The numbers and the formulas scribbled on the pages of my notebook blurred.

None of it mattered. My chest felt heavier, the air thicker. It wasn't fair that I needed any more it was answers.

Who was she? Why did she feel so real?

Was it my past trying to call me back? A memory buried so deep that it had been erased? Or was it something else entirely, something I could not understand?

Maybe I am going insane. Maybe… Just maybe.

I pressed my fingers at my head, trying to push past the burning pain in my head, but the questions just kept on coming.

The harder I searched for her, the more she slipped away into the shadows. Her voice still echoed in my mind, gnawing at the edges of my sanity.

I pushed myself up from the chair, the floor creaked beneath me. I decided I needed a break.

My legs felt heavy as I made my way to the door, but even as I stepped forward I couldn’t shake the feeling that the answers I needed were not out there but rather buried within me somewhere I wasn’t ready to find.

The lights above me buzzed, faintly.

The hallway seemed longer than usual. The walls are closer together. The floor beneath my feet was colder than it should be. My feet felt disconnected from the floor as if I were walking on ice instead of wood. Each step sent a chill crawling up my spine.

I glanced back, half-expecting the door to my room to vanish behind me, but it remained.

Too far now, impossibly far.

Something was wrong. Something had shifted.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

As I reached for the bathroom door my hands froze while extended.

My breath caught in my throat. As I watched my hand glitch, a small child's arm extended over mine. For a split second, it overlapped with mine—a small hand—my hand.

I stumbled back, my hand clutching at my chest. The hallway before me began to dissolve the walls before me began to melt and the faint hum of my computer was replaced by silence.

Then it hit me.

A faint smell.

A mix of something sweet, almost like freshly baked food. My throat tightened.

This wasn't my hallway anymore.

I was standing in my childhood bedroom.

The walls were painted a light blue I barely remembered, and the air carried almost a faint nostalgia to it. My bed was placed in the corner, and above it were my notes stuck on the walls of ideas I had dreamt of but never truly made.

The colors felt wrong; they were brighter—the blue was too bright, the lights too yellow. Objects seemed to need to be found.

I watched the boy tinker, his fingers fumbling with pieces of electronics and wires. He was so focused, so determined to make it perfect. My heart ached while watching him, watching me.

How long had it been since I felt that? That naive feeling that everything could be fixed if I did everything right. Now all I could think about, what was the point of even trying to fix anything If the person fixing it was broken?

“Hey,” I called him, my voice deep, sharp against the silence.

But he didn't respond.

“Can you hear me?” I screamed, stepping closer to him.

Nothing happened.

My chest now wrapped around my heart tightened far too much panic ran down my back, and I stumbled out of the room into the hallway as if I was racing to find something, someone to help me.

I entered the living room, my parents were there.

My father sat on the couch, his head buried in his laptop. The screen glowed faintly, showing lines of numbers and codes I couldn’t quite make out. His glasses slipped down his nose as they always did.

My mother was in the kitchen humming whilst cooking something ordinary. Simple.

And yet it wasn't.

The warmth of the scene did nothing to ease my uneasiness, but I knew deep down inside me this wasn’t real. The colors here felt two bright, and bold.

The room was slightly more distorted now like I was looking through a cracked window, unable to make out the view.

“Mom, Dad?” My voice is broken.

They didn't even look at me, instead, my mother called my name out.

“Kaito, dinners ready!”

Her voice hit me like a train, shattering years of silence that I had grown used to. “Kaito, dinner's ready!” She hadn’t said that in years, not since the nights when homework and studies were the norm. We barely talked, and when we did, it was always about school.

I stood paralyzed as the scene played out, a helpless spectator to a reality that was once my own.