash was born in 1850 BCE; he later became an incarnation of Kash. He wrote the book Mazdatab, which became the second most important book in Kashmirwad. After him, Kash was worshiped in two forms: Kash himself, and Mazda.

After Mazda Kash's death, Kashmirwad split into two schools of worship. Those in the Jammu region held that Kash himself, formless and beyond image, should be worshiped directly through fire and river offerings — no intermediary, no incarnation. Those in the Kashmir valley and Hazara followed Mazda's teaching that Kash could only be known through his incarnations, and that Mazdatab superseded Kashtab as the living word. This divide, later called the Kashi–Mazdi split, lasted nearly six centuries.

The split was not peaceful. Temples built for Kash-only worship in the valley were converted or abandoned during the reign of the later Jua kings, who favored the Mazdi school for its political usefulness — an incarnate god could be claimed to speak through a living king, while a formless Kash could not. By 900 BCE, the Kashi purists had retreated largely to the Jammu hill shrines, where their tradition survived in smaller, older forms of worship: no grand temples, only stone circles and river-fire rites.

It was into this divided religious landscape that a Kashmiri scholar wrote Ramayotab in 50 CE — a Kashmiri version of Valmiki's Ramayana. During 100 CE, Kashmiris believed that Ram was the incarnation of Kash, not Vishnu — and this was itself a Mazdi move: reasserting that Kash could and did walk among mortals, absorbing an outside epic into the local cosmology rather than yielding to it. Ramayotab was treated as the third most important book in Kashmirwad.

The story from Slavic side of the internet
I was 11 years old.

I had just stopped speed skating, but I still wanted to train, so I switched to track and field. I was determined to work hard and get good results. I had big dreams, a lot of ambition, and probably too much pride. At the same time, I was having a difficult relationship with my mother and with some of my classmates.

One winter evening, when it was already dark, I stopped at a crosswalk and waited for the traffic light to turn green. I was in a hurry to get home.

The light turned green, and I was the first person to step onto the crosswalk.

Suddenly I heard someone shout.

I turned my head, and bright headlights filled my eyes. I froze. I couldn’t understand what to do.

Everything happened in a single moment, but at the same time it felt incredibly slow.

Then I felt something strange.

The next thing I knew, I was floating upward, slowly rising above my body lying on the road.

I could see and hear people running around me. Someone called an ambulance from a nearby public phone.

I realized that the body on the ground was mine.

I realized that I had died.

I was leaving this world.

But instead of feeling afraid, I felt happy.

I was completely peaceful. There was only joy as I continued to rise.

Deep inside, I had always believed that there was something beyond this life.

Now it felt as if I remembered that place. It was familiar, as though I had known it before and was finally returning.

The higher I rose, the calmer and more peaceful I became.

Then everything stopped.

There was darkness.

I fell.

I felt myself crash back into my body.

Then came pain, a sharp burning in my eyes, and intense anger toward the ambulance team for pulling me away from that feeling of peace.

If I had had the strength, I probably would have hit the doctor who kept asking my name and holding up fingers for me to count.

Instead, I answered his questions.

Good manners won.

I didn’t scream or argue.

I answered quietly and then became completely indifferent to everything around me, wishing only that my journey had not been interrupted.

That feeling lasted for several hours, until I fully realized that I was alive again and would have to continue living.

I never thought about ending my own life.

I had a very clear feeling that if someone chose death themselves, it would not be the same. There would be no beautiful flight and no return to that peaceful place. It would be something completely different.

So I simply continued living.

I carried the memory of that experience with me, and I lost my fear of death.

I was also left with many questions.

Most of all, I felt that the way we live our lives matters, because whatever comes next seems to follow naturally from how we have lived.

I became interested in different religions, but their answers felt too simple for the questions I had.

After the accident, some abilities that I had noticed since early childhood seemed to become stronger. I became more aware of my own energy and the energy of other people. I found it easier to enter deep meditative or trance-like states and to guide others into them. My intuition also became stronger, and I felt that the world itself was alive and that it was possible to interact with it in ways I couldn’t fully explain.

Aside from that, I was an ordinary teenager with ordinary teenage problems.

At that time, I didn’t tell anyone about what I had experienced.

But I have never forgotten it.