The night felt ordinary enough to be forgettable.
That should have warned me.
I was walking home with my phone in hand, not scrolling—just staring at the screen like it might explain something if I waited long enough. The city lights smeared across the glass, reflections overlapping words I hadn't posted yet.
Nothing bad will happen tonight.
The sentence sat there, unfinished, arrogant in its calm. I hadn't uploaded it. I hadn't even saved it. It was just a thought pretending to be a line.
I remember smiling at how stupid it sounded.
That was the last clear thing.
Sound came first. Not loud—wrong. A tearing noise, like metal disagreeing with physics. Then weightlessness, followed by a pressure so absolute it erased pain before I could register it.
My phone flew out of my hand. I watched it spin once, twice, the screen flashing white as it shattered. For a moment, I was detached enough to think: That's going to be expensive.
Then the ground rose to meet me.
Impact wasn't a moment. It was a process. My body tried to understand what was happening and failed in pieces—shoulder first, then hip, then the side of my head snapping against asphalt hard enough to knock the world sideways.
Someone shouted. Or maybe several people did. The sound stretched and warped, like audio played at the wrong speed.
I tried to move.
Nothing answered.
The sky above me looked artificial, too clean for a city that had felt rotten only hours ago. Streetlights buzzed. A siren wailed somewhere far away, growing closer with predatory patience.
I wondered—briefly, stupidly—if this was irony.
If writing nothing bad will happen had tempted something into proving me wrong.
Then darkness folded in on itself.
I didn't wake up.
Waking implies a transition.
This was more like sinking into a room that already existed.
I could hear voices, but they weren't attached to faces.
"Pulse is there."
"Head injury."
"Possible internal bleeding."
The words passed through me without sticking. Language felt optional here, like subtitles for a movie I wasn't fully watching.
I tried to scream.
I tried to blink.
I tried to remember my own name.
Nothing moved.
But my thoughts—my thoughts were loud.
Too loud.
They echoed, overlapping, repeating the same fragments again and again. Sentences I'd written. Sentences I'd deleted. Sentences I'd only thought and never trusted enough to put on a page.
Somewhere, a machine beeped steadily.
I focused on that sound. It felt important, like a metronome keeping me from drifting apart.
Time behaved strangely after that.
There was no day or night. No sense of duration. Just interruptions.
Pressure on my arm.
A needle.
A cold wash of something chemical crawling through my veins.
"He's not responding."
"EEG is… abnormal."
"Too active."
Too active.
That phrase stuck.
If my body was quiet, my mind wasn't. It was restless, pacing in circles, searching for an exit that didn't exist.
And then—
A cursor blinked.
White space stretched in front of me, infinite and forgiving. No hospital. No ceiling. No beeping machines.
Just a blank page.
The relief was immediate and terrifying.
I didn't ask where I was.
I knew.
This was where my thoughts went when they needed to make sense of things.
So I did the only thing that had ever calmed me.
I wrote.