Memory's Edge

It wasn’t the silence that told me I was lost—it was how familiar everything felt when it absolutely shouldn’t have.

I opened my eyes to a ceiling that looked like peeling skin, pale pink and warped with age. The light above me flickered—not a sharp flicker, but the tired twitch of a dying bulb. It buzzed like something whispering through grit, or maybe my nerves.

I sat up slowly. My muscles ached in that strange way you feel after crying for hours, though I didn’t remember shedding a single tear. The bed creaked beneath me—flannel sheets, purple with faded yellow daisies. My fingers clutched at the pattern before I knew why.

My old sheets. From when I was eight.

No. That couldn’t be right.

I scanned the room. White dresser—one handle missing. Unicorn lamp on the nightstand, cracked but still standing. I swear the unicorn’s flickering pink light was mocking me—some cosmic joke about my sanity.

Solar system poster curling at the edges on the far wall. A stuffed rabbit sat slumped in the corner, ear torn halfway through and stitched with blue thread.

My mouth went dry.

The room hadn’t existed for decades. It burned down. I saw it happen.

The air smelled like lavender spray, cheap and artificial, the kind my mom used to use to mask cigarette smoke. The scent pulled at something buried—mom humming some awful lullaby, off-key, hands trembling. I never asked why she always smelled like smoke too.

No sound came from outside. No wind, no birds, no city hum. Just thick, waiting silence. It didn’t feel peaceful. It felt staged.

I stood. The carpet squished beneath my bare feet. Too soft. Like something breathing under it. I forced myself toward the door.

It was ajar. Half open, the way I used to leave it when I was terrified of total darkness but couldn’t stand it fully open either. I reached for the knob—and paused.

There was a mirror on the back of the door.

I hadn’t noticed it before.

My reflection stared back at me—face pale, hair tangled, a thin streak of dried blood across my temple. My eyes were too wide, and I wasn’t sure if I recognized them.

Then I saw it.

A figure behind me. Not standing—inching. Blurred like an overexposed photo. It mirrored my tilt of the head. Slightly off. Not quite human.

I spun around.

Nothing.

Just the room. Just me.

But the mirror—

It was empty now. No reflection. Just a pale smear where my body should have been.

I didn’t scream. Couldn’t. Something deep inside me already knew. The part of you that recognizes a predator before you see it. Instinct sharpened by fear.

This wasn’t a dream.

This wasn’t memory either.

It was a lie. A lie told in my voice.

And I was starting to believe it.

The hallway outside the bedroom bent where it shouldn’t—like a piece of paper folded too many times. The walls pulsed. A family photo hung at an angle. I walked past it and froze.

In the picture, I was smiling. Maybe thirty. Hair longer than I remembered ever letting it grow. My arm around a man I didn’t recognize. His face looked carved, unfinished, like a sketch abandoned halfway.

Beneath the frame, in small letters: Marin & James – 2029.

What year was it now?

I reached into the pocket of my pajama pants—wasn’t expecting anything—and found a small notebook. Black leather. Blank pages.

Except one.

Scrawled in my handwriting:

You aren’t alone in here.

I slammed the notebook shut.

The hallway curved impossibly. Rooms branched off at wrong angles—kitchens opening into forests, bathrooms into subway platforms. I passed through one doorway and felt cold metal beneath my feet—hospital tiles.

Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead. A clipboard sat on a counter. My name—Dr. Marin Albrecht—printed at the top.

Diagnosis:

Neurostructural Memory Extraction Trial—Phase 2

Status: Invasive recall symptoms. Memory bleed. Subject unstable.

My hand trembled. I wasn’t a subject. I was the lead researcher.

Wasn’t I?

A noise—scraping, low and wet—echoed from somewhere down the corridor. I didn’t wait to find out what made it.

I ran.

I don’t know how long I wandered.

Rooms blurred—some made of memories, others of something darker. I stepped into my college dorm. A version of my apartment I hadn’t seen since the breakup. A blood-smeared nursery I couldn’t remember ever being in.

The notebook kept updating. Every time I blinked, new messages appeared:

Don’t follow her voice.

The shadow lies.

You tried to erase it.

Eventually, I collapsed in what looked like a library. Dust danced in golden beams from a skylight that couldn’t possibly exist underground. Books lined every wall. But they weren’t real books—each spine bore a single phrase:

First panic attack.

Dad leaves.

Car crash.

She said no.

You said it anyway.

I dropped the one labeled Car Crash. Pages fluttered open. It wasn’t a book—it was a looping scene. My hands gripping the wheel. A blaring horn. My own scream. Then black.

I closed it. Gently. Too gently.

The figure returned that night.

I say night, but the concept of time here didn’t make sense. My watch spun backwards. Sometimes, the moon hung beneath the floor.

I saw it in a shattered window—no reflection for me. Just it. Watching from inside the glass.

This time, it whispered.

You did this.

It sounded like my mother. But my mother had been dead for six years. Throat cancer. I’d held her hand in hospice. I remembered that clearly.

Didn’t I?

One room held a bed soaked in seawater. Another, a closet with a child crying from somewhere impossibly deep. I opened a bathroom door and found a subway car, doors flickering in and out of existence.

In the window’s reflection, the figure stood closer.

A single eye now visible—coal black, with a thin ring of red.

My own.

Eventually, I found a room that wasn’t a room at all. Just a vast, open space. White walls stretching forever. No ceiling. No floor. Just horizon.

In the center, a chair.

I sat.

Across from me, the figure emerged—no longer blurred. Fully formed. Wearing my face. Older. Weary. Scar down her left cheek.

You know what this is, she said.

I shook my head. I don’t.

You tried to cut it out of your mind. The experiment. The implant. It didn’t erase the memory. It locked you in it.

I swallowed hard. Why show me this?

Because you have to choose, she said.

Choose what?

Wake up and remember everything… or stay here, safe. Forget. Forever.

She reached into her coat. Pulled out two things: the notebook… and a photo. A real one. Me and a woman, smiling, holding hands.

She looked familiar. Like someone I should have loved.

But I didn’t remember her name.

The shadow—my shadow—held it out.

Choose.

My hand hovered between the two.

Notebook or photo.

Truth or peace.

The shadows were creeping in faster now. Every second I hesitated, the room warped a little more—edges fraying, memories bleeding out. I didn’t have long before this world swallowed me whole.

What is real? I thought. Is this the place where broken memories go to die? Or is it the cage I built for myself, brick by brick, to keep the pain at bay?

And then I heard it again—that voice from the beginning. Only now I knew what it really was:

Not my mother.

Not the figure.

It was my own voice, screaming to wake up.

I took the photo.

The world cracked like glass under strain.

Light poured in.

And then—nothing.

I woke to hospital beeps and white light and the burn of tubes in my arm.

A nurse gasped.

She’s awake!

I blinked.

I remembered everything.

And the shadow… it remembered me too.

Somewhere, still watching.

Still waiting.

For me to close my eyes again.

Did I choose truth or peace? And could I ever be sure which was which?