I woke up feeling heavy, as if I had run a marathon. The morning sun slipped through the gap in the curtains, turning the dust suspended in the air into golden specks. I rubbed my eyes and took a deep breath, trying to push away the memory of last night's dream. That's all it was, I told myself: a nightmare.
The sounds of the street were growing louder—cars, neighbors, scattered voices. I sat up in bed, grabbed my phone, and saw a string of messages from Pedri, full of exclamation points, always dramatic. "Did you see that? I'll never forget it. We need to talk again. Coffee in a bit?"
I agreed without thinking too much. Maybe it would be better to get out of the house, breathe some different air.
When Pedri arrived, he was already sitting on the living room couch, fiddling with his phone, restless as always. Before he even opened his mouth to say anything about the night before, the sentence formed completely in my mind: "I barely slept, I kept replaying everything a thousand times." A second later, he said it out loud—word for word.
I stayed quiet, trying to hide the shiver that ran through me. I shook my head, but then it happened again. He was about to get up to grab a glass of water, and I saw the movement in my head before he even made it: his hand pushing against the table, his glasses slipping slightly down his nose. Seconds later, he did exactly that.
My stomach twisted. I said nothing. I just watched him return, as if nothing unusual had happened. Coincidence? Maybe. But coincidences didn't make my heart race like this.
"You're way too quiet today…" he said, setting the glass on the table. "Do you really want to talk about last night?"
I shook my head. I didn't. I couldn't even explain what I was feeling, let alone speak it out loud.
I spent the rest of the day trying to distract myself with practical things—college notes, my internship report, coffee after coffee. But underneath it all, there was this layer of strangeness that wouldn't let me go. As if something had subtly shifted the axis of my life.
That night, I lay down early but couldn't sleep. The room was silent, the ticking of the clock almost unbearable. Until I felt it again: a faint, deep vibration, almost imperceptible, along the walls around me. As if the house itself was breathing.
This time I didn't close my eyes. I got up, turned on the lamp, and stared at the walls. That's when I noticed the small paint spots scattered across the room. They had always been there—leftovers from when my father painted years ago. But that night, they drew my attention in a different way.
I grabbed a pen and a ruler and started connecting the dots on a piece of paper, trying to reproduce their arrangement. As the lines came together, a shape revealed itself. A perfect triangle. Then another, and another. Every time I measured the angles, they were exact. No matter how I combined the points, flawless triangles appeared again and again.
I pressed the ruler against the wall, tracing the same points directly on the paint, and the shape repeated itself before me, as if it had always been there, hidden in plain sight, waiting to be uncovered.
I stood still for a few minutes, staring at it. Was it just coincidence? I took a deep breath, dropped the ruler, and sat back on the bed. The room was silent again, but that sense of being watched lingered, as if the walls were holding something I wasn't meant to understand yet.
I closed my eyes, trying to convince myself there was nothing strange about it. Just old paint. Just geometry. Just coincidence. But sleep was slow to come, and when it finally did, it carried the same restlessness that had haunted me since the lake.