I don’t wantanythingto break this fragile illusion of safety we’ve been pretending is real — but my body moves before Idecide, fingers wrapping around the cold metal, screen lighting up in the darkness.
Unknown number.
One message.
You remember the place with the white walls.
They lied to you there.
Ask him what he did the night you stopped talking.
I don’t breathe.
I just stare at the words until they blur, until they look like someone else’s memory, until I can’t tell if they’re new or something I read in a file once — a note left in the margin of a therapist’s report.
The white walls.
The silence.
Theboy with the moths.
The one they told me wasn’t real.
I press my thumb to the message like I can erase it just by touching it too long, like maybe I imagined the whole thing if I close the screen fast enough.
But I didn’t imagine the tremor in my gut.
I didn’t imagine the way my mouth suddenly tastes like chalk and blood and something rotten.
And I didn’t imagine the way Damiendidn’ttell me everything when I asked him about that night.
He said I left him there.
But he never saidwhat happened next.
I get up slowly, heartbeat too fast, the floor too cold under my feet. The room tilts, just a little. The edges blur.
And then I remember?—
The asylum.
The forced meds.
The white walls so bright they erased colour from my skin.
And the moths.
There were always moths in that dream.
They’d crawl up the inside of the window like they were trying to get back in. Like they were mine. Like they followed me.
And in the dream, someone always whispered my name from the other side.
But they told me that washallucination.
They said no one came.
No one found me.
