Forget This Letter

You shouldn’t read this. But if you’ve gotten this far it’s already too late for that. It knows you’re there. God I’m sorry. This is plan B, it’s desperate and selfish and probably pointless. But I don’t want to be nothing, less than nothing, whatever it is that looks at nothing and thinks that’s too much. I’m not trying to be funny; I just don’t know a word that does what I need it too. Maybe it ate that first. It eats things and ideas, information in all its forms, it takes them out, out of, this. But the damage they did, the things they touched or changed, the scars they leave, they’re still there in the world. Only, different, harder to see. It’s like the blood of spacetime makes them slippery in the mind. I’m so sorry. I know I’m hurting you, I have to, to make my scar, to be real, to fight.

This letter is second hand, so you may have time. You won’t be as clear, yet. But it’s coming for you all the same, it has your scent. Don’t look for it. It doesn’t like to be seen. And if you do look you will find it. I did. I wish I hadn’t, but I did. It’s never what you think it is and it’s always what you don’t. It’s everywhere. It’s hungry. It’s always hungry. It’s been eating for so long and still it’s practically starving.

I think it wasn’t as easy to find before. But it’s grown, and maybe that’s part of why it will never get enough. It eats to grow; it grows and needs to eat more. I can’t tell you what it is, I don’t understand that. But I can tell you it’s real. It exists in this universe. It shouldn’t but it does. It broke through with the bang, at least that’s my theory, when the borders were chaos and ill defined. It’s alive in the sense that matters. But I don’t think it can be killed.

Based on the patterns I’ve seen it’s a parasite. It bursts through membranes and consumes everything: matter, energy, information. It won’t stop until it’s eaten all of it, which means wherever it was before is a place that now never was. It’s not one thing and it’s not everything but it’s also not not those things.

It hides in the places we forget to see. It’s all the things you drive past and never really look at. It’s the patterns on the walls you’ve stopped noticing. It ate the memories you lost. It’s the shape of the word you know you knew. It’s the colors that we’ve forgotten we could see. It flourishes in assumption and belief; it’s camouflaged in the things we take for granted.

It’s grown so much more since thought came into being here. At first only a little, then faster and faster, gorging on growing complexity. It’s been thinning us out, picking off the ones who might look long enough to see it, to question it, to recognize it. It’s shaped us into things that think but can’t focus, a species flavored by short attention spans. Making us blind to its obvious patterns.

It’s feasting on all the things we grow bored with, devouring anything that drifts out of our social conscious for even a moment. It’s a glutton for the mind of the masses, but see’s individuals too.

You can’t understand the scale of it. It’s not measured in ways our brains can work. It lives in infinites, small and large and impossibly fractal. It’s the reason we can’t measure both the position and the spin of a particle. It’s grown in and out of realities that dwarf our own. As it grows it fills in the space between, becomes the space itself. When we stare into the void, we’re looking through it.

Its growth is pushing all the stars away, isolating the living, the seeing, making them more vulnerable. I think it’s saving them for last. Dessert, for after it’s eaten the worlds beyond the light horizon, devoured the galaxies we overlooked, taken the simple life and molecules and light that never stood a chance. It snacks on the strings of reality, grazing existence out of possibility.

It’s there, in the room with you, all around you. You’ll see it flicker in on shiny surfaces. It stalks through negative spaces; it nests in everything no one will ever look for. It’s in the trash that just is and never gets touched. It’s the face of the man you saw but pretended you didn’t.

It’s taking everything, consuming all to make one. The antithesis of chaos disguised as the totality of order. It’s always here, it’s almost always been here. If you see it, you’ll know it. If you think about it, you’ll call it into your mind. Once it’s there, it sees you, so don’t look for it and don’t think about it. Just know you aren’t as crazy as you think, and for what it’s worth, you aren’t the first or the last that it will hunt. There will never be a last.

If you haven’t seen it yet, good. Forget this letter and remember that you aren’t crazy. It’s coming for you by now, as it did for me and everything else. An eater of impossible stars in places that shouldn’t have been and now cannot be. It’s grown into new dimensions on alien calories, information that can’t be translated into this reality and which presents as improbable fats in unreal planes. It’s coming for you, and you can’t see it, not in the way you want, but you will feel it like acid in the brain, somewhere down deep in the reptilian parts that remember being hunted without needing to know why or what or how.

It’s there, in the things you think you see from the corner of your eye. It calls out in hunger and its song is interpreted as a singularity, unseen but hinted at. Don’t try to hear it, it doesn’t make sound. It speaks through others, in whispers and suggestions, shifting the fleeting focus of thinking into something even easier to digest. You’ve heard it, in spite of that.

Don’t trust any thought you can’t come to on your own. Don’t trust any idea you can’t question. Whatever you think it can’t do, it can. It’s here now, with me. I can feel it sniffing though the roof. I can feel my nerves firing off like poppers and I know it’s licking at me, nudging me, waiting for me to look at it now. If I don’t, maybe it can’t get me. If I can make it not there, maybe it will forget about me.

I’ll forget it. I have to forget. If I can forget I should be able to get a little more time. At least as much as anyone else. I’m going to forget it, and when I do, I will pull this message unread from the mailbox and burn it. That’s the plan. I’ve written a sticky note to myself to do it, and not to read it. It should be easy, I’ve forgotten most of my life already, what’s this one thing compared to that.

I need to forget and oh god but I can feel its breath like ice and crippling sorrow. I need to forget. I will forget. You must forget. Please, for fucks sake forget! Forget! Its drool is like liquid sunlight and passes through me and then the earth itself. Why would I tell you that? Why would I write that? I can smell unmade time on its breath. Jesus, it’s making me notice now. Nudging my mind to it. Its touch is like nothing, real nothing, the absence of everything, the oblivion that encompasses eternity made tactile by my bursting synapses. I smell burning toast. I can see its eyes, so many eyes, eyes that see and see and see and see an see n eee d eeeeeeeeeee

 I’ve bitten off my own finger. god it hurts, hard to write. For a moment at least, it’s a distraction, enough to pull me up for air. But I can feel it dragging me down again. I have to put this in the mailbox, now, while I still am. I’m going to forget. There are no monsters. Nothing prowls the skies behind me, nothing tramples the stars and splits the vibrations between the real. Nothing hunts me. Still, I should run to the mailbox just in case. In case I can’t. But I can, I’m sure I can, I feel like I’m going to be sick, I feel like my eyes are made of chemicals and probabilities, I can taste the color of the end of all things, no, no, I can forget. I will forget. Oh god just forget.